Women Academics From The United States

"The way ideology is constructed in Latin America –if you claim Blackness or talk about race, it’s because you have some kind of complex; you just can’t seem to deal with the world the way it is. It’s a good way of silencing any kind of protest against discrimination because people think you’re saying because you have a problem, it’s your personal problem not collective discrimination."

"Influenced by the Civil Rights, Black Power and Nuyorican movements, Miriam often asserted, “African Americans have always been in the vanguard. Everything that’s worthwhile in this country has come about because African Americans have pushed it. We all benefit everyday, white people as well as people of color, from the struggles of African Americans.”"

"In law there are “magic words.” If one of them applies to what you are challenging, you have a good chance of getting it overturned. Linda and I used all the magic words that might possibly apply: The statutes were “vague” and uncertain on their face; they were “unconstitutionally broad” on their face in that they infringed upon plaintiff’s “right to safe and adequate medical advice” about the decision of whether to carry a pregnancy to term, upon the “fundamental” right of all women to choose whether to bear children, and upon plaintiff’s “right to privacy” in the physician-patient relationship; on their face they infringed upon plaintiff’s “right to life” in violation of the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; on their face they violated the “First Amendment” prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion; and on their face they denied plaintiffs the “equal protection of the laws.”"

"Whether we look at race as a fixed notion or culturally constructed concept it is very real. Race itself is an invention, a creation. Many people feel race is something that’s fixed, rigid and doesn’t have variances. By looking at Afro-Latinos, you kind of get a better sense of how fluid race has been. People have constructed it in different ways depending on conditions and circumstances."

"In 1973 a lesbian-feminist press collective in Oakland published a long poem by a working-class lesbian, Judy Grahn. In "A Woman Is Talking to Death" Grahn gives chapter and verse to the "death" that is self-denial, accepted disempowerment, passivity, mutual betrayal. ("Death sits on my doorstep/ cleaning his revolver.") Stylistically it transits from a long, open narrative line to dialogue to blocks of prose to invocation, from linear anecdote to surreal images. What's notable is the freedom of line and voice, a colloquial diction with surges of intensity. A great public poem, emerging from a new and vital women's movement, expanding the political imaginary of Whitman and Duncan, enlarging the potentialities of gay and lesbian poetry. In sometimes raw urgency, it locates its voice in the class- and race-inflected lives of everyday "common women"...Grahn herself wrote of the poem: "The particular challenges... for me were ... the criss-cross oppressions which... continually divide us-and how to define a lesbian life within the context of other people in the world. I did not realize at the time that I was also taking up the subject of heroes in a modern life which for many people is more like a war than not, or that I would begin a redefinition for myself of the subject of love."

"poetry readings were incredible. I mean, people like Judy Grahn could bring 500 people to a reading."

"In the women's consciousness-raising groups I belonged to in the early 1970s, we shared personal and very emotional stories of what it had really been like for us to live as women, examining our experiences with men and with other women in our families, sexual relationships, workplaces and schools, in the health care system and in surviving the general societal contempt and violence toward women. As we told our stories we found validation that our experiences and our reactions to them were common to many women, that our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings made sense to other women. We then used that shared experience as a source of authority. Where our lives did not match official knowledge, we trusted our lives and used the collective and mutually validated body of stories to critique those official versions of reality. This was theory born of an activist need, and the feminist literature we read, from articles like "The Politics of Housework" and "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" to the poetry of Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Alta, Judy Grahn, and others, rose out of the same mass phenomenon of truth-telling from personal knowledge."

"I was not surprised by the reactions of women following my performance in Bloomington. One woman in the stage crew ran up and exclaimed, "They're standing up; they're giving you a standing ovation." the surprise in her voice told me that she had never seen a poetry performance; she had never felt the energy reverberate through a room with the Audre Lordes, Adrienne Richs, and Judy Grahns of this world. The glow in her face also told me that she would do so in the future."

"Judy Grahn traced the probable origin of the word "dyke" in the English language to Boudica, the warrior queen of the Celtic tribes who led a fierce uprising against the Roman conquest of the British Isles in 61 C.E."

"In her study of gay culture, Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn envisions the women warriors in the lesbian tradition from antiquity to the persecution of lesbians in the U.S. armed forces since World War II. Grahn begins her odyssey of the lesbian warrior with the Celtic queen Boudica. Grahn disclosed details of the Amazon peoples on the European and African continents, who lived circa 3000 B.C.E. The oldest of these peoples were Libyan in northwest Africa who "were known not only as warriors but as founders of cities," most of which were named after their female generals, such as Myrine, Mytilene, Elaia, Anaia, Gryneia, Kyme. "At the city of Ephesus the Amazons established a shrine and magnificent statue to the Goddess Artemis." Included in this section of Grahn's book is a description of one of the many horrific witch-hunts of lesbians in the U.S. army in modern times. This ended in Grahn's discharge in 1960. "Military authority," she writes, "rules by the breaking of pride and dignity as much as by any threat of bodily harm. Nor can anyone humiliate you as deeply as your own." Describing this period in her life, Grahn continues: "Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization... I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself indefinitely, inside the mind and outside. . . . I thrashed about at the bottom of the well of degradation among the more demoralized of America's people.... But I had to put the pieces of my life back together somehow." Grahn emerged from this time "fighting, studying, making notes on my own about Gay people I knew," embodying the warrior legacy she was soon to uncover in her search and make available to us."

"I found out that Santa Teresa was sent to the convent by her father because they caught her kissing a woman cousin. I had been reading Judy Grahn's poem "I Have Come to Claim Marilyn Monroe's Body," and at the same time I was reading about what happened to Teresa's body: how they dug her up, how people had taken different pieces of her, and how her body did not really belong to her but to the Church. I started making the connection with what happens to women's bodies now."

"I came into civil rights and feminist consciousness in the middle of the American war on Vietnam, and the police and FBI war on the Black Power and nonviolent civil rights movements. I experienced the violence at People’s Park and at Altamont, and the news reports of the assassination of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and the mass murder of nine hundred mostly African American men women and children by a trusted white man at Jonestown. The Left seemed paralyzed, while the Right moved into more overt white supremacy and homophobia. And religious fundamentalism, already excluding and punishing LGBT+ people, became more aggressive and threatening. Meanwhile Rachel Carson told us we faced a “silent spring” if we did not change our economic and philosophical habits. The world, my friends and I decided, was lacking in mother love, at both the local, personal level, and the macro, religious and ethical level. A large number of us went looking for the goddess, among other things, any goddess who might give us a handle on establishing love, compassion and a maternal way of solving problems, as guiding principles."

"purple is of the spirit and denotes a change from one world or life position to another. In recent times, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked the greatest single change in the American economic and political viewpoint since the time of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt fifty years earlier. And the fashion industry responded in kind, reflecting 1981 as a year of change by coming out with racks of clothes for men and women that featured every shade and hue of purple."

"In particular, I’m occupied by addressing the roots of oppressive conditions, the origins of outdated and harmful ideas and practices."

"The burning questions of my life have been to discern what obstacles prevent me and the people I love—“wounded communities” I sometimes say, though they are also vibrantly alive and creative—from living fully engaged, accepted, lives. This has meant changing attitudes and practices in psychiatry, the military, police, families, the public, the law—toward women, LGBTQI, BIPOC people, and nature. What can I do to further these changes?"

"Among them the most important single influence on my work at present-and for the last couple of years-has been Judy Grahn. In her poetry she works for clarity and she works for ease of comprehensibility so that anybody walking into your reading can understand what you're saying and anybody who picks up the book can understand what you're saying. She's taught me a great deal about doing that and simplifying the structures that are so ridiculously obscure. Some of the changes you've noticed in my work come directly from studying her work as well as living with her. I wrote "Recuerdo," and "Los Angeles 1980" and "Laguna Ladies Luncheon" before I met her, so I was moving in that direction. But it's like she jumped it up."

"The texts themselves must be addressed, and now that the ancient mythology that directly impacted the Abrahamic texts is available, it is clear that initially women had sacred place/office, with numerous goddesses who were powerful creation deities. Inanna has a female goddess companion who is as close to her as the male lover of King Gilgamesh was to him. The research of Will Roscoe and others has made clear that homosexual and transgender people held sacred office and participated in her rituals. And Inanna is both immanent within, and protective of, nature. Her radiant powers are erotic and interactive, accessible and creative. Her stories are richly psychological."

"Last month, when US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines presented the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, committee members praised her for the “excellent work” leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for “continuing to keep us informed.” To the US intelligence community’s credit, and to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chagrin, US senators weren’t the only ones kept informed. The rest of the world was, too, thanks to thorough strategic US intelligence disclosures. Making intelligence public is more art than science, and spies and analysts have struggled to master it. But when it comes to Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns deserves recognition for changing how the agency thinks about revealing its secrets. A former ambassador to Moscow, Burns told the Senate committee that, “In all the years I spent as a career diplomat, I saw too many instances in which we lost information wars with the Russians.”"

"I mean we're not going to be as effective if they don't have trust in us and we're also not going to get the best people coming to the Intelligence Community if they don't trust us. ...We are not doing everything perfectly. We understand that. We see problems too. We're going to try to correct it. We do sometimes needs space for people to say, okay, you're doing something that is totally unacceptable, but okay, you've admitted to it. Now, let's actually fix it and get better and work on that."

"Director Avril Haines has earned a stellar reputation of bipartisan collaboration and deep expertise. Many of you worked with her when she served as Deputy Director at the CIA and the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor during the Obama Administration. And the agency she now oversees have been the consequential players as the free world counters Russian aggression. In the days leading up to Putin's vicious assault on democracy, the United States Intelligence Community over and over accurately and precisely predicted his every move and revealed his intentions. That public use of intelligence exposed false flag operations, it built trust in America's warnings, it united our allies, and it gave the Ukrainians greater time to prepare."

"Yes, I think the survey is indicating that there's a lack or the trust in the military, not the Intelligence Community, but I do think that we also have a challenge with public trust in the Intelligence Community. And honestly, we’ve seen for years public trust deteriorating in public institutions more broadly. This is something that's happening in the United States, and also in Europe... I mean I think coming in it was one, from my perspective, one of the key priorities, is can we increase public trust in the Intelligence Community? And I see it as fundamental, frankly, to our mission. Which is to say that when we have an opportunity to warn the public about threats and challenges that we're facing as a country, I'm hoping that they will actually believe what we're saying, right?"

"Satan is a way of perceiving opponents. You may not believe the mythology of such a universe, but it’s in you, a background perception.”"

"There are certain ecological structures in any marriage—some with a traditional gender bias and some not. Simply, people take on certain roles. In a way, I had to do everything. But, most of all, I also wanted to take on the challenge of not giving up, of not despairing. Because Heinz was on the side of life. He loved life. He was full of explorative excitement, interest, passion. I realized that it would be no honor to him to say, ‘I can’t take this, I can’t go on, it’s too hard.’ Somehow, I wanted to take on something of what I’d learned from him, the way he embraced life, with all its dangers and difficulties. I was challenged to do that. I can’t say I’ve done it, but that’s what I wanted to do."

"Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source . . . Does not such teaching—the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide—sound more Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the 'living Buddha' appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism?"

"At one point in my life, I had to make a decision...I had to decide whether to have too little or too much in my life...Study, children, friends, travel—all of it. That was an easy one. I chose too much.”"

"Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas—named after the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India—suggest the influence of Indian tradition?"

"...she is enormously strong. Pagels not only survived two tragedies in the space of fifteen months but since then has written another book, reared her children, taught her many students. She is, by all reports, a good colleague, a devoted friend. Her mind is quick and generous. At fifty-two, she has a mild, earnest appearance (a rounded, friendly face, windblown blond hair), and yet in conversation she is absolutely fierce, focussed, picking apart the careless question, delighted by the unexpected one. When she delivers her lectures for an undergraduate course on the New Testament—Monday and Wednesday mornings at ten—she does not so much pace the room as prowl it. Pagels radiates so much intensity that you somehow imagine a fast-burning cigarette in her hand. There is none. She does not smoke. She smolders."

"Her vision and execution are so breathtaking."

"She brings acute intelligence, scholarly knowledge, and recognizable vulnerability to the formation of a new school of thought she names minor feelings."

"When I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, it felt like I was being shaken awake to something I had convinced myself wasn’t real. The subtle ways Asian Americans are dismissed; how Asian American women feel the need to apologize when taking up any sort of space. I was also floored by how she described the ripple effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act: how that fear of not wanting to stick out has been passed down through generations, and how this survival tactic limits us and can cause self-hate. And at the same time, Cathy shares stories that feel so personal, so fresh and so specific, nobody else could’ve written them. I had never read a depiction of three contemporary, young Asian American women that was so complicated, interesting or full of both love and conflict. Her writing is beautiful, funny, sharp and—most importantly to a working mother of two who has few brain cells left at the end of the day—easy to read. I annotated the hell out of Minor Feelings—it’s the kind of book you want to dog-ear and underline. Reading it was such a crazy feeling: I felt so seen that I couldn’t believe that this book existed. And it’s become even more painfully relevant in a year in which anti-Asian violence, which has always existed in America, has spiked so aggressively, putting our communities on high alert and searching for solidarity. This is the book to read when you ask me, “How can I be an ally?” This is the book to read if you want to educate yourself. This is the book to read if you want to be more in touch with your humanity."

"Racism is never new. It just changes, it adapts. I think people are louder. But when I hear Asians being called “chink” on the street, that’s not really different from what I experienced as a kid. It’s all part of a historical continuum. The issue is that people forget. My book is not offering new ideas exactly, it’s just a reminder. It’s a reminder of the history of Asian Americans in this white supremacist capitalist nation. I think sometimes we get lulled because we forget. Being a person of color, you’re either invisible or hypervisible. And when you’re hypervisible, your hypervisibility—when there’s a target on your back—is dependent entirely on what’s happening economically in this nation, or what’s happening with foreign policy. One year it’s Muslims, another year it’s undocumented Latinx people, and this year it’s East Asians. It’s like musical chairs."

"A lot of us come from countries—if you’re South Asian or Southeast Asian—that have been colonized by Western powers. But that’s never talked about. It’s almost as if in immigrant stories we’re supposed to forget our past once our family comes over here. Or there is a kind of writing about the past, but it’s divorced from US foreign policy. It comes from immigrant parents as well. They say, “Oh, you’re here, it’s a rich land, and there are so many opportunities here, you should be grateful,” without actually acknowledging why we ended up here in the first place. I wanted to show how it was all interrelated."

"The Western is now a global fantasy. It’s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there’s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier."

"I’m a poet, so I look at prose differently than a journalist would. I’m not trying to make a singular argument. I want to document my thought process. And that thought process is never linear. It involves different subjects."

"In certain ways, the Western ideals of the frontier, of escaping regulation, are still alive today, but now they are carried on in the life of corporations rather than individuals."

"Shame can make you more aware. Shame can make you more empathetic, too. What’s important, of course, is not staying in that shame, not wallowing in shame. If there are any political uses of shame, it’s that it allows you to see outside yourself. And to move, and to do something with that."

"The frontier is always the border of something, virgin territory where we can build new worlds, remake ourselves; always there’s this obsession with remaking ourselves. So to dream of the frontier is also to desire immortality. But there is no such thing as new territory. There are always previous civilizations, societies, families, and cultures. So when we build new worlds, there will be violence."

"It’s one of the best benefits of growing up bilingual, right? You realise that meaning is slippery."

"Maybe what I’m responding to is how white America has flattened our experience to a single story, how they perceive us as one kind. The book is an attempt to overthrow that."

"Asians are hyper invisible. We’re not even included in racial breakdowns in polls. We’re always listed as ‘other’, if we’re listed at all...It almost feels like we’re not publicly participating in this country."

"you have to write toward your discomfort."

"The way Richard Pryor talked about race was so brutally honest and funny and unvarnished. It made me think that I had never encountered Asian identity being written in that way."

"I don’t create redemption for my characters. The narrative of redemption is a false and lazy conceit in art. Redemption through the act of violence is avoiding culpability."

"As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love."

"Nothing gets dated faster than a joke."

"minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed."

"Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately."

"Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst"

"The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting."

"The flip side of innocence is shame."