The Politics of Everybody Quotes

“... but working through racism or sexism in a student consciousness-raising group, at a book club, or on social media is therapy for depoliticized subjects. Therapy is not something to be opposed; but, on its own, it brings about neither reforms nor revolutions.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

“The medialization of politics turns into politics into an apolitical media spectacle.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

“Owning one’s sexuality may be an important aspect of personal empowerment, but a queer sex party is no more likely to disrupt capitalist production than a heteronormative grandmothers’ knitting circle.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

“While poststructuralism has a cynical disdain for terms such as ‘Truth with a capital T’ and ‘Knowledge with a capital K’, the entire edifice depends upon a mysterious ‘Power with a capital P’ (...) A history that is the sum of individual responses to and refractions of Power is no more of a history of human existence than a relay of blinking lights is a history of light. Such a schema is not a history, but a situation, a meaningless existential crisis in which one is positioned arbitrarily.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

“The political meaning of femininity is historically and socially specific. In the mid-twentieth century, the expectation of femininity was a source of violence against white women just as the social denial of femininity was a source of violence against Black women. Eradicating gender expression or finding new empowering ways of expressing gender is not the basis of political liberation; it is the right to gender expression in light of historically specific strictures that is emancipatory.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

“Phenomenology became the grounds for variants of standpoint epistemology: if a phenomenon seems real, then it is real enough. A Marxist vision of standpoint epistemology, on the other hand, does not privilege individual perception as the arbiter of reality.”
― Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection