Radicalizing Her Quotes

“A politics anchored in pain will never be performative.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“In America, the mishandling of both guns and women by men does not raise questions of morality. Rather, both reinforce a virile masculinity that fills in the foundation of our society - one whose aggression can justify existence through the biological essentialism ascribed to (offered to?) masculinity. In America, both women and guns are the property of men: a toxic combination whose fumes extend from the chambers of governance to the streets.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“Nonviolent protest in the face of state violence (reliant on mobilizing the moral conscience of others) has long been the prescribed, progressive pathway to political change. To access this space, violated women are most often expected to wear trauma as an identity card, their injuries used to incite outrage. A woman who slings a gun across her chest, resisting the commodification of her trauma, is jarring to a liberal sense of self.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“Listening to her, I wondered, how does rape age inside of women as the world around them moves on unbothered?”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“Our view of the female fighter has been obstructed by both the moral compulsion to decry violent resistance and a societal drive to divide categories of thought along gendered lines.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“When misogyny is the hatred of women, racialized supremacy is the hatred of specific women.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“Her mother was captured for an act of dissent, but the uniformed men who raped her reminded her she was a woman.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

“Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.”
― Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence