Popular quotes about Gender! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 19
As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.
Del LaGrace VolcanoGender is used as a control mechanism that's just wrong. Gender is never anything to struggle with; gender is something to play with. Once you're free of the rules that all these hierarchical, oppressive systems place on gender, that's the tricky part.
Kate BornsteinI am a men's liberationist (or "masculist") when men's liberation is defined as equal opportunity and equal responsibility for both sexes. I am a feminist when feminism favors equal opportunities and responsibilities for both sexes. I oppose both movements when either says our sex is THE oppressed sex, therefore, "we deserve rights." That's not gender liberation but gender entitlement. Ultimately, I am in favor of neither a women's movement nor a men's movement but a gender transition movement.
Warren FarrellEvery year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.
Louise BrownGenitive is a funny word because it means "from," but it also is the gender in European languages for objects: the masculine, feminine, and neuter. So if you have a genitive present, there's room for everybody to fit in. I just did a project in Vienna about rock, paper, scissor; you change the gender and it simply changes the whole thing. Rock is no longer a male. It doesn't function the same way.
Lawrence WeinerNowhere have women been more excluded from decision-making than in the military and foreign affairs. When it comes to the military and questions of nuclear disarmament, the gender gap becomes the gender gulf.
Eleanor SmealMMI brothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm's X entourage.
Manning MarableIf gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.
Judith ButlerIf supporters of equality for women want to vote for the best candidate, they must look to a person regardless of gender and must disregard the gender of political opponents.
Karen DeCrowOn the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.
Barbara MikulskiRecognition 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 LesserIf we agree that universities need to monitor sexual violence in various locations, and that they will require students to hew to a narrower set of rules than the wider world, how do we deal with putting these ideas into the brains of teenagers who have been schooled in the disgusting gender norms of our American culture for the previous eighteen years? This is the essential conundrum. Can we teach these relatively young dogs new tricks? I believe that we can.
Vanessa GrigoriadisWhen two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
Andrea DworkinMichael J. Copps, acting FCC chairman, has denounced the lack of racial and gender diversity in the broadcast industry as 'a shameful state of affairs.' Unsurprisingly, his proposed corrective is to force the transfer of station ownership to greater numbers of minorities, who are statistically more likely to carry liberal talk shows.
David LimbaughAlmost all the voices in history have been men, but on this one question of gender, men don't talk about it. This has nothing to do with women; it has to do with men.
Stephen MarcheStereotypes 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. MitchellMore attention should have been given to the fundamental transformation which took place during Queen Victoria's reign, from ruling sovereign to constitutional monarch. Again, gender mattered. If Albert had lived, it seems clear that he would have resisted that development much more tenaciously, which the gradual emasculation (and feminization) of monarchy was probably more easily accomplished when a woman was on the throne.
David CannadineNow, 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 TrumbleIn 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 think there's so many things happening, whether it's gender inequality or immigration, there's just so many issues happening around the world where not doing anything makes you guilty.
Lilly SinghIt is enough to make anybody's blood bile in thier vains to think how different sin is looked upon in a man and woman. I say sin is sin, and you can't make goodness out of it by parsin' it in the masculine gender, no more'n you can by parsin' it in the feminine or neutral.
Marietta HolleyThere are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.
Gloria SteinemI will do comedy until the day I die: inappropriate comedy, funny comedy, gender-bending, twisting comedy, whatever comedy is out there.
Sandra BullockI don't believe in categorising a gender, as it makes for discord. People always say, 'That's what men are like' or, 'That's what women do'; I don't really feel that at all. I think that's because I have two fathers, three brothers, a husband and two sons. I'm surrounded by maleness, and I couldn't possibly summarise them into a type.
Natascha McElhoneI 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 PollinI didn't want to be discriminated against because of my gender and status. I promised myself I was never going to be treated as a second-class citizen.
Bianca JaggerThere 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 WillardYou can support trans-positive legislation, tranny artists, and the inclusion of trannies in your neighborhood, schools, place of worship, whatever. For the long term? Join or initiate some good legal battles against the puritanical laws that exist around sex and gender.
Kate BornsteinNot since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct issues. At one time, educators boasted that their role was not to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their role is far too often to teach students what to think on everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred trinity of 'race, class and gender.'
Thomas SowellGender assignment is a "construction" and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle.
Judith ButlerWhatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.
Gloria SteinemThink of how hard it would be to create a gender-based movement across racial lines as long as one group believes that it has to be strong while seeing the other group as passive and weak. We could also go into the stereotypes of the saucy, mercurial Latina and the docile, easily-dominated Asian woman.
Melissa Harris-PerryMy 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 MaslanyThis notion that 'what happens in your house doesn't affect what happens in my house' on the subject of the institution of marriage may be the ultimate sophistry of those advocating same-gender marriage.
Lance B. WickmanI don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.
May-Britt MoserThe fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.
Guy MaddinOne feels so despairing on some levels about what's going on in our culture, in regards to things like gender inequality. But there is progress. There is enhanced empathy and respect for others, we are fighting the tide, even though it seems like a tug of war sometimes.
Uma ThurmanSisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis
Chandra Talpade MohantyA lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
Dan SavageI think that why the research and the data are so important is because you become so used to seeing the world one way that you don't even notice anymore. [Gender inequality] has this invisibility.
Emma WatsonNo matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a "hard-wired" sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization - and with full institutional and community support.
Judith Butler