Quotes About Femininity

the very premise of this project takes seriously, rather than simply decries, the intractable imbrication among femininity, the ornamental, and the Oriental, in order to explore the entanglement of living and living-as-thing.

I offer the yellow woman here not as the real but rather as a conceptual category and a critical agent,

Apparently, as historian Paul Kramer dryly observes, "for California officials and in the eyes of the law, there is little difference between disability, immorality, and Chinese femininity.

The women were thus simultaneously dressed up and stripped down. The evidence of an overmaterialized and scopically available body emerges not out of bare flesh or real ornaments, but instead from their phantasmic conflation, an overlapping of surfaces located in teasing peripheries: the borders of a collar, the peep of a hem, the gleaming edge of a sleeve.

one of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes "visual evidence" and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.

Porcelain thus connoted both hardness and plasticity, old-world beauty and new-world technology, fragile daintiness and insensate coolness: a mixture of antithetical symbolic meanings that are then ascribed to, indeed, become the very "stuff" of Asiatic femininity.

We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.

And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

He didn't understand why everyone fussed about taking clean clothes out of a drawer. Underclothes smelled a lot more interesting after the female wore them.

Sylvia had given him a scalding lecture, the gist of it being that whatever a woman enjoyed wearing was feminine and anything she didn't enjoy wearing wasn't, and if he was too stubborn and old fashioned to understand that, he could go and soak his head in a bucket of cold water. He hadn't quite forgiven her yet for saying they would have to look hard to find a bucket big enough to fit his head in to, but he admired the sass behind the remark.

Make-up is in short designed to mimic youth, correct asymmetries, and signal sexuality.

Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

If Kafka had been a woman, then Gregor Samsa would not have turned into an insect, he would not have had to. Gregor would be Gretel and she would wake up one morning pregnant. She would try to roll over and discover she was stuck on her back. She would wave her little hands uselessly in the air.

And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband's arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe.

I watched her peel off the slip, The bra closed in the front like the other. Ah, my teeth clenched seeing her tighten the clasps, breasts gathered like that. The she smoothed the flesh into the cups, lifted each breast, dropped it, her fingers casual, rough. I got hard watching it. Then the panties came up stretched sheer over her pubic hair. I could see the silk seal itself over her secret lips. Little crack. Hair a dark shadow underneath.

Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman

I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering.

Sometimes I feel like another creature, hardly a woman. I can't be a modern woman. I'm a Victorian teenager–at heart.

A woman who writes feels too much, Those trances and portents!

we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.

Her father said she was a princess. He did not see that she was a brave knight.

A vagina or a penis need not cause gender identity from the inside to be relevant in staging oneself as a woman or a man. The extent to which they are relevant depends on the scene. Out in the streets one does not need a penis to perform masculinity. But in communal showers at the swimming pool, it helps a lot. So there they are, the genitals: on stage.

Ver a una mujer, y sentir en ese mismo instante que también ella me ha visto, que sus ojos interrogantes han quedado prendados de mí cómo si no tuviéramos más remedio que encontranos en el umbral de lo ignoto, de esa frontera oscura y melancólica de la conciencia...

Ver a una mujer, y sentir en ese mismo instante que también ella me ha visto, que sus ojos interrogantes han quedado prendados de mí cómo si no tuviéramos más remedio que encontrarnos en el umbral de lo ignoto, de esa frontera oscura y melancólica de la conciencia...