Feminist Quotes - Page 18

...feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.

...feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.

I was encouraged, though, because I saw feminist writers - male and female - calling out the bias. I feel like more and more writers are cognizant of the problems and are willing to try to challenge them.

You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

I don't see myself as a crusading feminist filmmaker. Not at all. I have the luxury of coming from New Zealand and I've had moments in my life where being female is considered to be a tremendous advantage - emotionally, career-wise. Personally, I have nothing to prove. But I'm tremendously curious about human nature. Female life is so incredibly underexplored in cinema, so these stories feel very exotic.

A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.

One of my experiences around feminist risk and change is that it's difficult, if not impossible, to put new wine into old wineskins.

The power of the Marxian critique of class domination stands as an implicit suggestion that feminists should consider the advantages of adopting a historical materialist approach to understanding phallocratic domination.

A feminist is a man or woman who already knows for a fact that men and women are qual and wants society to wake up to that fact, so the world can stop operating at half-strength.

For better or worse, there is not a situation in one's daily life that does not have feminist subtext, superstructure, implications and one is constantly aware of it, even when you want to rest it stands up and hits you in the face.

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

I am not Lyme disease, that's not who I am, I'm still a feminist artist, but this is a part of my story too, and I'm not going to keep it out to look cooler.

Just because you have political beliefs or feminist beliefs, you don't have to like everybody, you don't have to like everything.

I have a lot of fantasies about being tied up and spanked. I suppose it isn't very liberated, is it? What kind of fantasies do feminists have?

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

Whenever I talk about being a feminist or speaking out for equality, it's also about the idea that men are treated with respect. It's not just about treating women like people and not abusing them. You also can't abuse men and you can't say things like, 'Oh, he was just a man. He didn't know any better.' Or 'He's a man, what did you expect?' That's just as abusive and damaging to men, I feel.

I would say there have been different stages of my feminist awakening. The more layers you peel back and the more things you're made aware of, you're like, "Oh my God."

Today [the voice of women] is being heard loud and clear. But I do not read the welcome triumph of feminism, social, economic, and creative, as a brief for postmodernism. The advance, while opening new avenues of expression and liberating deep pools of talent, has not exploded human nature into little pieces. Instead, it has set the stage for a fuller exploration of the universal traits that unite humanity.

I'm a feminist, yes! Very strongly.

Women now wield considerable power along political lines and I believe each succeeding year for some time to come will find them wielding that power more effectively.

We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.