Quotes

“I have methodically to sweep into one little heap some of the otherwise unarticulated assumptions and conclusions from a long-term project of antihomophobic analysis.”

Sedgwick

“I could hear Khomeini raising his voice. He was blaming those around him, asking how they could mistreat someone who had come for shelter. He was saying, 'This person is God's servant.’”

Maryam Khatoon Molkara

“For a while, my art practice revolved around painting portraits that aimed to humanize, make visible, and uplift American Muslim women. Then I got to a bit of a breaking point, where I felt really annoyed at the fact that “humanizing Muslims” was considered groundbreaking, and felt resentful of this pressure to send a palatable and “respectable” message.”

Saba Taj

“There currently exists no framework in which to ask about the origins or development of individual gay identity that is not already structured by a… fantasy of eradicating that identity”

Sedgwick

“Issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured, not by the supersession of one model and the consequent withering away of another, but instead by the relations enabled by unrationalized coexistence of different models during the times they do coexist.”

Sedgwick

“Compared to chromosomal sex, which is seen…
as tending to be immutable… the meaning of
gender is seen as culturally mutable”

Sedgwick

“The association of ‘sex,’ precisely through the physical body, with reproduction and with genital activity and sensation keeps offering new challenges to the conceptual clarity or even possibility of sex/gender differentiation”

Sedgwick

“How do you know you want rhinoplasty, a nose job?” he inquires, fixing me with a penetrating stare.

“Because,” I reply, suddenly unable to raise my eyes above his brown wingtips, “I’ve always felt like a small-nosed woman trapped in a large-nosed body.”

“And how long have you felt this way?” He leans forward, sounding as if he knows the answer and needs only to hear the words.

“Oh, since I was five or six, doctor, practically all my life.”

“Then you have rhino-identity disorder.” My body sags in relief. “But first,” he goes on, “we want you to get letters from two psychiatrists and live as a small-nosed woman for three years . . . just to be sure.”

Spade

“Strategically deploying medically-approved narratives in order to obtain body-alteration goals”

Spade

“Personal narrative is always strategically employed. It is always mediated through cultural understandings, through ideology. It is always a function of selective memory and narration. Have I learned that I should lie to obtain surgery, as others have before me? Does that lesson require an acceptance that I cannot successfully advocate on behalf of a different approach to my desire for transformation?”

Spade

“Riki Anne Wilchins describes how trans experience has been used by psychiatrists, cultural feminists, anthropologists, and sociologists “travel[ling] through our lives and problems like tourists . . . [p]icnicking on our identities . . . select[ing] the tastiest tidbits with which to illustrate a theory or push a book.”[7] In most writing about trans people, our gender performance is put under a microscope to prove theories or build “expertise” while the gender performances of the authors remain unexamined and naturalized ”

Spade

“Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the ‘right’ kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative)”

Janet Mock

• “I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes. I don’t want to be seen as one of them.”
  

• “Despite my attempt to remain separate and be the exception, the reality was that I was one of these women.”

Janet Mock

“When I say I always knew I was a girl with such certainty, I erase all the nuances, the work, the process of self-discovery. I’ve adapted to saying I always knew I was a girl as a defense against the louder world… I wielded this ever-knowing, all-encompassing certainty to protect my identity. I’ve since sacrificed it in an effort to stand firmly in the murkiness of my shifting self-truths.
I grew to be certain about who I was, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I was learning the world, unsure, unstable, wobbly, living somewhere between confusion, discovery, and conviction. The fact that I admit to being uncertain doesn’t discount my womanhood. It adds value to it.”

Janet Mock

“The doctors interviewed concur with the argument that… professional opinions be presented in a clear and unambiguous way. When doctors make a statement about the infant they should ‘stick to it… serves to maintain the credibility of the medical profession’”

Holmes

“a world beyond pathologisation, medicalization, normativisation and surgical management”

Holmes

“The Western simplification of ‘sex’ into the simple sum of

biological building blocks: genes, chromosomes, gonads and

hormones… they lack access to a language of sex that would

admit its multiply contingent character.”

Holmes

“Disorders that can be managed, fixed, and brought into line with the expected rather than the unexpected.”

Holmes

“Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires”

Tuck & Yang

“Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous peoples on the list of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or class. This kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change”

Tuck & Yang

“Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.”

Tuck & Yang

“The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.”

Tuck & Yang

“He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess production, he needs excess labor, which he cannot provide himself”

Tuck & Yang

“Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land”

Tuck & Yang

“Some queer activist groups, however, have argued fervently for the disavowal of any alliance with heterosexuals, a disavowal that those of us who belong to communities of color cannot necessarily afford to make”

Johnson

“For example, my grandmother, who is homophobic, nonetheless must be included in the struggle against oppression in spite of her bigotry. While her homophobia must be critiqued, her feminist and race struggles over the course of her life have enabled me and others in my family to enact strategies of resistance against a number of oppressions, including homophobia.”

Johnson

I tell him how my parents have not responded well to my coming out, how my dad has told me that he isn’t going to pay for “that kind of education.” The hot, young, white professor says, “Why don’t you just divorce them?” betraying not a stitch of emotion in his face. I look at him, this anomaly of a human, who was a concert pianist as a child, finished undergrad at nineteen, law school at twenty-two, practiced corporate law for four years before returning to school to get a PhD in queer lit. I feel a chasm open up between us that I, of course, cannot predict will be a topographical rupture I stand at the edge of for the bulk of my adult life. “No,” I say. “That is not an option. That is not an option for a kid in a Colombian family. You don’t get it.”

Gutierrez

“Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘‘working on and against’’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local and everyday struggles of resistance.” (11–12)

Munos

“Champagne’s own ‘bravura’ in his reading of Hemphill’s tears illuminates the ways in which many queer theorists, in their quest to move beyond the body, ground their critique in the discursive rather than the corporeal.” 

Johnson

“Galvanizing around identity, however, is not always an unintentional ‘‘essentialist’’ move. Many times, it is an intentional strategic choice”

Johnson

“That moment when one creates a theory, thus fixing a constellation of ideas for a time at least, a fixing which no doubt will be replaced in another month or so by somebody else’s competing theory as the race accelerates.”

Christian

“I, for one, am tired of being asked to produce a black feminist literary theory as if I were a mechanical man”

Christian

“I, therefore, have no set method, another prerequisite of the new theory, since for me every work suggests a new approach. As risky as that might seem, it is, I believe, what intelligence means—a tuned sensitivity to that which is alive and therefore cannot be known until it is known.”

Christian

“I had, I felt, more pressing and interesting things to do, such as reading and studying the history and literature of black women, a history that had been totally ignored, a contemporary literature bursting with originality, passion, insight, and beauty”

Christian

“The literature of people who are not in power has always been in danger of extinction:” We should be fighting, not assisting, that extinction.

Christian

“Many of us are particularly sensitive to monolithism since one major element of ideologies of dominance, such as sexism and racism, is to dehumanize people by stereotyping them, by denying them their variousness and complexity. Seldom do they note these distinctions, because if they did they could not articulate a theory”

Christian

“I have no quarrel with those who wish to philosophize about how we know what we know. But I do resent the fact that this particular orientation is so privileged and has diverted so many of us from doing the first readings of the literature being written today as well as of past works about which nothing has been written”

Christian

“It became the name of an already established school  of theory, as if it constituted as set of specific doctrines, a singular, substantive perspective on the world, a particular theorization of human experience”

Halperin

“Promoting the assumption that “queer” was some sort of advanced, postmodern identity, and that queer theory had superseded both feminism and lesbian/gay studies”

Halperin

“The undesirable and misleading effect of portraying all previous work in lesbian and gay studies as under-theorized, as laboring under the delusion of identity politics, and if it hadn’t radically narrowed the scope of queer studies by privileging its theoretical register, restricting its range, and scaling down its interdisciplinary ambition.”

Halperin

“Despite its implicit (and false) portrayal of lesbian and gay studies as liberal, assimilationist, and accommodating of the status quo, queer theory has proven to be much more congenial to established institutions of the liberal academy.”

Halperin

“For queer to become a harmless qualifier of theory: if it’s theory, progressive academics seem to have reasoned, then it’s merely an extension of what important people have already been doing all along.”

Halperin

“They also seek to create a space for themselves and their work within the field of queer theory as that field is already constituted”

Halperin

“if queer theory is going to have the sort of future worth cherishing, we will have to find ways of renewing its radical potential - and by that I mean not devising some new and more avant-garde theoretical formulation of it but, quite concretely, reinventing its capacity to startle, to surprise, to help us think what has not yet been though.”

Halperin

“Abstracting ‘queer’ and turning it into a generic badge of subversiveness, a more trendy version of “liberal”: if it’s queer, it’s politically oppositional, so everyone who claims to be progressive has a vested interest in owning a share of it.”

Halperin

“Make queer theory a game the whole family could play”

Halperin

• “I would not want to teach such a course if it were to function as a means for (straight) students who do not wish to engage with queer culture or queer studies to acquire a qualification in queer theory, merely so as to complete an up-to-date graduate education.”

Halperin

• “Queer theory proper is often abstracted from the quotidian realities of lesbian and gay male life. That doesn’t undercut its importance. A survey of canonical queer theory, such as I have outlined above, can be immensely valuable, and I have willingly taught it in the past.”

Halperin

• “I should say at the outset that intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here. Indeed, factors I address only in part or not at all, such as class or sexuality, are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of colour. My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.”

Crenshaw

“While it is true that many lesbian and bisexual women in certain regions of the U.S. do describe their gender/sexual styles as play, the reasons that women play with gender have deeper significance than just frivolous masquerade and have more to do with living in the complex intersections of sex, appearance, anatomy, sexuality, race, and culture. In particular, for women of color who ‘play’ with gender, relationships and gender identities are complicated by racial and cultural differences that affect how both their genders are perceived and how they shape their genders.”

Lee

• “A particular strain of Orientalist discourse in the U.S. that constructs Asian women of various ethnicities as hyperfeminine, exotic, passive objects of white heterosexual male desire. In an environment where we are constantly confronted by such expectations, our presentations of gender are decidedly not neutral.”

Lee

• “It affected their lives whether they conform to it or not.”

• “If they can’t come on to you, then they want to kick your ass.”

• “Our gender identities have many aspects and are shaped by many forces; and how we are viewed by men is often the least of our concerns.”

Lee

• “The gender identities of bisexual and lesbian women of color are not formed by a simple addition or layering of racist, then sexist, then homophobic logic. Discourses do not work as sums, they work as particularities. For femme Asian women, it is a specific racializing discourse of gender that constructs them as feminine and heterosexual and serves to make them invisible.”

Lee

• “For some of my interviewees, certain behaviours or appearances that they felt were masculine, feminine, or not gendered according to their Asian cultural background were rendered femme or butch in mainstream lesbian contexts and thus interpreted in ways that they hadn’t intended.” 

Lee

• “My future, she felt, should be spent not researching disability but overcoming it”

• “Suggestions that a better life would of necessity require the absence of impairment”

Kafer

• “They tell stories of lives lived fully, and my future, according to them, involves not isolation and pathos but community and possibility”

Kafer

• “Disability continues to be seen primarily as a personal problem afflicting individual people.” 

• “The meaning of blindness, in other words, is completely encapsulated in the experience of wearing a blindfold; there is simply nothing else to discuss.”

Kafer

• “In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to “‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating’ the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives”

Kafer

• “Thus, in both the individual and medical models, disability is cast as a problematic characteristic inherent in particular bodies and minds. Solving the problem of disability, then, means correcting, normalizing, or eliminating the pathological individual”

Kafer

• “People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren’t disabling, social and architectural barriers are.”

Kafer

• “The first casts disability as pitiable misfortune, a tragedy that effectively prevents one from leading a good life, while the second refuses such inevitability, positioning ableism— not disability—as the obstacle to a good life.”

Kafer

• “For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them... however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies.”

• “The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.”

Kafer

• “People with chronic illness, pain, and fatigue have been among the most critical of this aspect of the social model, rightly noting that social and structural changes will do little to make one’s joints stop aching or to alleviate back pain. Nor will changes in architecture and attitude heal diabetes or cancer or fatigue. Focusing exclusively on disabling barriers, as a strict social model seems to do, renders pain and fatigue irrelevant to the project of disability politics.”
  

• “As a result, the social model can marginalize those disabled people who are interested in medical interventions or cures. In a complete reversal of the individual/medical model, which imagines individual cure as the desired future for disability, a strict social model completely casts cure out of our imagined futures”

Kafer

• “It is this presumption of agreement, this belief that we all desire the same futures, that I take up in this book”

Kafer

• “If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid.”

• “Disability is seen as the sign of no future, or at least of no good future.”

Kafer

• “Notions of disability and able-bodiedness affect everyone, not just people with impairments. Anxiety about aging, for example, can be seen as a symptom of compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, as can attempts to “treat” children who are slightly shorter than average with growth hormones; in neither case are the people involved necessarily disabled, but they are certainly affected by cultural ideals of normalcy and ideal form and function.”

Kafer

•  “How good is the care? Who has access to it? For how long? Do they have choices? Who pays for it?” Swan’s questions remind us that medical framings of disability are embedded in economic realities and relations, and the current furor over health care reform underscores the political nature of these questions.”

Kafer

“Moreover, as with heterosexuality, this repetition is bound to fail, as the ideal able-bodied identity can never, once and for all, be achieved. Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility—they are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really guarantee”

McRuer