Quotes About Identity

Girls are cruelest to themselves," observes Anne Carson in "The Glass Essay," her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.

attempts to nail down "who we really are" most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

The Oblivion Seekers, a collection one critic has described as "one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.

88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.

If there's one thing homonormativity reveals, it's the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.

After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit.

It's painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn't really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it's explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.

About parenthood and BDSM) Note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

I insisted that words did more than nominate.

Een vriend zegt dat gender voor hem net zoiets is als kleur. Gender en kleur delen een zekere ontologische onbepaaldheid: het klopt niet helemaal om te zeggen dat een voorwerp een kleur ís, noch om te zeggen dat het een kleur hééft. Ook de context verandert: 'alle katten zijn grijs', et cetera. Ook is kleur niet echt iets 'vrijwilligs'. Maar geen van deze formuleringen betekent dat het voorwerp in kwestie 'kleurloos' is.

That's my depression talking. It's not "me." 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Standing / apart from them one wonders / what on earth is a straight woman. / 'The only love I have ever felt / was for children and other women. / Everything else was just lust, pity, self-hatred, / pity, and lust.

I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply.

To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes..., they remain ours.

And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without

And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom.

It should be noted that the Tuareg do not call themselves Tuareg. Nor do they call themselves the blue people. They call themselves Imohag, which means "free men.

On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more "male," mine becoming more and more "female." But that's not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.