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Quote by Kate Zambreno

“If Molly Brown was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics. They can play women, fetishize her excesses. Make fun of her frivolity. They don't have to be women. A colonizing or appropriating of the feminine.”

Quote by Kate Zambreno

Work

Heroines

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Author

Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno

Kate Zambreno is an American writer born in 1977. Her works are known for their unique literary style and profound exploration of female experience. more

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“It's difficult not to read Vivien(ne) as this pathetic spectacle of illness and dependence. The ultimate grotesque of femininity, like Freud's hysteric/housewife (both Dora and her mother). But channeling her, imagining an interior life, I can sense her early inner spirit and see it squelched and doomed into sickness and submission. Under different circumstances and with more strength and less of a mother who crafted her as an invalid from childhood., she could have been an author. Maybe.”

“The idea of women as a reserve army of labour is double-sided, in a sense. Women are a spare resource for employers in times of expansion; they are also a spare resource for politicians to call upon in times of recession. When it ceases to be convenient to spend money on public services, responsibility is handed back to those two euphemisms for unpaid female labour, 'the community' and 'the family.”

“We are struggling to change the values and priorities of men alongside us, as well as the way they conduct themselves - in short, to change the world. All the while, we are fighting to assert our own interpretations of what we are doing and our own definitions of what we are, against the man-made versions, which tend to ridicule, belittle or ignore our efforts and achievements.”