“We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.”
“Ia kadang tak perlu senjata dalam pengertian sesungguhnya. Musuhnya sangat dekat, ada dalam dirinya, hawa nafsunya sendiri”
Source: Raden Mandasia si Pencuri Daging Sapi
“A LITTLE SONG AND A RECEIPT.
Doe: a deer, a female deer—
Often chased by sonneteers of old.
Caught, and killed, and bathed in fear,
turned to human blazons to be sold—
Eyes—$twin models of the stars.
Skin—$fine tissue wrought from gold.
Lips—$your favorite kind of flower.
Sex—$a secret still untold/ a Silk Road to unfold/ a thing for you to mold/ a source by you controlled.
Total: $—————.—”
Source: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018: New Fiction, Poetry, and Category-Defying Literary Gems
“Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories of sexual harassment and sparked the #MeToo movement.”
Source: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“以不变应万变。不变的是我的 honesty，decency，integrity；万变的是小人们的变化多端的谎言，狡诈，诡计。”
Source: Biomaterials: A Basic Introduction
“The response to naming and shaming is often what I call ‘institutional airbrushing’: neoliberal institutions and organisations obsessed with how things look rather than how they are merely remove the ‘blemish’ that has been exposed.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“Sometimes I dream that his rare book collection
Is made of all “his” women turned to fiction.”
Source: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018: New Fiction, Poetry, and Category-Defying Literary Gems
“MUTANT BLAZON
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun.
To look at them will mean that I go blind.
His mouth beside my ear—they form a gun.
Each breath: a bullet targeting my mind.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun.
His throat: a fist to silence mine designed.
His reason: a ventriloquist’s illusion.
No tenor in the end could hearing find.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun—
Too close for any vessel with a mind.
Survive or get to die—that is the question.
No longer have I any will to mind.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun—
Not dead, not living, neither keen nor blind;
A daily haunting; memory rebegun;
Disaster in some future undivined.
I write, rewrite, a “sonnet” about rape
To hunt that voice I wish I could escape.”
Source: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018: New Fiction, Poetry, and Category-Defying Literary Gems
“.. I want you to be scared of being alone with strange women like I'm scared of being alone with strange men.”
Source: Last Woman Standing
“I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it’s hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.
To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.”