Women Academics From The United States

"The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent."

"We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself."

"The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it."

"All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms."

"Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men."

"The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo."

"Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature."

"Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again."

"The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood."

"Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means "of the earth"—but earth's bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force..., the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form."

"Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated."

"The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure."

"Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions."

"Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."

"Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate."

"Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead."

"Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau."

"Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements."

"Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature."

"In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man."

"My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy."

"Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture — something that has inspired little belief since the period before World War I."

"Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom."

"I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse. The Obamas represent the future, not the past."

"She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same."

"Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses."

"Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."

"As texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying."

"The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."

"The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control … the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness."

"Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess."

"I have been studying it [sexuality] since before it became fashionable. At the Yale Grad School, for example, where I was from 1968 to 1972, I was literally the only person in the humanities departments doing a dissertation on sex — hard to believe now, but I was a real pioneer and I took the career hit for it. It was considered tacky, low, not serious — my dears, I was absolutely scouring the Yale archives for every bit of dirt on homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestism — you name it. That is the basis of the research for my first book, Sexual Personae, which was my dissertation."

"It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity."

"Hooks is a contentious writer, and I don't always agree with her contentions, but Ain't I a Woman has an intellectual vitality and daring that should set new standards for the discussion of race and sex."

"Plagued by Western habits of either-or, dualistic thinking, we all may fail to understand that race, class and gender interconnect to sustain a corporate ruling class. In the language of African-American essayist bell hooks, they are interlocking systems of oppression. Neither Latina nor Anglo women should yield to the temptation of making a hierarchy of oppressions where battles are fought over whether racism is "worse" than sexism, or class oppression is "deeper" than racism, etc. Instead of hierarchies we need bridges which, after all, exist to make two ends meet."

"the choice of bell hooks, her great-grandmother, which she put in lowercase letters, said to us that it is not me, Gloria Watkins, who is the most important; it’s what these words are and the model of my great-grandmother Bell Hooks, who stays in my consciousness. And the small letters also captured, I think, bell hooks’s always transgressive oppositional self. So, I’m not going to even use capital letters. I’m not going to use my name. I’m going to use my transgressive great-grandmother’s name on those books...fundamentally, she was a teacher. And by “teacher,” I meant she believed that her audience was broader than the academy or broader than higher education, and she wanted to reach the largest number of people, regular people, young boys, children, that she could. And she wanted to have the broadest impact on the broadest amount of people. And so, when I think of bell hooks, I think about her primarily as a teacher...And she was very much impacted by teachers. She was very much impacted, for example, by the Buddhist person Thich Nhat Hanh. And I think that she saw herself in some ways as a person who would sit with — sit with — young people and community people and students and help them understand this world in which we live, which is full of all kinds of domination. So I see her as a teacher...She was hard-hitting. She was sometimes merciless in her critiques. She was unrelenting. She was courageous. She was in your face. But she was also gentle. And I was just listening to that sort of soft voice, gentle spirit, passionate and always, always trying to tell the truth, from her perspective...She wanted little Black boys to love themselves. She wanted little Black girls with so-called nappy hair to love themselves, which is why she wrote that book about — of being nappy. So we might think about love as a sort of innocuous, trivial, nonpolitical project, but she knew that loving ourselves, all people, but particularly people of color and Black people in the U.S., to love ourselves is a radical political act. And that’s one of the people’s favorite books, All About Love, because I think we understood that, that if you don’t love yourself, if you don’t engage in self-love, you cannot possibly change the world. And so, that was an extremely important intervention in terms of her writings...Her constant naming of imperial white supremacist patriarchy, which can also be framed if we borrow Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” — bell didn’t use the term “intersectionality.” She wanted us to hear “imperial white supremacist patriarchy” — and later she added “heteropatriarchy” — because she wanted to name what that was. But it is essentially the concept of intersectionality, which goes back to the 19th century Black women, such as Maria Stewart and Ida B. Wells. And so she never stopped saying it, “imperial white supremacist heteropatriarchy,” because she wanted us to hear it over and over and over again so that we could eradicate it...she always insisted, lived the life that she wanted to live, lived it on her own terms."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world."

"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"

"My own book Women, Race and Class was one of many that were published during that era, including, to name only a few, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle. A history of conversations among activists within movement formations, and with and among academics as well."

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"My leaving a high-ranking tenured position opened up new spaces for teaching and learning that renewed and restored my spirit and enabled me to hold onto the joy in teaching that makes my heart glad."

"Like many folks accustomed solely to teaching in university settings, I was comfortable talking with and teaching adults, but I was afraid I lacked the skills to engage in meaningful dialogue with children. Persuading me that this was nonsense, that I could do it, G. let me loose in her classrooms and in auditoriums filled with third- and fourth-graders. This work was challenging. It was not paid labor. This experience, and the many more that followed it let me know that if one is willing to work without pay there are many formal educational settings that will welcome informal teaching interventions."

"As an intellectual working as an academic I often felt that my commitment to radical openness and devotion to critical thinking, to seeking after truth, was at odds with the demands that I uphold the status quo if I wanted to be rewarded. My integrity was as much at risk in the academic world as it had been in the non-academic work world, where workers are expected to obey authority and follow set rules. While much lip service is given to the notion of free speech in academic settings, in actuality constant censorship—often self-imposed— takes place."

"Despite my criticism of the banking system of education, I had unwittingly been seduced by the notion of the set classroom time as the most useful vehicle to teach and learn. Dislocated, with time on my hands to contemplate being outside the structured classroom, I began to think of new ways to be immersed in teaching. Dislocation is the perfect context for free-flowing thought that lets us move beyond the restricted confines of a familiar social order. Like many individuals seeking a new path, I pondered what I would do in the world of teaching and learning if I were free to design and choose."

"Suddenly I was in a world where every day was a day off. And it did not feel empowering. I had to face being without the magic of the classroom and the caring community of learners I had dwelled in for most of my adult life, being always either student or teacher. Like many retirees I suddenly felt as though I was cut off from a system that had been a form of life support. Without it, life felt less interesting, less compelling. I was the teacher alone with myself, the teacher facing myself as the pupil, needing to chart a new journey for myself."

"Working within the conventional corporate academic world where the primary goals of institutions is to sell education and produce a professional managerial class schooled in the art of obedience to authority and accepting of dominator-based hierarchy, I often felt as though I was in the dysfunctional family of my childhood where I was often in the outsider position and scapegoated, viewed as both mad and yet a threat. To regain my sense of full integrity as a self, I needed to leave the academy, to remove from my life the constant pressure to conform or to endure punishment for non-conformity."

"Teaching with excellence and being rewarded for this work by excellent student work is a truly ecstatic experience."

"When I taught at elite private schools, where most students lived on campus or nearby, if I faced such a problem it was easy to locate a student (even if it meant knocking on their door at home) to seek an explanation and a solution to problems. This process could not happen at a commuter school where students often lived two or three hours away. Locating a student often took hours of time. And by the time a connection was made it was too late for grades reflecting excellence."

"When I chose to teach at a big state school, many of my colleagues warned me that I would be disappointed by the students, that I would find myself “teaching down.” These warnings came from colleagues who taught at elite schools, and they were echoed by my new colleagues. I found that my students at this public institution were just as brilliant and open to learning as my beloved Yalies, but that the difference was often in levels of self-esteem."