Quotes About Gender

Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many 'culturally-mandated' differences. In First World countries we've evolved beyond mere biology -it isn't the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

You are indeed a victim of our culture's mercenary exploitation of feminine innocence.

In the throat, the male is as vulnerable as the female. Once the sharp points of the shears pierce his skin, puncture the artery, there will be no turning back for either of them.

A man is fearful of lonely in a woman

Mulheres eram especialistas em chorar, assim como os homens eram humilhados e impedidos de chorar. Mulheres eram purificadas pelo choro, assim como os homens eram maculados e manchados pelo choro.

Si hubiera podido, habría echado a Warren a patadas y se habría quedado con Norma Jeane. Pero, naturalmente, no podía hacerlo. Vivimos en un mundo de hombres y una mujer debe traicionar a sus congéneres para sobrevivir.

Tu castigo si eres mujer. Que no te amen lo suficiente.

You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.

When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it's naive to expect the flow to reverse.

I am not at ease in a kitchen, which, I tend to think, is a "woman's place"—(I do not identify with "woman" if I can help it: "woman" is likely to be a sap);

as men were smudged and stained by crying.

For women, deeply personal writing can also be described as a rebellion against the expected role, though in the case of women, the expectation is that we will be preoccupied with inner lives, with relationships, and with family, but that we will gear our stories to satisfy, flatter, or collude with our immediate circle.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

Irigaray remarks in such a vein that the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own.

Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with "being a man," others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function.

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.

Es gibt kein Ich vor der Annahme eines Geschlechts.

identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated.

El género no es exactamente lo que uno «es» ni tampoco precisamente lo que uno «tiene». El género es el aparato a través del cual tiene lugar la producción y la normalización de lo masculino y lo femenino

El género es] la estilización repetida del cuerpo, una sucesión de acciones repetidas –dentro de un marco regulador muy estricto– que se inmoviliza con el tiempo para crear la apariencia de sustancia, de una especie natural de ser.

But if there is no subject who decides on its gender, and if, on the contrary, gender is part of what decides the subject, how might one formulate a project that preserves gender practices as sites of critical agency? If gender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically, normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings, how might agency be derived from this notion of gender as the effect of productive constraint?