Popular quotes about Gender! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 16
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 ButlerSome 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 ButlerI think we have to ask, not, what "Gender trouble" is today but where "Gender trouble" is today.
Judith ButlerBehind the cameras, there's a different problem, which I think is not unconscious gender bias. It's probably categorized more as conscious gender bias. Because everybody's known the numbers for decades. Nobody's stunned to hear there are very few female directors, only 4 or 7 percent. Everybody knows, but it doesn't change anything. It doesn't make people say, "Wow! We should change that." Nothing happens. It's utterly stagnant.
Geena DavisWe act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually its a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.
Judith ButlerMy conception around being a woman in 2016 has definitely been shifting over the past year, because I feel like I'm proud of womanhood, and I feel attached to it, and at the same time I'm someone who doesn't believe in having a gender binary, and so often times I separate those two concepts in my mind - the concept of being a woman and the concept of being a girl or being female, being kind of attached to a certain gender identity.
Amandla StenbergRecognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.
Elizabeth LesserWe live in an uncertain world and we want to believe that what a man is and what a woman is-I know that. And people don't want to critically interrogate the world around them. Whenever I'm afraid of something or I'm threatened by something, it's because it brings up some sort of insecurity in me. I think the reality is that most of us are insecure about our gender. They think, 'Okay, if there's this trans person over here, then what does that make me?
Laverne CoxI'm suspicious of any man or woman who approaches their own liberation with any kind of gender bias
Andrew CohenI'm interested in the female dom/male sub dynamic, and how superficially it can seem like a total reverse of gender roles and maybe even subversive or something.
Marie CallowayHomosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.
Charles W. SocaridesSame-gender attraction did not exist in the pre-earth life and neither will it exist in the next life. It is a circumstance that for whatever reason or reasons seems to apply right now in mortality, in this nano-second of our eternal existence.
Lance B. WickmanAmerica cannot be America in the new century until it deals with these new questions of gender, including the trans issues, and the questions around faith and Islam.
Van JonesI love technology, and I don't think it's something that should divide along gender lines.
Marissa Mayer'Man up' is a sexist term that should be retired along with all the other gender-based imperious imperatives.
Christine PelosiIt's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other.... For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.
David LevithanHere we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
Will SelfPainting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.
Kehinde WileyI hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.
Lorin SteinThere are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.
Eddie Bernice JohnsonWe come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.
Vijay PrashadIn regards to being female, I don't really think about it in the same way that other people do. I prefer to focus on my job rather than my gender. I'm still amazed that people think it's a big deal.
Rhianna PratchettFor a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.
Gloria SteinemI gravitate towards the utopian potentials of digital space (post race, post gender, post human etc.), but understand that people live in real bodies that experience real consequences based on how they are gendered, sexed, raced and classed.
Saya WoolfalkI think it is inevitable that leftist forces in the US would be divided, if not balkanized, to some extent. Among the full range of people who are committed to social and economic equality and ecological justice - i.e. to some variant of a leftist vision of a decent society - it will always be the case that some will be more focused on egalitarian economic issues, others around the environment and climate change, others on US imperialism, militarism and foreign policy, others on race and gender equality, and still others on sexual identity.
Robert PollinPeople who don't have gender dysphoria aren't going to catch it by watching me dance on television.
Chaz BonoIndividual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.
Bell HooksIt's truly hard to understand how liberal politicians, activists and journalists so consistently escape accountability for stoking the flames of racial disharmony while purporting to dampen them and for dividing our society along racial, gender, and economic lines while claiming to unite us.
David LimbaughWhen I hear Obama speak he just seems really sincere and he just seems like somebody who actually has his heart and his motivation in the right place. Forget about color or race or gender or whatever, he's got his heart in the right place.
Adam YauchIt's not enough to vent about what you don't like on social media. I would ask everyone who can, men included, to get involved in an organisation actively working for gender equality.
Catherine MayerWe need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.
Alice Schwarzer[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.
Gloria SteinemI wear non-gender-specific clothes. I just look silly in girls' clothes. I'm quite tall, and they're never the right cut for me - T-shirts and stuff are always too low-cut or too short. I've worn boys' clothes forever because girls' stuff never felt right for me.
LadyhawkeI would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.
Gloria SteinemI don't think people should have boundaries put on them, by themselves or society or another gender, because it's our birthright to experience life in whatever way we feel best suits us.
Hilary SwankMy upringing did influence me to a certain extent. I grew up going to private school, and we'd have these really cute uniforms, but you'd only have so much sway over how you could "customize" them. I would line my blazers, I would dart my skirts, I'd change the buttons, I would do anything I could to make them unique. And when I started designing, I found myself referencing those roots. I love a sort of preppy, gender-bender vibe. I wanted to incorporate the feel of menswear into the looks. That definitely comes from my private school days.
Minnie MortimerI believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
Angela DavisI have no problem with it. I don't look on homosexuality as an aberration. It's just they way they're born, and how could any relationship between two people in a committed relationship be wrong, regardless of gender?
Andrea ThompsonI'm more concerned with the work people do than their gender. When I was younger, I was pretty judgmental. Things had to be a certain way. Now I just want to see the work. It doesn't matter who does it.
Patti SmithI was raised in a musical family - 5 girls and 1 boy - so all of us girls don't do gender. We were all made to believe that we could do anything we wanted and so we did. One of my early bands was with my sisters. I didn't really come across a lot of problems because I just didn't see it. I took myself seriously and so everyone else did too - this is my mantra.
Suzi QuatroThe gaming industry is a fairly liberal, hip place, and if you're making games people really don't care what your gender is. At least this has been my experience.
Brenda RomeroFeminism is rooted in racial rights and gender rights, and all of those things intersect, and to say that that's not something you can stand behind - it confuses me. I think it's a really great word.
Mackenzie DavisIs individual gender suffering relieved at the price of role conformity and the perpetuation of role stereotypes on a social level? In changing sex, does the transsexual encourage a sexist society whose continued existence depends upon the perpetuation of these roles and stereotypes? These and similar questions are seldom raised in transsexual therapy at present.
Janice RaymondWhat worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary
Simon Baron-CohenAs I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering path through everything I was already interested in - gender politics, public space and urban life, demonstrations and parades and marches. The relationship between walking and thinking and between the mind and the body.
Rebecca Solnit