Quotes About Identity

The show tries to offer its young female characters postfeminist identities that break down gender boundaries and hybridize gendered characteristics to produce new versions of power and heroism...being a woman involves work, work of constant self-(re)construction. Buffy's female characters are represented as always working in this way, whether to come to terms with power, or to maintain a "successful "good-girl" identity...

Spike may be the most "hybridized" character in terms of gender, within the show he is presented until the last moment as a failure.

the character's failure to move with the times leads to death, suggesting the anachronistic nature of this [hyper/stereotypical] type of masculinity.

Transgressions is the attraction of any dead boy, but as with openness of other more minor characters, this functions both to enlarge and restrict their potential as alternative gender representations. Dead boys exist through binary opposition; they are always already Other

It's the rare person whose outside matches up with who they are inside.

Les femmes portent les marques, le langage et les nuances de leur culture plus que les hommes. Tout ce qui est désiré ou détesté est projeté sur le corps féminin.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely.

Beneatha: You didn't tell us what Alaiyo means... for all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something... ... Asagai: It means... it means One for Whom Bread--Food--Is Not Enough.

Something always told me I wasn't no rich white woman.

For above all, in behalf of an ailing world which sorely needs our defiance, may we, as Negroes or women, never accept the notion of - "our place.

I can't help the way they are, but I'll be damned before I become like them.

She planted her hands on her hips. "Which twin are you?" He studied the ground for a moment, then peered up at her, suspicion showing clearly in his brown eyes. "Joe." "Well, Josh, are you alone out here?" "I said I was Joe." "And I think you're afraid I'm going to tell how you frightened me so you gave me your brother's name.

Ainsley cleared his throat. "Allow me to apologize for my brother. He's not been himself since he returned home." "With all due respect, Your Grace, I suspect he's being exactly himself. He's just simply no longer the person you knew before he left.

And while she pretended he was someone else, he would pretend she had no reason to imagine he was anyone other than who he was.

Fascinating. He'd never known a woman who didn't take up residence in front of a looking glass. "Why have you an aversion to gazing in the mirror?" "Because within a mirror I can't avoid looking into my own eyes. The life I've lived is reflected in my eyes and there are parts of it that I wish to forget." "Yet, it has made you the fascinating woman you are.

woman much like herself, who knew her worth was not measured by the man in her life but by her own accomplishments. Thus far in their letters, the ladies had listed

How long do you think it will take her to figure out who you are?" "She is blind." "Then that makes two of you." Alejandro

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

It's in giving yourself that you possess yourself

But thinking back on all those times, I had this odd, inescapable feeling that society thought it was some kind of sin to be deaf.

I have talked and listened and heard and there is no me!

My greatest fear had always been: The more you get to know me, the less there is to know.

I had to learn I wasn't deaf. I had to start speaking out.

My father, she insisted, was not born deaf. "Insisted" because there was an even greater stigma attached to genetic deafness (and the family) than there was to acquired deafness.