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Quote by Rita Mae Brown

“In the little patch of concrete by the front porch were the two pennies stuck in there when Leroy and I started first grade. “Long as we got those two cents,” Carrie would say, “we ain’t broke.”

Quote by Rita Mae Brown

Work

Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle is a coming-of-age novel that delves into the complexities of identity and the quest for self-discovery. The protagonist, Ellen, navigates the tumultuous landscape of the 1960s, moving from her sheltered upbringing in a small town to the vibrant and chaotic world of New York City. The novel is celebrated for its raw and honest portrayal of Ellen's struggles with her own sexuality, her family, and her place in the world. Through Ellen's journey, readers are offered a glimpse into the transformative power of self-acceptance and the courage it takes to embrace one's true self. more

Author

Rita Mae Brown
Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown is an American writer born on November 28, 1944. Her works span across various genres including novels and poetry, known for her unique sense of humor and insightful commentary on social issues. more

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“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”

“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”

“One casualty of this "increasingly sophisticated" intersectional model, which focuses primarily on the power of discourses, is the neglect of the most materially relevant variable in many of the problems faced by women (and by many racial and sexual minorities): economic class.”

“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”

“Never was the two cultures stand-off more apparent than here. In Gunn’s poem, a new neighbour (an outsider) wants them evicted because of their detrimental effect on property prices. She might well have been an academic: in more than thirty years in the humanities side of universities, the attitude towards those skills which I encountered was mainly one of ignorant, patronizing condescension. Just occasionally a student from the science side would dismantle a car in a campus car park only to be moved on by the authorities, as were Gunn’s auto freaks. Among the younger academics, disdain for this culture verged on contempt because of its supposedly obsolete ‘masculinist’ values. Those same academics were also the ones quick to brand any intense friendship between the men of this ‘masculinist’ culture as repressed homosexuality. In truth, sometimes it might have been, and yet sometimes it almost certainly wasn’t: some of the most loyal and selfless friendships I’ve ever known were between working-class young men who, insofar as anyone can ever be sure of these things, really were straight.”