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Intersectionality Quotes

Browse 109 quotes about Intersectionality.

Intersectionality Quotes

“The same patriarchy that oppresses women oppresses nonhuman animals. Farmed animals and “housewives,” “lab” animals and prostitutes, dancing bears and girls in the sex trade—all have too long been exploited by the same patriarchal hierarchy wherein the comparatively weak are exploited for the benefit of the powerful. Those who are aware of history, of patriarchy and of the feminist movement, tend to understand how difficult it is—and how important—for people to rethink basic behaviors in order to bring about deep and lasting change. We must rethink how we speak, how we spend our time, and what we consume. This is as true for fighting sexism as it is for fighting speciesism—or any other form of domination, exploitation, and oppression. We must change our lives first, and most fundamentally. I hope that readers working to improve the lives of girls and women . . . will realize that they can and must choose not to continue to exploit nonhuman animals while working to liberate girls and women.”

WomenChangeSocial JusticeOppressionGirlsExploitationPatriarchyIntersectionalitySpeciesismActivsim
Book:Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices
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“My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.”

WomenBlack WomenIntersectionalityJanet Mock
Book:Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love So Much More
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“By itself, legal abortion does little for poor and working-class women who have neither the means to pay for it nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-for-profit health care, as well as the end of racist, eugenicist practices in the medical profession.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityAbortionHealthcareNeoliberalismIntersectionality
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“laws criminalizing gender violence are a cruel hoax if they turn a blind eye to the structural sexism and racism of criminal justice systems, leaving intact police brutality, mass incarceration, deportation threats, military interventions, and harassment and abuse in the workplace.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityDomestic AbuseNeoliberalismIntersectionalitySystemic Oppression
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“Intersectionality […] is often reduced, in common understanding, to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability, and so on. […] The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement — feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement — that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”

RaceClassHuman RightsGenderOppressionIntersectionalityLeftism
Author:Amia Srinivasan
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“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”

RaceClassGenderIntersectionalityIntersectional Feminism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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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.”

ClassIdentityIntersectionalityIntersectional Feminism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“...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.)”

ClassIntersectionalityClassism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..”

RaceClassFeminismEqualityGenderEquityIntersectionalityWhite FeminismIntersectional Feminism
Book:Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
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“Historically, the 1 percent have always been indifferent to the interests of society or the majority. But today they are especially dangerous. In their single-minded pursuit of short-term profits, they fail to gauge not only the depth of the crisis, but also the threat it poses to the long-term health of the capitalist system itself: they would rather drill for oil now than ensure the ecological preconditions for their own future profits!”

PoliticalSocietyFeminismRacismCapitalismEconomicsEcologyNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“societal reorganization, has played out several times in modern history—largely to capital’s benefit. Seeking to restore profitability, its champions have reinvented capitalism time and again—reconfiguring not only the official economy, but also politics, social reproduction, and our relation to nonhuman nature. In so doing, they have reorganized not only class exploitation, but also gender and racial oppression,”

PoliticalSocietyFeminismRacismCapitalismEconomicsEcologyNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“The dilemmas Friedan described were fundamentally “problems of privilege.” And those afflicted were generally quite keen to keep their privilege: Despite railing against suburban life, the women who sympathized with Friedan’s critique were generally disinterested in living in the kinds of households or communities these “other” women lived in (nor in having “others” move into their own neighborhoods). Nor did they have any interest in taking on the kinds of jobs these “other” women worked in. They wanted well-compensated and socially respected professional jobs, befitting their social status. And they ultimately achieved that goal by offloading unwanted domestic responsibilities onto other women—lower-income women, typically immigrants and women of color. Nonetheless, elite women sought to conflate their own interests with the interests of “women” writ large. The campaign to enhance the position of upper-middle-class women was (and continues to be) carried out in the name of feminism per se.”

FeminismIntersectionalitySecond Wave FeminismBetty Friedan
Book:We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
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“The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end. When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl. The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own. I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.”

PoetryFeminismIntersectionality
Book:Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
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“The feminism we have in mind recognizes that it must respond to a crisis of epochal proportions: plummeting living standards and looming ecological disaster; rampaging wars and intensified dispossession; mass migrations met with barbed wire; emboldened racism and xenophobia; and the reversal of hard-won rights—both social and political.”

PoliticalFeminismRacismCrisisGlobal WarmingXenophobiaNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism. But far from providing the solution, liberal feminism is part of the problem. Centered in the global North among the professional-managerial stratum, it is focused on “leaning-in” and “cracking the glass ceiling.” Dedicated to enabling a smattering of privileged women to climb the corporate ladder and the ranks of the military, it propounds a market-centered view of equality that dovetails perfectly with the prevailing corporate enthusiasm for “diversity.” Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top. In treating women simply as an “underrepresented group,” its proponents seek to ensure that a few privileged souls can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own class.”

PoliticalFeminismMediaSolidarityNeoliberalismMainstream MediaIntersectionalityMedia Manipulation
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“Its love affair with individual advancement equally permeates the world of social-media celebrity, which also confuses feminism with the ascent of individual women. In that world, “feminism” risks becoming a trending hashtag and a vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few.”

PoliticalFeminismMediaSocial MediaCelebrityNeoliberalismIntersectionalityInfluencersLean In
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“This kind of caring for oneself is not about caring for one’s own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist. This is why, this is how: those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them.”

FeminismSelf CareIntersectionality
Book:Living a Feminist Life
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“As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.”

FeminismIntersectionality
Book:Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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“And despite the punishments for boundary crossing, we continue to live, daily, with all our contradictory differences. Here I still stand, unmistakably "feminine" in style, and "womanly" in personal experience - and unacceptably "masculine" in political interests and in my dedication to writing poetry that stretches beyond the woman's domain of home. Here I am, assigned a "female" sex on my birth certificate, but not considered womanly enough - because I am a lesbian - to retain custody of the children I delivered from my woman's body. As a white girl raised in a segregated culture, I was expected to be "ladylike" - sexually repressed but acquiescent to white men of my class - while other, darker women were damned as "promiscuous" so their bodies could be seized and exploited. I've worked outside the home for at least part of my living since I was a teenager - a fact deemed masculine by some. But my occupation is now that of teacher, work suitably feminine for a woman as long as I don't tell my students I'm a lesbian - a sexuality thought too aggressive and "masculine" to fit with my "feminity.”

FeminismLgbtqLesbianIntersectionality
Book:S/He
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“Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.”

Diversity And InclusionViolence Against WomenIntersectionalityOnline AbuseTrolls And TrollingOnline HarassmentMarginalized PeopleInternet AbuseIgnoring Outside VoicesRace And Racism
Book:Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate
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“At the end of the day, dipping into the attack well of body-shaming, racism, misogyny, and ableism is just lazy. When people resort to these kinds of tactics, I simply think that they have lost the ability to debate the merits and content of a position. Instead, they want to play to the bot-fueled, troll-fed, worst of who humans can be.”

RacismSocial MediaDebateBullyingMisogynyCivilityIntersectionalityAbleismTrollsBody Shaming
Book:In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World
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“Without acknowledging the variety of the human experience, all you get is the perspective of majority representation, which is mostly white and male and straight and able-bodied and cisgender and "traditionally" attractive. None of those things are inherently negative... but neither are their alternatives. So, all deserve some spotlight.”

RacismRepresentationIntersectionalityAbleismCommunity Dynamics
Book:Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities
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“For those who haven’t yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions; these are stories that change our own. The moment we begin to truly engage with climate science, our narratives of self and future are whirled out of orbit.”

Climate ChangeColonialismPatriarchyEssaysNeuroscienceWhite SupremacyEnvironmentalismNeuronsIntersectionality
Book:The Nerves and Their Endings
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“Many black intellectuals spoke about the experience of racism mainly, and sometimes exclusively, from a black male perspective, highlighting the various ways their humanity had been degraded and denied. While this discussion was something I cared about deeply, it was rarely balanced with one about all the unique ways in which black women have suffered. Even the scholars who spoke about race without focusing so much on the particular experience of black men still failed to fully capture and dissect the compounded challenges black women faced as they dealt with racism and sexism. The result of discussions of race being unfairly tilted toward the male point of view is that the experiences of black women have taken a backseat to those of black men, although they've suffered in ways that black men haven't. Racism and sexism were stacked against them. And too often they've borne the brunt of the very masculinity that has been historically debased in black men when black men asserted their power over the only people they could - black women...The hard truth is that black men have contributed to these struggles both subtly and overtly...we contribute to the degradation of black women by glorifying the kind of common rap that reduces them to bitches, hoes, and body parts.”

SexismBlack WomenBlacknessIntersectionalityBipocIntersectional FeminismBlack Experience
Book:Uncensored
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“You deserve so much more than just to be tolerated. You deserve to be loved for exactly who and what you are right now. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. This also means you must return the favor. Learn more about racism and sexism and ableism, too. You, unfortunately, are probably already well aware of how much homophobia can hurt, inside and out. Learning more about how different kinds of oppression work and where they intersect will help you build better bridges with others and create a safe and respectful...culture for everyone. Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize.”

LgbtHomophobiaIntersectionalityAllyship
Author:Ivan Coyote
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