Representation Of Gender Quotes

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...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
Abigail Adams
The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
How often have you heard the argument that we have to slowly implement gender and racial equality in order to not “shock” society? Who is the “society” that people are talking about? I can guarantee that women would be able to handle equal pay or a harassment-free work environment right now, with no ramp-up. I’m certain that people of color would be able to deal with equal political representation and economic opportunity if they were made available today. So for whose benefit do we need to go so slowly? How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?
Ijeoma Oluo (Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America)
That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or ... people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.
Eve Sedgwick
The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.
bell hooks (Black Looks: Race and Representation)
Actively question what we are doing and why. Rather than passively consuming our culture's ideas and representation of gender, break them down. Reflect on why they are the way they are. Greater undestanding comes through analysis.
Ashley Mardell (The ABC's of LGBT+)
Even in school, children get subtle messages about whose stories matter. Literature classes routinely feature literature written by women and men of color as exceptional (one among many white male writers) or available for study in some schools as elective classes only. A recent global review found that gender bias is also "rife in textbooks." The result of pedagogical choices like these shape self-esteem, empathy, and understanding. They also shape resentment, confusion, and anger.
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
Let's get real about the ideal. It sucks. It doesn't represent us, and it doesn't even try to. It refuses to acknowledge that people of all sizes, shapes, ages, skin colors, genders and abilities exist and are worthy of being seen, heard, and valued.
Megan Jayne Crabbe (Body Positive Power)
This is why reading representations of disability as simultaneously metaphor and materiality is so essential -- disability oscillates between abstraction and material meanings due to its social history.
Sami Schalk (Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction)
When a young woman discovers her power, both sexual and intellectual, she unleashes her own voice, her righteousness. The first things she has to jettison are the Devil and any religious representation of her gender as stained or subservient. She's just naturally going to be attracted to Goddesses or witches or, as in my case, a scientific understanding of the body and a historical view of sexual politics.
Susie Bright (Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression)
Finally, the dirty little secret about sexual objectification is that it is an act that cannot be performed with any attention to its ethical meaning. Experientially —from the point of view of a man who is sexually objectifying—sexual objectification and ethical self awareness are mutually exclusive. A man cannot reflect on what he is doing and its real consequences for real people and at the same time fully accomplish the act of sexual objectifying. There's no way it can be done, because hos own subjective reality is too contingent upon the unreality of someone else. All that can be left "out there" in his field of awareness is the other person's sexedness—an abstract representation of a gender—in comparison with which his own sexedness may flourish and engorge. So it is that a man shuts off his capacity for ethical empathy—whatever capacity he may ever had—in order to commit an act of despersonalization that is "gratifying" essentially because it functions to fulfill his sense of an identity that is authentically male.
John Stoltenberg
Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was “amazing,” “marvellous,” incredibly funny,” worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.
bell hooks (Black Looks: Race and Representation)
If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased. An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Transgressions is the attraction of any dead boy, but as with openness of other more minor characters, this functions both to enlarge and restrict their potential as alternative gender representations. Dead boys exist through binary opposition; they are always already Other
Lorna Jowett (Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan)
If women really are practically interchangeable with men, because there is hardly any difference, why would it be important to strive for equal representation in a presidential cabinet? The distinction becomes something equivalent to hair color. Would fairness demand an equal number of blondes and brunettes in government?
Sam A. Andreades (enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship)
Argument 4: Affirmative action is unfair to white men because it causes them to lose opportunities to less qualified women and people of color. As with argument 3, remember that these are representational goals, of which we are falling far short. When you say that a representational number of women or people of color cuts out more deserving white men, you are saying that women and people of color deserve to be less represented in our schools and our companies and that white men are deserving of an over-representational majority of these spots. We see the disparities in jobs and education among race and gender lines. Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, prompted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
From the erasure and delegitimization of bisexual and transgender identities to the infantilization of asexuals to the “white-centric” expressions of relationships and identities to the prevalence of monosexism in LGBTQ+ circles, the continued centering of gay and lesbian relationships as the primary and best indicator of individual queer representation is doing harm. It robs us all of the complex and beautiful diversity of how we experience sexuality, gender, and community.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
queers--real-life ones--do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as people. they deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough... A cliche born of a necessary evil: the fight for rights. As with race and gender and able-bodiedness, the trope of the saintly and all-sacrificing minority is one that follows on the heels of unadulterated hatred, and is just as dangerous (but for different reasons). p. 47
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
Oil production affects gender relations by reducing the presence of women in the labor force. The failure of women to join the nonagricultural labor force has profound social consequences: it leads to higher fertility rates, less education for girls, and less female influence within the family. It also has far-reaching political consequences: when fewer women work outside the home, they are less likely to exchange information and overcome collective action problems; less likely to mobilize politically, and to lobby for expanded rights; and less likely to gain representation in government. This leaves oil-producing states with atypically strong patriarchal cultures and political institutions
Michael L. Ross (Oil, Islam, and Women)
Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very real sense, the story of our lives.
Anne A. Lawrence (Men Trapped in Men's Bodies (Focus on Sexuality Research))
MANO: There's no question in my mind that we've always felt, in the heart of our Western, Christian culture, that Jesus was very much female. That is why the representations of Jesus with long hair have always been predominant in art. The Virgin Mary was later presented as a harmless sort of woman to whom we can address our need for a maternal outlet in prayer, as a safer way of dealing with the fact that Jesus was as much a woman as a man, particularly when he died. DOOR: You said that if men don't overcome their wanting of women, society will crack. MANO: We are coming to a point where the genders are clumsily engaging in civil war with each other. There's a lot of unpleasantness in the land. Men feel terribly threatened. Women have been crucified for many years, so they understand it and have their axes to grind as well. The truth of the matter is, Jesus on the cross is the female being exploited in every which way. I mentioned intercourse being, at its best, an act of penetration, but there are many other ways in which women have been sacrificed, whether from childbirth or being sold as wives or whatever, through history. So when the male S&M devotee binds a woman to a cross, he has to realize, if he's a Christian-- DOOR: Uh, just how many Christian S&M devotees are there? MANO: Even if he's not a Christian, he ought to realize that he is essentially binding Jesus again, because Jesus contains in him the female--very, very strongly--but almost mystically hidden, I think, because the truth is too painful to deal with. I don't know. I've never heard anyone else say what I'm saying now.
D. Keith Mano
It is almost inconceivable that so many filmmakers could think of nothing -- be inspired by nothing -- nothing, nothing, nothing -- but the politics of representation, 'performitivity', gender, race, queer theory etc. There must be other subjects, in the world outside or in their inner lives, which belong on the silver (or digital) screen. This degree of conformity is unsettling. It should alarm cultural elites rather than comfort them. Yet the art world's ideological atmosphere is so thick and pervasive that those inside of it don't even realise it as the air they breathe." "Forgive me, I forgot to mention the other permissible topic: 'consumptive capitalism', that oppressive economic system which creates vast sums of taxable wealth, which in turn allows the UK government to fund even this nonsense.
Sohrab Ahmari (The New Philistines (Provocations))
(From an interview with Daniel Kahneman) Q. Is it possible that one barrier for women trying to work in male-dominated fields is that such an environment demands extra mental effort on behalf of the women? A. Being self-conscious takes up mental capacity and is certainly not good for performance. Furthermore, the more self-conscious you are, the more likely you are to interpret (and sometimes misinterpret) the attitudes of others as gender-based, which is bound to make things worse. However, there is hope: self-consciousness is likely to diminish when you are in a stable environment, interacting with people you know well. The trend appears to be favorable: improving attitudes of men, rising representation of women in many male-dominated occupations, so the future is likely to be better than the past.
Steven D. Levitt
We, everyday citizens who are increasingly befuddled about what has happened to society and how it happened so quickly, regularly hear demands to “decolonize” everything from academic curricula to hairstyles to mathematics. We hear laments about cultural appropriation at the same time we hear complaints about the lack of representation of certain identity groups in the arts. We hear that only white people can be racist and that they always are so, by default. Politicians, actors, and artists pride themselves on being intersectional. Companies flaunt their respect for “diversity,” while making it clear that they are only interested in a superficial diversity of identity (not of opinions). Organizations and activist groups of all kinds announce that they are inclusive, but only of people who agree with them. American engineers have been fired from corporations like Google for saying that gender differences exist,43 and British comedians have been sacked by the BBC for repeating jokes that could be construed as racist by Americans.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn star' aesthetic and young girls' behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. 'Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,' the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. 'They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.' The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, combined with the under-representation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it's especially insidious for girls' self-concept; as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility.
Carina Chocano (You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages)
One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia
Zainab Bahrani
I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.
Sara Sheridan
The fact that Ishtar's sexual encounters usually mingle eroticism with violence was pointed out by Harris (1990: 264). However, it is not because Ishtar shatters the boundaries of her sex by proposing marriage (a masculine act) that Gilgamesh is frightened. -Women of Babylon: Gender and representation in Mesopotamia
Zainab Bahrani
from the 1990s, postmodernists were increasingly in the ascendant. Over time, the postmodernists came to focus on microaggressions, hate speech, safe spaces, cultural appropriation, implicit association tests, media representation, “whiteness,” and all the now familiar trappings of current racial discourse.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
As a viewer, I was left torn, wanting the women to have it all, to not seem to be excluded if they dared to transgress the traditional female gender role, but finding myself presented with heroines who never did, who seemingly had to choose between heroic accomplishment and romance, and who made it more complicated to see these options as possible for other than the male-identified. This representational “either/or” is one more symptom of the so-called war between the sexes that continues to confound feminists about the roles romantic relationships play in our lives and even the idea of romance itself: how are we to be dedicated to empowering ourselves and others but also to find a real romantic connection if that interests us? (4)
Allison P. Palumbo
It is curious that the #MeToo movement is concerned only with gender representation in particular occupational categories. For instance, most HVAC and refrigeration installers and mechanics are men, yet there is little outcry about getting more girls into vocational training for these jobs. Similarly, virtually all workers in the carting, moving, trucking, and mining industries are males, but female underrepresentation in these high-injury and high-fatality occupations has not sparked celebrity outrage.
Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
The extraordinary accomplishments of Western science were achieved without regard to the complexions of its creators. Now we are to believe that scientific progress will stall unless we pay close attention to identity and try to engineer proportional representation in schools and laboratories. The truth is exactly the opposite: Lowering standards and diverting scientists’ energy into combating phantom sexism and racism is reckless in a highly competitive, ruthless, and unforgiving global marketplace. Driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up fast to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence that we cannot afford.
Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
1.​Identify the messages that are being presented. They all have one or more. (Except maybe that song about there being millions of peaches… I think those dudes were just high.) 2.​Along with your kids, identify which values the creators are elevating. (Freedom? Autonomy? Sex? Drugs? Pride?) Which values are they demeaning? (Humility? Responsibility? Traditional gender roles?) 3.​Try to piece together the worldview behind the message. What do you think the artist’s definition of good and bad is? What about moral and immoral? What is the good life—the life that reflects success (according to their art or writing)? Is it money? Lots of romantic relationships? Freedom from rules? 4.​If you are watching a movie, identify which characters and qualities are presented in an attractive way. Pay attention to the traits that are exhibited by the villains. The protagonist and antagonist are often archetypes, or representations of ideas.
Hillary Morgan Ferrer (Mama Bear Apologetics™: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies)
One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally. White resistance to the term white supremacy prevents us from examining how these messages shape us.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
Ilta had explained that her spiritual practice required representation from at least two genders—whether that was within one person or two didn’t matter. While that could’ve been handled by Lieutenant Fugl Vang alone, Nels had wanted his sister to have a part in the ceremony, and that had dictated Ilta’s choice.
Stina Leicht (Blackthorne (The Malorum Gates, #2))
Zillah Eisenstein uses the term ‘decoy’ to describe the way in which ‘imperialist democracy’ covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: ‘The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics.’4 Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn’t so far.
Nina Power (One Dimensional Woman)
Is representation everything? Of course not. Just because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean I’d be a good President for women. (I would have been, but not only because of my gender.) But it does matter, and often in concrete ways. I remember when I was pregnant with Chelsea, working at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and repeatedly went to my superiors to ask about their maternity leave policy. They avoided the question until there was no longer any way to avoid it, then stammered that they didn’t have a policy. “No woman who’s worked here has ever come back after having a baby.” So I wrote my own. I was a new partner and had the power to do that. But what about more junior lawyers or support staff? Would they have been expected to come in a few days after giving birth, or not come back to work at all? It took a woman in the room to notice a huge hole in the firm’s policies and care enough to fix it.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
Representation for representation sake is very dangerous.
Malebo Sephodi
To attack a system that has evolved to contain social movements through elite representation, we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By "autonomous," we mean the formation of independent groups of people who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression, including but not to limited to nonwhite people, women, indigenous people, nonwhite and white queers, people with disabilities, trans* and gender-nonconforming people, and the poor. Creating a variety of spaces as free from anti blackness, racism, sexism, and sexual violence as possible are the minimal conditions needed for political projects to survive over time. We also believe in the political value of organizing across social divisions with the understanding that any identity category is already a "coalition" of different groups with often radically different political interests depending on the issues being addressed. We hope for the emergence of widespread autonomous organizing. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.
Tipu's Tiger
The Pluto boys were already The Planets so the Pluto girls were The Lady Planets. Their colors were purple and white, their mascot was a round planet with legs, arms, a perky face. The Reservation team was The Warriors but the girls weren't The Lady Warriors, they were just The Warriors also. Their colors were blue and gold. They didn't want to have themselves as a mascot so they had an old time shield with two eagle feathers.
Louise Erdrich (LaRose)
Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level: First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple. Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it. CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important. Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives. Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period. LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same. Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use. Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.
Emily Chang (Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley)
...if something about the environment is preventing women from being as successful as men, then imposing a quota without thinking about the environment is going to increase women's representation without necessarily increasing their success. This is perhaps encapsulated as the difference between diversity (which is about numbers) and inclusion (which is about environment).
Eugenia Cheng (x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender)
We can be misinterpreted through lack of representation - but also through the particular prejudices of popular writers. The denial of reality, the cutting of a story to fit a particular narrative, and presenting uninformed opinion as fact: on a weekly basis, these are the ways in which trans people are represented to the wider world by those who know nothing about our lives.
C.N. Lester (Trans Like Me: 'An essential voice at the razor edge of gender politics' Laurie Penny)
…This lack of morality is not limited to rank. In Alaba, for example, even the simplest social structures are ignored. Alabans claim that concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not apply, and insist they have either five or six genders, depending on how they are counted, between which these heathens will move depending on their whims. As a tonal language, the same sound with different inflections carries different meanings, so a Naridan must be very careful to avoid misrepresenting himself: for example, ‘mè’ is ‘high masculine’, used by those in whom the fire of manhood burns strongly, while ‘mê’ is ‘low masculine’, for in Alaban society it is no great shame for a man to admit to womanly character. The largely uninflected ‘me’ is the gender-neutral formal, but ‘mé’ is ‘low feminine’, favoured by women who lack the qualities appropriate for their gender, and ‘mē’ is ‘high feminine’, the only appropriate usage for any Naridan lady of decency. Even stranger is ‘më’, used only by those who insist they have no gender, even in the most informal settings. Such immorality is hardly unsurprising in a land that has provided succour to exiled pretenders since the Splintering. Needless to say, Naridans should resist these pernicious local customs and only use the ‘high’ forms for themselves when visiting this land, lest they cause themselves considerable embarrassment.
Mike Brooks (The Black Coast (The God-King Chronicles, #1))
The Buryats and other Mongols believe that representation contains the power of the represented. Representation can ignite an object’s influence and must therefore be controlled in its extent and frequency… [T]hey describe their oppressors’ institutions of power soberly while fetishizing their shamanic deities, such as Hoimorin Högshin, through layers of material and verbal representations: figurines, accessories, clothing, poetic evocations, and actions of swaddling and cradling—and, specific to this discussion, by attributing to her the power to punish. As Taussig (1993:105) discusses… to represent something in detail is to display its power and authority… It is through a detailed representation of their own spiritual world that the Buryats have resisted their oppressors. The harsher the Buryats’ experience of oppression, the greater they seem to have made their supernatural entities. This makes sense if we stick to a rational calculation that the Buryats took the powers of their oppressors and attributed them to their own deities, making the latter correspondingly powerful. By attributing the characteristic of a dominant figure to Hoimorin Högshin, they shifted the power of the oppressor to their own supernatural world… By transferring the specific power of the colonial into their own deity, the Buryats also transform their own relationship with the colonial power. Hoimorin Högshin takes over the role of a brutal punisher, as if she were on the side of the oppressors, albeit temporarily. This temporarily renders the oppressors obsolete… [T]he Buryats fold Russian colonial power into Hoimorin Högshin and symbolically transform the Russians’ oppressive powers into their own. The Russian colonial power is limited to jails and police; it is not a part of the supernatural… By keeping the representation of their colonizers at a minimum, the Buryats prevent their “legitimation and hegemony in the form of a fetish” (Mbembe 1992:4), which protects them from internalizing the oppression and making it deeper, more subconscious, and more naturalized.
Manduhai Buyandelger (Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia)
Considering the Scottish census through these theoretical lenses, where the census is not a neutral representation of a reality but a tool to construct a governable population, raises questions as to whether the census is an exercise in knowledge construction or a tool to bolster the state’s capacity to manage its population. These two objectives are not exclusive: improved knowledge likely facilitates the design of more efficient ways to coerce, control and discipline people who live within a state's jurisdiction. However, if the construction of knowledge is no longer the primary purpose of a census, this throws into doubt then need for a census to collect accurate information that authentically represents the lives and experiences of the people about whom the data relates.
Kevin Guyan (Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures))
Marcy Resnik said as a woman lawyer, building a thriving legal practice can be both challenging and rewarding. Women have historically faced barriers in the legal profession, including gender bias, lack of representation in leadership positions, and work-life balance challenges. However, with determination, strategic planning, and effective business strategies, women can build successful and thriving legal practices.
Marcy Resnik
The coordinated market economies of continental Europe and Japan unintentionally hurt women when they protected labor from layoffs, because women cannot compete with men in committing credibly to human capital accumulation over long careers. Although female political representation tends to be higher in these countries than in the district-based systems of liberal market economies, gender-friendly policies have not yet made much of a dent in many outcomes of concern to women, such as female employment, the gender wage gap, male share of household work, and the ability to have children without negative career effects.
Torben Iversen (Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies))
When you say that a representational number of women or people of color cuts out more deserving white men, you are saying that women and people of color deserve to be less represented in our schools and our companies and that white men are deserving of an over-representational majority of these spots. We see the disparities in jobs and education among race and gender lines. Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, promoted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
Gender is a bodily discourse - repetitively performed, so as to become real and accepted - as opposed to a sheer identity that requires a fixed representation.
Lina Attalah (Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World)
Art-making, the very creation of beauty itself, was equated with the representation of the female nude. Here, the very notion of the originary power of the artist, his status as creator of unique and valuable objects, is founded on the discourse of gender difference as power.
Linda Nochlin (Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays)
The nature of Christ’s actions toward the church and the husband’s actions toward the wife in Ephesians 5:25–33 would have been understood as “women’s work.” The representation of the church as the bride would have been effeminate, according to Greco-Roman values. Consequently, Paul is subverting male privilege in the home and church. He promotes a model of servanthood and low status, consistent with the humility of Christ’s incarnation, precisely for men, who have power and position in the Greco-Roman social system.
Cynthia Long Westfall (Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ)
The elimination of circumcision canceled the other sources of ritual impurity caused by the body. This has a direct application to the priesthood of the believer and the representation of Christ: having the same genitals is eliminated as a factor.
Cynthia Long Westfall (Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ)
Overall it’s really clear that the way we talk about genitals is a super concentrated representation of how we thing about sex and gender,” he [Lal Zimman] tells me. “The research that people have done on heteronormative gender naming really shows that our worst cultural values are reflected in the ways we talk about genitals. Like penises are always weapons that exist for penetrating, sex is always violence, and women and vaginas are passive and absence, just a place to put a penis.
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
No matter the response though, I still and will always believe that representation of all kinds is essential. My work-the memoirs, anthologies, novels, television pilots, magazine articles-is just one long attempt to make sure that people from different backgrounds are seen and heard, especially people who are in some practical way challenging the status quo, and offering different interpretations of what it means to be a human being right now. What it means to be a feminist, for example, what it means to be a man in a culture that demands toxic masculinity. What it means to spend your days challenging the racism coded into artificial intelligence, to be pansexual and polyamorous, to be the third generation in your family to struggle with schizophrenia, to embark on the arduous search for your identity as a transracial adoptee. To have a family member in prison.
Rebecca Walker (Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves)
Regardless of the medium, performance artists explicitly explore and enact their holistic autonomies and interiorities (gendered, spiritual, emotional, and political), not simply their bodily corporeality. If this process takes place within a recorded electronic or digital environment, it is the medium that is virtual, unreal or disembodied, not the human performer within it. In the performance arts, whether in a theater, on a street corner, or on a computer monitor, the medium is not the message (and never has been); the performer is. [. . .] The dislocation and fragmentation of the body in digital performance is an aesthetic praxis which deconstructive critics have hungrily grasped and mythologized, holding up the virtual body as the central icon (immaterial, disembodied), whereas in actuality, it operates as an index, as another trace and representation of the always already physical body.
Steve Dixon (Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation)
It is less important simply to denounce or defend cultural representations of gender than to critique them in the context of an explanation of how they work, what social tensions they address, where they come from, and why they are credible to particular audiences... popular music may teach us more than any other cultural form about the conflicts, conversations, and bids for legitimacy and prestige that comprise cultural activity... By taking the trouble to distinguish carefully among the varieties of representation within heavy metal, we can gain a better understanding of larger interrelationships of gender and power. - Running with the Devil : Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
Robert Walser (Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Music / Culture))
Queer data is more than using data to tell stories about the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals: the presentation of the data is also an opportunity for LGBTQ people to see themselves reflected, although this mirror image is never a truly accurate representation.
Kevin Guyan (Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures))
One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)