Living a Feminist Life Quotes

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Living a Feminist Life Quotes
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“When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive as a question as well as being a life question.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Feminist consciousness can be thought of as consciousness of the violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility. You can venture into the secret places of pain by recalling something. You can cause unhappiness by noticing something. And if you can cause unhappiness by noticing something, you realize that the world you are in is not the world you thought you were in.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“We become a problem when we describe a problem.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“The personal is theoretical.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about it or if you went away. The charge of sensationalism falls rather quickly onto feminist shoulders: when she talks about sexism and racism, her story is heard as sensationalist, as if she is exaggerating for effect.5 The feminist killjoy begins as a sensationalist figure. It is as if the point of making her point is to cause trouble, to get in the way of the happiness of others, because of her own unhappiness.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“When you have to fight for an existence, fighting can become an existence.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“a system is working when an attempt to transform that system is blocked.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Indeed so often just talking about sexism as well as racism is heard as damaging the institution. If talking about sexism and racism is heard as damaging institutions, we need to damage institutions.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Sexual harassment works—as does bullying more generally—by increasing the costs of fighting against something, making it easier to accept something than to struggle against something,”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Queer and feminist worlds are built through the effort to support those who are not supported because of who they are, what they want, what they do.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“When we have to think strategically, we also have to accept our complicity: we forgo any illusions of purity; we give up the safety of exteriority. If we are not exterior to the problem under investigation, we too are the problem under investigation. Diversity work is messy, even dirty, work.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“We are dismissed as emotional. It is enough to make you emotional.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“By using the idea of sweaty concepts, I am also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. A concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. More specifically, a sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. By this I mean description as angle or point of view: a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it. Sweat is bodily; we might sweat more during more strenuous and muscular activity. A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying. The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty. We might need not to eliminate the effort or labor from the writing. Not eliminating the effort or labor becomes an academic aim because we have been taught to tidy our texts, not to reveal the struggle we have in getting somewhere. Sweaty concepts are also generated by the practical experience of coming up against a world, or the practical experience of trying to transform a world.6”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“To be a feminist at work is or should be about how we challenge ordinary and everyday sexism, including academic sexism. This is not optional: it is what makes feminism feminist. A feminist project is to find ways in which women can exist in relation to women; how women can be in relation to each other. It is a project because we are not there yet.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“I think of feminism as poetry; we hear histories in words; we reassemble histories by putting them into words.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Doing diversity work has taught me that agreeing to something is one of the best ways of stopping something from happening. Agreeing to something is an efficient technique for stopping something because organizations can avoid the costs of disagreement.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“it is dangerous to be perceived as dangerous.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“But think of this: those of us who arrive in an academy that was not shaped by or for us bring knowledges, as well as worlds, that otherwise would not be here. Think of this: how we learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Think of the kinds of experiences you have when you are not expected to be here. These experiences are a resource to generate knowledge.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“A significant step for a feminist movement is to recognize what has not ended. And this step is a very hard step. It is a slow and painstaking step. We might think we have made that step only to realize we have to make it again.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“an institution being willing to appoint someone (to transform the institution) is not the same thing as an institution being willing to be transformed (by someone who is appointed). An appointment can even be about an appearance: being given a diversity mandate might be how an institution appears willing to be transformed.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything. But they keep saying something. So maybe you respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel wound up, recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The feminist killjoy appears here: when she speaks, she seems wound up. I appear here. This is my history: wound up.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“The more nots you are, the more committees you might end up on. Not being not can mean being less likely to end up doing this kind of work. Given that diversity work is typically less valued by organizations, then not being not can mean having more time to do more-valued work.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Sexual harassment is material. It is a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something; that enable a complaint to be held up or to become confidential, so that it never comes out into the public domain. And notice here: so many complex things are going on at the same time. It is not activity that is coordinated by one person or even necessarily a group of people who are meeting in secret, although secret meetings probably do happen. All of these activities, however complex, sustain a direction; they have a point. Direction does not require something to originate from a single point: in fact a direction is achieved through consistency between points that do not seem to meet. Things combine to achieve something that is solid and tangible; bonds become binds. If one element does not hold, or become binding, another element holds or binds. The process is rather like the cement used to make walls: something is set into a holding pattern. The setting is what hardens. Perhaps when people notice the complexity, or even the inefficiency and disorganization, they don’t notice the cement. When you say there is a pattern, you are heard as paranoid, as if you are imagining that all this complexity derives from a single point.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Perhaps sometimes we just can’t do this; it means being prepared to be undone, and we just don’t know if we are ready to put ourselves back together again,”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Gentrification is a public policy for managing strangers: a way of removing those who would be eyesores; those who would reduce the value of a neighborhood; those whose proximity would be registered as price.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Your own body becomes used as evidence that the walls of which you speak are not there or are no longer there; as if you have eliminated the walls through your own progression. You got through, so they are not there.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Individuals within the institution must act as if the decision has been made for it to be made. If they do not, it has not. A”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life
“Within the organization there is a gap between words and deeds, between what organizations say they will do, or what they are committed to doing, and what they are doing.”
― Living a Feminist Life
― Living a Feminist Life