Popular quotes about Gender! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.
Judith ButlerI've always thought about gender, as someone who has been categorically "gender nonconforming" for my entire life, I was forced to think about it, but obviously I became more conscious of it as a social issue as I've gotten older. And as I've met more folks who are genderqueer or trans, it's been really enlightening to hear their stories, and it got me thinking about my own gender history.
Liz PrinceI think the way we look upon gender is that we're realizing that we're not that different, which is a good thing. The United States needs to come further with that. In the Scandinavian countries, we've come further when it comes to gender politics and how we look upon gender and how women are treated in general.
Joel KinnamanSome trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.
Judith ButlerIf you are trying to live with and maintain ascendancy over same-gender attractions, the best way to do that is to have groups that define their members in terms other than same-gender attractions.
Dallin H. OaksI think we have to ask, not, what "Gender trouble" is today but where "Gender trouble" is today.
Judith ButlerSome people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general-but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieU.N. Women was created due to the acknowledgement that gender equality and women's empowerment was still, despite progress, far from what it should be. Transforming political will and decisions, such as the Member States creating U.N. Women, into concrete steps towards gender equality and women's empowerment, I think is one of the main challenges.
Michelle BacheletThe gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.
Gloria SteinemI know there is gender imbalance in the spec fic field, and it concerns me very much. We live in a gender-biased world. There have been some fascinating discussions and studies on this on the internet in recent years. There seem to be a lot of women writing spec fic and not as many getting published, or otherwise taken seriously. While it seems there is less overt bias against women writers compared to a few decades ago, there are still institutionalized biases, subtler biases that are harder to discern. I think these are serious issues that deserve examination by the community.
Vandana SinghZoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species homo sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."
Stephen FryGrowing up we were secular Jews, but what I got out of Judaism at that time in my life was questions. Everything was a question. "Dad, is there a heaven? Is there a hell?" You never could get an answer. That informed a lot of my reasons for getting into Scientology, because they had all the answers. They said I was not my body, not my mind. I don't have a soul; I am an immortal soul. I've lived many lives and I'll live endlessly into the future, and as an immortal soul I have no gender.
Kate BornsteinHuman beings make mistakes, so we all make mistakes and wrong decisions. Being able to make a decision and act upon it is not gender specific.
Helen MirrenI'm suspicious of any man or woman who approaches their own liberation with any kind of gender bias
Andrew CohenI bring the experiences of women. As a daughter, as a mother, as a wife, as a sister. That is who I am. Those experiences are part of me. And it is part of our American journey that we have moved through so much of what used to hold people back because of gender, because of race.
Hillary ClintonI donโt love just men. I love people. Itโs not about a gender. Itโs just about the spirit that exudes from that other person youโre with.
KeshaThere's a test they can do to determine a baby's gender ahead of time; I think they insert a tiny photo of Leonardo DiCaprio into the uterus, and if the baby punches it, it's a boy.
Dave BarryJanet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature.
Raquel CepedaSomeone asked me the other day, "Oh your story is like Cameron Crowe's, he has the same thing of having been a teenage journalist," but he was a guy and you just add gender into the mix, it's a 16-year-old girl with adults and rock stars, and it's tough.
Emma ForrestStereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual.
W. J. T. MitchellEveryone's really different. I've worked with women who I've never wanted to tell anything about myself to, and I've worked with guys who have been pouring wells of emotion. So emotional availability is not a gender-specific thing.
Kristen StewartIntersectionality has made an important contribution to social and political analysis, asking all of us to think about what assumptions of race and class we make when we speak about "women" or what assumptions of gender and race we make when we speak about "class." It allows us to unpack those categories and see the various kinds of social formations and power relations that constitute those categories.
Judith ButlerI don't hold myself out as a role model. I don't believe that everyone should make the same choices; that everyone has to want to be a CEO, or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose. But I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us.
Sheryl SandbergThere is no fullness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband, a wife, and posterity. Further, men are that they might have joy. In the eternal perspective, same-gender activity will only bring sorrow and grief and the loss of eternal opportunities.
Dallin H. OaksTo Witches, the cosmos is the living body of the Goddess, in whose being we all partake, who encompasses us and is immanent within us. We call her Goddess not to narrowly define her gender, but as a continual reminder that what we value is life brought into the world ... She has infinite names and guises, many of them male.
StarhawkThe thing we need to work on as a country is our educational system. To me, that is something that our generation needs to be focused on. To make sure that for our next generation, every child - no matter what background, no matter what ethnicity, no matter whether they're whatever gender - that they are all educated to have real equal opportunity. That's number one for me. But I have no question that if it's not our generation that will make sure that that happens that it will be our children's generation.
Kate HudsonThere's no telling from poem to poem where this brilliant 'conversation' about maleness and gender will lead---there are poems about husbands and wives, parents and children, Elvis, Apollo, Walt Whitman, rhythms of its politics. Manthology is a remarkably honest and enormously heartening collection.
Nancy EimersMy mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj; my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive.
Mohsin HamidNow, Iโm not even saying that girls shouldnโt have princesses in their lives, the archetype in and of itself is not innately wrong, but there should be more options to choose from. So that was my intent, to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to paint an entire gender of heroes with one superficial brush.
David TrumbleWe chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.
Jon MeachamSarah Palin is an heir to the women's movement. She has not been constrained by gender. At no point in her life has she thought, 'I can't do that because I'm a woman.'
Gail CollinsNeither gender is routinely more jealous - although women are more willing to work to win back a lover, while men tend to flaunt their money and status and are more likely to walk out to protect their self-esteem or save face.
Helen FisherThere is a tendency under capitalism system to reduce everything to a kind of commodity fetish, and this order tends to promote extremely conventional and uniform expressions of gender and sexuality in order to promote certain products and lifestyle choices that are commercialized. This necessarily entails a capitulation to heteronormativity, or in the case of the new gay movement, a "homonormativity" that doesn't stray far from the heterosexual paradigm. Anyone who questions these normative values and conventions is subject to disapproval, hostility, or even violence.
Bruce LaBruce...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.
Riane EislerI will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.
Sandra BullockAll women have a complicated relationship to beauty, but as a transgender woman it's a bit more complicated. There's a lot of pressure to appear feminine. When I was younger, I was most insecure about my size, my angular features, my feet, my hands . At the end of the day, it's about being comfortable in your own skin, and being able to walk down the street and not have people question your gender - and, for me, being perceived as a woman.
Andrej PejicPeople who don't have gender dysphoria aren't going to catch it by watching me dance on television.
Chaz BonoThere is no cure for the social battles that we fight in our culture - and there's so much grief around race, gender, and so forth - until you eliminate "withdrawal" and "attack" and replace them with "acceptance" and "help." Once you do that and not just talk about it, these other issues will fall into place quickly. They will not fall into place at all unless it is done this way.
Dallas WillardWhatever you proclaim as your identity here in the material realm is also your drag. You are not your religion. You are not your skin color. You are not your gender, your politics, your career, or your marital status. You are none of the superficial things that this world deems important. The real you is the energy force that created the entire universe!
RuPaulGender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.
Kofi AnnanThere can be moments in your life where you may feel attracted to someone depending on circumstance, depending on the person of one gender or another, and sometimes where that is less of an influence in your life.
Charles M. BlowMy favorite actor on the planet is Gena Rowlands and she plays women who, to me, somehow defy gender. They are women, they are feminine, they are masculine, they are everything. There's something exciting about that. I don't know how to articulate it exactly. I guess it's busting out of the archetypes a little bit and not feeling restricted.
Tatiana MaslanyFrom what I understand from talking with older friends and feminists, I think that once I enter the workforce and start to think about marriage and having children, my gender will probably eclipse my feminist identity in terms of marginalization. Discrimination in terms of hiring and in the workplace are still real according to statistics. I also think, as a feminist, figuring out what a relationship based on true and complete equality is will be a challenge. But hopefully by the time I'm dealing with those issues feminists will have made great progress in all of those areas.
Julie ZeilingerSo much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.
Immanuel Wallerstein