Feminists

"We always think that if we believe in certain things, there is only one way of true believing, which I think sometimes will collude with the powerful way. We think everybody should believe like that. Why? Because we have power. We have the power to coerce. We have the power to discipline."

"O que podemos com elas em nosso favor e de mulher em mulher nos dizermos e contarmos do domínio que ainda somos, despojo hoje de guerreiros que se fingem companheiros em ajudada luta, mas que apenas pretendem montar-nos e serem cavaleiros de Marianas de outros cativeiros presas e monjas de diferentes conventos, sem disso se darem conta?"

"The popular idea of an advocate of women's rights is this:—she is an angular hard-featured withered creature with a shrill, harsh voice, no pretence to comeliness, spectacles on nose, and the repulsive title, "blue-stocking" visible all over her. Metaphorically she is supposed to hang half way over the bar which separates the sexes, shaking her skinny fist at men and all their works. I don't think it will be difficult to unseat this idea as soon as we can get people to think about the subject at all, for it is remarkable that almost every thinking man who does investigate the topic seriously, at once hands in his allegiance."

"Patriarchy is not an archaic relic but a living, breathing structure that is co-constitutive with capitalist exploitation. The crisis of social reproduction we see today is a direct result of this partnership."

"The labor that produces life—the cooking, cleaning, caring, and nurturing—is the invisible infrastructure upon which all other 'productive' economic activity depends. To ignore it is not just an oversight; it is an ideological commitment."

"Our political imaginations have been captured by the very structures we seek to dismantle. A feminist politics must be, first and foremost, a project of decolonizing our desires for power and freedom."

"Lyn Ossome's work relentlessly exposes the gendered fault lines of capitalist accumulation in Africa. She forces us to see that the 'economy' cannot be understood without centering the violence and valorization of social reproduction."

"I am American. I am Black. And I am proud that I’m Black"

"I asked her] if she really thought colored women would be allowed to vote if the ballot privilege was conferred on them, as it is to the colored men of the South. She assured me that if it were made the law that women might vote, the right would not be denied them"

"How many times have I asked myself whether it was possible to tie oneself to a mass without ever having loved anyone .. whether one could love a collectivity if one hadn’t deeply loved some single human beings . . . Wouldn’t this have made barren my qualities as a revolutionary, wouldn’t it have reduced them to a pure intellectual fact, a pure mathematical calculation?"

"I don’t believe that we could exist with one foot in two worlds. We have to be able to synthesize and be part of whatever that world is, from within our identity."

"one of the questions that I had in my writing was not so much about how to reorganize the material, but also how to write the material in a written form and retain the integrity of how we perceive oral literatures and how they work."

"As human beings, we have to learn; we have to become knowledgeable enough to be able to accomplish that continuum of life, and also to make life natural. When we can’t do that, we are not learning; we are not knowledgeable; we are parasites on the earth and we destroy life rather than create life, work with life, embrace life, and uphold life."

"Globalization is foundational to destruction because of the competitive nature of corporations, extraction of resources, mobilization of peoples as a labor force,, and countries segmenting the world to own and commoditize. In contrast, indigenous peoples, valuing long term residency and knowledge, work within the conditions appropriate to whichever place they are located. They develop social structures to live sustainably, not only for the environment but for the community itself. To be indigenous to a place is to have adapted to the conditions present over a long period of time, to have learned not only how to thrive, but how to survive the catastrophic interventions and changes that threaten lifeforms on the land."

"the idea of complete regeneration has to be underpinned by an idea that every life form has as much right to exist as the human lifeform. That idea of the human being having dominion, or the human being having more right or more privilege, in terms of the field of ethics, is no different than saying one race having more right and more privilege. So, that is a profound principle to think about. How do you enforce that? How do you create that? How do you act responsibly,if that were the bottom line? How would you create a government? How would you create an economic system? How would you create an education system around that?"

"Knowledge should be mobilized for all people. It’s not something that is held only by one group"

"The idea of indigeneity is to create that kind of process, and to mimic, this is where the idea of eco-mimicry comes in, and to be able to mimic what nature does in those interactions in order to stabilize how we have to participate in that interaction of what constitutes the place we live. So, we become a healthy part of that interaction rather than isolated from it, or aggressive toward it."

"if we were to look at how the cells in the body operate, they are interdependent. If you look at how an ecosystem operates, any ecosystem, there is this mechanism of interdependency, which means one part could not exist without the cooperation and the help of the other parts that surround it. So, if we look at communities in that way, as an interdependency, and we look at what, therefore, it might mean in terms of governance, or a social structure, then it becomes really exciting research. Because, in a lot of ways, the opposite ideas are in place in regards to governance and government. Where governance and government is largely exclusionary, and largely protectionist, in terms of trying to isolate and protect"

"This love that had come to her was a kind of madness. It owned her. It created a wreckage of her body. The way, after a long climb, there is no longer searing pain and the muscles give up and all that is left is a deep and silent quivering. All else is blurred and each breath is a sacrifice. The way when the body finally finds itself. This madness moved inside, not the heart, but a place more hidden, yet more omnipresent. A place where one should never find it. It had found her; claimed her in the way it did to make her become what she must. This love. This is a map."

"Indigeneity describes principles of how to be in a specific place, and the kinds of laws or rules or protocols that human beings could practice within those principles. Indigeneity can still apply in a contemporary context, without humans having to go back to the woods of a thousand years ago. (Mind you, that would be nice too.)"

"We’re not talking about creeping fascism here. This is full on police state tyranny from the gangster President Donald Trump."

"I’ve received hundreds of messages of concern and outrage from Canadians that a convicted felon, sexual predator, and a man who threatened our nation’s sovereignty, is being allowed into our country."

"Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy, to Canadian sovereignty, and to the international rule of law."

"Canada can no longer view the United States as an ally. We know that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in liberal democracy."

"Canada must be focused on containing this clear and present danger to our nation and the rule of law."

"One will see a layer of smooth stones, popularly called fluitati [diluvium], and over these another layer of smaller pebbles, thirdly sand, and finally earth, and you will see this repeatedly...up to the summit of the Mountain. This clearly shows that the order has been caused by many floods, not just one."

"Many have observed and many still expect to observe, but not everyone has observed well, and others do not know how to observe, nor perhaps do they know how tricky the art of observation is, easily misunderstanding one thing for another, being blinded by the light, or not looking with due attention and diligence at what is to be looked at."

"in recent times, largely because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there has been a construction in the public sphere of Jews and Muslims as always already enemies. In the media, journalists often appeal to the cliché that “this conflict goes back thousands of years.” But historically that is false; it largely goes back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of Zionism. For many centuries and even millennia, Jews and Muslims often faced Christian prejudice together...The two stories/histories of Jews and Muslims are often told in isolation, but in fact the two groups were subjected to the same inquisition and continued to live together within Muslim spaces. In my work, I have insisted on the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, because while the Judeo-Christian hyphen implies a legitimate meta-narrative, the Judeo-Muslim hyphen has been elided. Yet, historically the Judeo-Muslim hyphen could be seen as the norm rather than the Judeo-Christian, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the Euro-Jewish enlightenment and reinforced by Zionist Eurocentrism."

"After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities. There were transfers of populations, wherein one identity was transformed into another identity. A Muslim Indian became a Pakistani. In our case, Arab-Jews became Israelis. All of this happened virtually overnight. These new official identities did not reflect the feelings of the displaced people, and could not translate the contradictions on the ground. This new situation did not necessarily reflect those communities` sense of belonging. Hence, a crucial tension was generated between one`s official documentation and one`s emotional map of identity and sense of home and belonging. I have tried to explain this historical context in order to make sense out of our brutal rupture in the wake of partition. I grew up in Israel as a Jew, in a country that defines itself as a state for the Jews and as a Jewish state, which was presumably a solution for “the Jewish problem.” But for which Jews, and a solution for what? Being schooled in Hebrew in a Jewish state required that I completely reject everything associated with my home: namely, the Arabic that we spoke at home; my Iraqi parents; my Iraqi grandparents who didn't speak a word of Hebrew. The fact is that many people in my community missed Baghdad. But in this context, Iraq and the Iraqis were the enemy of the state to which we now officially belonged. I often describe my experience as a child as one of virtual schizophrenia, where I had to simultaneously live two identities, one outside of the home and another inside the home...The conflict between Israeli Zionism and Arab nationalism generated a situation where we had no place."

"The particular/universal dichotomy often gets enlisted into a rescue narrative. We cannot forget how colonial discourse often represented colonialism as not simply conquering and exploiting, but also as advancing a universal civilizing mission, rescuing those barbaric people–especially, of course, their women and children–from their own horrible traditions, rituals, and culture. This idealist discourse was framed by the arrogant imperialism that saw itself as bringing light to dark places. This is unfortunately one side of the enlightenment. And addressing the intersection of the Enlightenment metanarrative with colonial discourse does not mean rejecting the Enlightenment in general. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon featuring contradictory discourses; what is required, therefore, is to highlight its philosophical contradictions as wells as its imperial dark side “on the ground.” In the colonial context, the Enlightenment often meant cultural subordination and psychic devastation. So the question is, what is a “barbaric practice,” and who has the right to determine what is barbaric? Who has the right to say, “I am the savior of these children?”"

"Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives."

"The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russia and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”). Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran."

"every child is born into a web of multiple affiliations, intersecting identities, and potential identifications."

"Zionism, to my mind, can be described as an effort to whiten the Jew philosophically and even literally."

"To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel, referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin, is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms."

"For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences."

"Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history – Iraq, Israel and the United States – have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate “neat” national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the (1991) Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives. War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities."

"Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation."

"Although I in no way want to idealize that experience – there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence – on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies. Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology."

"Hussein as the villain, Bush as the hero, and the US rescuing the victim is typical of colonial narratives...The analogy insists, furthermore, on a Eurocentric approach to Jewish history. In seeing Jewish history through a Euro-American Jewish perspective, the US media have presented Israel simplistically as a Western country populated by European Jews. Reading and watching media images from the Middle East, one is led to believe that there are only Euro-American Jews in Israel and only Moslem Arabs in the rest of the Middle East. One finds few images of Iraqi, Moroccan, or Ethiopian Israelis, even though Oriental Arab Jews compose the majority of the Jewish population in Israel."

"From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the media's coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagon's agenda, and the interests of an international elite."

"While the celebrations of Columbus' "discovery" have provoked lively opposition, the Eurocentric framing of the "other 1492" has been little questioned."

"Eurocentric historical discourse tends to paint a flattering picture of Europe during the "Age of Discovery" while denigrating the newly colonized peoples. At the time of the onset of colonialism and conquest, Europe was a rather brutal and superstitious place, dominated by a "demonological discourse" (Delumeau). Church-sponsored brutalities towards Jews and Muslims have to be seen therefore on the same continuum as the forced conversions of indigenous peoples of the Americas who, like the Jews and Muslims in Catholic Spain, were obliged to feign allegiance to Christianity."

"The elision of comparative discussion of the Muslim and Jewish situations in Christian Spain is rooted in present-day Middle Eastern politics. The 1992 commemorations reflect present-day battles over the representations of history. Subordinated to a Eurocentric Zionist historiography, they lament yet another tragic episode in a homogenous, static Jewish history of relentless persecution."

"The uniqueness and common victimization of all Jews at all times is a crucial underpinning of official Israeli ideology. The genocides of indigenous Americans and Africans are not a point of reference, while the linked persecution in Iberia of Jews and Muslims, Conversos and Moriscos, is rendered irrelevant. This selective reading of Jewish history hijacks the Jews of Islam from their Judeo-Islamic history and culture and subordinates their experience to that of the Ashkenazi-European shtetl, presented as a "universal" Jewish experience. In the Zionist "proof" of a single Jewish experience, there are no parallels or overlappings with other religious/ethnic communities. All Jews are by definition closer to each other than to the cultures of which they have been part. The Jews of Islam, and more specifically Arab Jews, problematize this Eurocentric representation."

"This picture of an ageless and relentless oppression and humiliation ignores the fact that, on the whole, Jews of Islam-a minority among several other religious/ethnic communities-lived relatively comfortably within Arab-Muslim society. My point is not to idealize the situation of the Jews of Islam, but rather to suggest that, with a few exceptions, the agendas of Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have either subsumed Islamic-Jewish history into Christian-Jewish history or ignored the status of Jews in the context of other minorities in Islamic societies."

"The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed... Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere where the Code Napoléon was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the rights of the individual... In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated... May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"

"Emma Goldman has campaigned boldly and steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."

"The more we delve into the essence of personality, the more we learn that in this world, certainly rich with natural beauty and things worthy of seeing, nothing is more attractive and worthier of knowing and experiencing than people."

"In the ranks of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to me as if proportionately more homosexuals and effeminates are found than in others."