Exam 1, Unit 3: Quotes

... veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after 'liberation' from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them?

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Could we not leave veils and vocations of saving others behind and instead train our sights on ways to make the world a more just place? The reason respect for difference should not confused with cultural relativism is that it does not precluding asking how we, living in this privileged and powerful part of the world, might examine our own responsibilities for situations in which others in distant places have found themselves.

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women.

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Instead of questions that might lead to the exploration of global interconnections, we were offered ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres - recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslim, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

My point is to remind us to be aware of differences, respectful of other paths towards social change that might give women better lives.

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged.

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

Ultimately, the significant political-ethical problem the burqa raises is how to deal with cultural 'others.'

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

We need to look closely at what we are supporting (and what we are not) and to think carefully about why. How should we manage the complicated politics and ethics of finding ourselves in agreement with those with whom we normally disagree?

Abu-Lughod "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?"

That since the sixteenth century the history of Native Americans is one of racist oppression has become an integral part of contemporary historical understanding. Indian women are speaking with increasing frequency and force about their experiences of the double jeopardy of racism and sexism.

Daly "Perspectives of Native American Women on Race and Gender"

The development of new theories must include appropriate, representative definitions of the total population, free of gender bias and not derived disproportionately from the observation of middle-class white men and women.

Daly "Perspectives of Native American Women on Race and Gender"

To ignore these experiences prevents us from understanding the basis for their radical and profound desire for self-determination, a condition they enjoyed fully before the European incursions began...

Daly "Perspectives of Native American Women on Race and Gender"

*Decentering* the dominant group is essential, and relinquishing privilege of this magnitude is unlikely to occur without struggle.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

Afrocentric feminist thought represents a subjugated knowledge.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

As epistemological stances, both positivist science and relativism minimize the importance of specific location in influencing a group's knowledge claims, the power inequities among groups that produce subjugated knowledges, and the strengths and limitations of partial perspectives.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

Black women scholars were in a position to see the exclusion of African-American women from scholarly discourse, and the thematic content of their work often reflected their interest in examining a Black women's standpoint.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

Dialogue is critical to the success of this epistemological approach.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

One distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute essential ingredients for social change.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences with penalty and privilege that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges, and, for clearly identifiable subordinate groups, subjugated knowledges. No one group has a clear angle of vision. No one group possesses the theory of methodology that allows it to discover the absolute 'truth,' or, worse yet, proclaim its theories and methodologies as the universal norm

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

What epistemological approach offers the most promise?

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought"

The dilemma facing Black women scholars engaged in creating Black feminist thought is that a knowledge claim that meets the criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is judged to be an acceptable knowledge claim may not be translated into the terms of a different group.

Hill Collins "Black Feminist Thought" --> accessibility. Knowledge is not considered legitimate unless in hegemonic terms.

Above all, patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

If we see patriarchy as nothing more than men's and women's individual personalities, motivations, and behavior, for example, then it probably won't even occur to us to ask about larger contexts - such as institutions like the family, religion, and the economy - and how people's lives are shaped in relation to them.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

More than anything, the structure of patriarchy is found in the unequal distribution of power that makes male privilege possible, in patterns of male dominance in every facet of human life, from everyday conversation to global politics. By its nature, patriarchy puts issues of power, dominance, and control at the center of human existence, not only in relationships between men and women, but among men...

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

Patriarchy is a kind of society organized around certain kinds of social relationships and ideas that shape paths of least resistance.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

Patriarchy's defining elements are its male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered, and control-obsessed character

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

The crucial thing to understand about patriarchy or any other social system is that it's something people participate in.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

To see the world through patriarchal eyes is to believe that women and men are profoundly different in their basic natures, that hierarchy is the only alternative to chaos, and that men were made in the image of a masculine God with whom they enjoy a special relationship.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

We need to see and deal with the social roots that generate and nurture the social problems that are reflected in and manifested through the behaviors of individuals.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

We're involved in patriarchy and its consequences because we occupy social positions in it, which is all it takes. Because patriarchy is, by definition, a system of inequality organized around gender categories, we can no more avoid being involved in it than we can avoid being female and male. All men and all women are therefore involved in this oppressive system, and none of us can control whether we participate, only how.

Johnson "Patriarchy, the System"

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege"

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms that we can see and embedded forms that members of the dominant group are taught not to see.

McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege"

White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.

McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege"

I now think we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.

McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege" --> On the different types of privilege

Insisting on the universal 'effects' of 'privilege' systems, then, becomes one of our chief tasks, and being more explicit about the particular effects in particular contexts in another.

McIntosh "White Privilege and Male Privilege" --> need for intersectionality

But then the very process of constructing a narrative for oneself - of telling a story - imposes a certain linearity and coherence that is never entirely there.

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

I want to suggest that one of the most crucial challenges for a critical multicultural feminism is working out how to engage in ethical and caring dialogues (and revolutionary strategies) across the divisions, conflicts, and individualist identity formations that interweave feminist communities in the United States.

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional, sensory space? Home is always so crucial to immigrants and migrants... I am convinced that this question - how one understands and defines home - is a profoundly political one.

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

Race,' 'Asianness,' and 'brownness' are not embedded in me, whereas histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism, as well as privilege (class and status) are involved in my relation to white people and people of color in the United States.

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

The very topography, language, and relationships that constituted 'home' were exploding. What does community mean in this context?

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

What are the politics of being a part of the majority and the 'absent elite' in India, while being a minority and a racialized 'other' in the United States? And do feminist politics, or advocating feminism, have the same meaning and urgencies in these different geographical and political contexts?

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

[Gender, race, and caste/class] must be analyzed in relation to contemporary reconstructions of womanhood and manhood in a global arena increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalist movements, the IMF, the World Bank, and the relentless economic and ideological colonization of much of the world by multinationals based in the United States, Japan, and Europe.

Mohanty "Genealogies of Community, Home, and Nation"

A fuller analysis of empire takes seriously the gendered and sexualized logics through which empire works.

Naber "Colonizing Culture"

Articulating immigrant cultural identity through rigid binaries is not an unfamiliar resolution to immigrant and people of color's struggle in a society structured by a pressure for assimilation and racism.

Naber "Colonizing Culture"

Liberal U.S. multiculturalism requires immigrants, people of color, and indigenous people to craft concepts of culture that are depoliticized and ahistorical.

Naber "Colonizing Culture" --> *Essentialist frameworks*

Consigned to the 'cultural,' aspects of dynamic, lived experience come to be seen as frozen in time...

Naber "Colonizing Culture" --> Need to preserve a 'culture' and thereby having static values (under multiculturalism)

Activists advocated an anti-Orientalist politics that reinforced the relegation of gender and sexuality to the margins. Activists feared that speaking out about sexism and homophobia could reinforce stereotypes of Arabs and strengthen the very violence they were fighting to eliminate. The tacit belief was that activists who publicly critiqued sexism or homophobia within Arab and Arab American communities were no better than traitors to their people.

Naber "Colonizing Culture" --> Orientalist binary, must either argue for Arabness or against it

How can we speak frankly about our experiences in ways that neither reinscribe Arab bashing nor engage in Orientalism?

Naber "Colonizing Culture" --> Orientalist binary, must either argue for Arabness or against it

It would be years before I grasped how each day they confronted not only the pressures of assimilation but also the realities of an expanding U.S. imperialist war in the Arab region and intensifying anti-Arab Orientalist and racist discourses in their new home.

Naber "Decolonizing Culture"

And if it came down to where I was from, I was from America. American girls were failing out of school and living in poverty and raising babies while they were still in their teens.

Subramanian "The Brown Girl's Guide to Labels"

The most common way to find oneself was to adopt a label. Among my white girlfriends, the most popular of these labels was feminist.

Subramanian "The Brown Girl's Guide to Labels"

"Be open to learning, growing, and self-correcting"

Uwujaren "Why Our Feminism must be Intersectional"

"Pay attention when people speak to their experiences"

Uwujaren "Why Our Feminism must be Intersectional"

"Take up the difficult work of investigating our own privilege"

Uwujaren "Why Our Feminism must be Intersectional"

A lack of intersectionality leads to an erasure of people and their identities.

Uwujaren "Why Our Feminism must be Intersectional"

Intersectionality is a framework that must be applied to all social justice work, a frame that recognizes the multiple aspects of identity that enrich our lives and experiences and that compound and complicate oppressions and marginalizations.

Uwujaren "Why Our Feminism must be Intersectional"