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Quote by Tracy Chevalier

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Remarkable Creatures

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Author

Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier is a renowned British novelist known for her delicate narrative and profound historical insight. Her works often focus on characters and events from specific historical periods, using fictional stories to depict real historical backgrounds. more

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“A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages?”

“The first treatise on the interior of the body, which is to say, the treatise that gave the body an interior , written by Henri De Mondeville in the fourteenth century, argues that the body is a house, the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are convoluted. While it is made of the same material as a man’s body, it has ben turned inside out. Her house has been disordered, leaving its walls full of openings. Consequently, she must always occupy a second house, a building to protect her soul. Gradually this sense of vulnerability to the exterior was extended to all bodies which were then subjected to a kind of supervision traditionally given to the woman. The classical argument about her lack of self-control had been generalized.”

“Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.”

“The concept of the "female" is a loaded one. Female. Woman. The entire concept of the womyn is derived from, and supports the existence and submission to the male. When you hear "female", the social association is weakness, incompetence, and fragility. Almost as if nothing done can shatter the chain of alleged inferiority. If you refuse this, society makes you a "radical".”