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“… a rebellion usually lasts only a few days. After it ends, the rebels are elated. But they then begin to view themselves mainly as victims and expect those in power to assume responsibility for changing the system. By contrast, a revolution requires

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“For some reason, cat nature aligns in our minds with a predilection for pleasure. To be catlike is to be contemptuous of sexual mores. It is to be unbowed by propriety and repressive body politics. It is to be wild and

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“We carry this bridge inside us, the struggle, the movement toward liberation. No doubt all of us have found by now that you don’t build bridges by storming walls—that only puts people’s backs up. Not acts of barging in the door and ramming our ideologies down people’s throats but of turning away, walking away from those

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“Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to

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“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore

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“The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to

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“The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. This story has nothing to do with

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“…motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others. Giving life is where it’s at. ‘Pro-maternity’ propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: ‘Have babies, it’s wonderful, you’ll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever,’ but do it

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“My grandmother remains—despite her futile efforts to make me more ladylike—one of the most feminist women I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and yet she would never have carried that label. Because so much of what feminists had to

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“(Emma) Goldman believed that sexuality, if unfettered by convention, prejudice, and repressive state institutions, was an agency that could produce the social harmony that Kropotkin argued was an adaptive strategy for human survival. ‘Love,’ she wrote, ‘should be the impetus for the harmonious blending of two beings’ (Traffic in Women, 149). ‘If the world is ever to give birth to

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“Many feminist practices of women of color, lesbians, and working-class women are not clearly registered in dominant frames because they involve political subjects who have multiple identities and who most often engage in multi-issue

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“At first glance, the feral feminine is a femininity that refuses domestication. See it in incisors that aren’t ground down, a larynx that unleashes too loudly, a sexual appetite that refuses to heel. To be feral is to be untamed, and to be feminine is to contain multitudes—which can, but

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“‘When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character

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““Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different

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“If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation: To insist upon complexity, to insist upon the

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“So many women come to my workshops or to my class or to my public talks convinced that they are sexually broken. They feel dysfunctional. Abnormal. And on top of that, they feel anxious, frustrated, and hopeless about the lack of information and support they’ve received from medical

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“In the exciting world of women I was raised in—an extended family with lots of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, great-aunts, aunts, daughters, and their children—I learned early that aging would be full of delight. Women around us talked about the prime of their life as though it was indeed the promised land. Like beautiful snakes, they were going to reach their prime, boldly shed their skin, and acquire another

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“We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice

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“Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the

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“Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid

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