Intersectionality Quotes

“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?”
― Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.”
― Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love So Much More

“I don't want equal rights with the white man; if I did, I'd be a thief and a murderer.”
― Fannie Lou Hamer

“White women will heap praise on my words calling for the destruction of the patriarchy, and then turn around and ask why I have to ‘be so divisive’ or say dismissively that I ‘sound like Al Sharpton’ when I dare bring up race.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“What they get wrong is precisely this false belief that online prejudice is easily compartmentalized or categorized into, say, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism when really it flows freely between these various bigotries.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Females – sows and cows and hens and women – suffer because of their sex in Western patriarchal cultures, where female bodies are exploited as sex symbols, for reproduction, for breast milk, and/or for reproductive eggs. As such, farmed animals are at the very bottom of the contemporary, Western hierarchy of beings – and this is speceisism.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“legal emancipation remains an empty shell if it does not include public services, social housing, and funding to ensure that women can leave domestic and workplace violence.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end.

When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl.

The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own.

I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“Life is a continuous process of unlearning for minorities and anyone with less power. These groups—women, people of color, and, in the next chapter, disabled people—can find it very difficult to claim asexuality because it looks so much like the product of sexism, racism, ableism, and other forms of violence. The legacy of this violence is that those who belong to a group that has been controlled must do extra work to figure out the extent to which we are still being controlled.
Call it variations on a theme. The theme is oppression; the variations are the exact ways that oppression manifests and how it affects asexual identity. The question of who gets to be ace versus who is considered deluded ornaive matters beyond the borders of each specific community. The details of why some groups find it harder than others to accept asexuality, or be accepted as ace, reveal the outlines of how sex and power and history have combined.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

“The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism. But far from providing the solution, liberal feminism is part of the problem. Centered in the global North among the professional-managerial stratum, it is focused on “leaning-in” and “cracking the glass ceiling.” Dedicated to enabling a smattering of privileged women to climb the corporate ladder and the ranks of the military, it propounds a market-centered view of equality that dovetails perfectly with the prevailing corporate enthusiasm for “diversity.” Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top. In treating women simply as an “underrepresented group,” its proponents seek to ensure that a few privileged souls can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own class.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“By definition, the principal beneficiaries are those who already possess considerable social, cultural, and economic advantages. Everyone else remains stuck in the basement.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Fully compatible with ballooning inequality, liberal feminism outsources oppression. It permits professional-managerial women to lean in precisely by enabling them to lean on the poorly paid migrant women to whom they subcontract their caregiving and housework.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Its love affair with individual advancement equally permeates the world of social-media celebrity, which also confuses feminism with the ascent of individual women. In that world, “feminism” risks becoming a trending hashtag and a vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Our answer to lean-in feminism is kick-back feminism. We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards. Far from celebrating women CEOs who occupy corner offices, we want to get rid of CEOs and corner offices.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“The feminism we have in mind recognizes that it must respond to a crisis of epochal proportions: plummeting living standards and looming ecological disaster; rampaging wars and intensified dispossession; mass migrations met with barbed wire; emboldened racism and xenophobia; and the reversal of hard-won rights—both social and political.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“By itself, legal abortion does little for poor and working-class women who have neither the means to pay for it nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-for-profit health care, as well as the end of racist, eugenicist practices in the medical profession.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“for poor and working-class women, wage equality can mean only equality in misery unless it comes with jobs that pay a generous living wage, with substantive, actionable labor rights, and with a new organization of house-and carework.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“laws criminalizing gender violence are a cruel hoax if they turn a blind eye to the structural sexism and racism of criminal justice systems, leaving intact police brutality, mass incarceration, deportation threats, military interventions, and harassment and abuse in the workplace.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“feminism for the 99 percent seeks profound, far-reaching social transformation. That, in a nutshell, is why it cannot be a separatist movement. We propose, rather, to join with every movement that fights for the 99 percent”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“What we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole—and its root cause is capitalism.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“we are living through is a crisis of society as a whole. By no means restricted to the precincts of finance, it is simultaneously a crisis of economy, ecology, politics, and “care.” A general crisis of an entire form of social organization,”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“confront head on, the real source of crisis and misery, which is capitalism.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“who will guide the process of societal transformation, in whose interest, and to what end?”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“societal reorganization, has played out several times in modern history—largely to capital’s benefit. Seeking to restore profitability, its champions have reinvented capitalism time and again—reconfiguring not only the official economy, but also politics, social reproduction, and our relation to nonhuman nature. In so doing, they have reorganized not only class exploitation, but also gender and racial oppression,”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Historically, the 1 percent have always been indifferent to the interests of society or the majority. But today they are especially dangerous. In their single-minded pursuit of short-term profits, they fail to gauge not only the depth of the crisis, but also the threat it poses to the long-term health of the capitalist system itself: they would rather drill for oil now than ensure the ecological preconditions for their own future profits!”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Intersectionality […] is often reduced, in common understanding, to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability, and so on. […] The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement — feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement — that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”
― Amia Srinivasan

“How can it possibly be anti-black when she worked with black people to produce the song? And how can it be anti-women when she is a woman?”
― Doeliza, The Shape of New Beginnings

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals