Nina Power > Quotes

“for the disproportionate fear that the statistically and historically minimal group of women who were both angry and had hairy legs have inculcated both in their detractors and in their wannabe-successors, we should salute them as often as possible”
― Nina Power

“It is also clear, unfortunately,that ideology runs deeper than the hopeful might have previously imagined. It is not merely a question of turning the tables or changing the language”
― Nina Power

“The Republican abuse of the term feminism in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man (Miller), being pro-choice (Valenti), being pro-life (Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Organizing among agency workers is structurally impossible, and the enforced atomization of the agency worker is rephrased as ‘individual choice’, ‘your freedom’.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off – this individual woman has betrayed the economy! All the while, women working full time receive 17% less than male counterparts while part-timers are paid on average 37% less.21 The model female worker, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or make undue demands, is both desirable and cheap. When”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“As Katherine Viner puts it: Feminism is used for everything these days, except the fight for true equality – to sell trainers, to justify body mutilations, to make women make porn, to help men get off rape charges, to ensure women feel they have self-respect because they use a self-esteem-enhancing brand of shampoo. No wonder it’s being used as a reason for bombing women and children too.12”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“The glorious world of work stumbles at various obstacles: pregnancy, age, lack of education, desperation (particularly of migrant and illegal workers, the nannies and cleaners who work so that richer women can do the same). The job market continues to differentiate between men and women – the most blatant is the surprisingly resilient pay differential for the same jobs, and the predominance of women in part-time and badly-paid work.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“If men’s wages too have been depressed, if there literally aren’t enough jobs, or enough money to pay for them (what with the dire need to pay CEOs so many more times more than anyone else, not to mention the precious shareholders), then the category ‘woman’ remains a useful one for the ‘first fired, last hired’ policy that has characterized the employment market for much of the last hundred years or so.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“The devout Islamic woman becomes the antithesis of a certain kind of strident right-wing feminist.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal ‘feminist’ discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“While one of the lasting achievements of feminism is to re-establish the link between household labor, reproductive labor and paid labor, capitalism has to perpetually pretend that the world of politics has nothing to do with the home.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Nevertheless, as Marx notes, it is only when women enter work ‘outside the sphere of the domestic economy’ that transformations in relations between the sexes, the composition of families and so on, really start to happen.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Clearly if something is to be salvaged of the ‘fight for true equality’, the meaning of feminism must be clear. It must also recognize the way in which it has been colonized not only by warmongers, but also by consumerism and contemporary ideologies of work.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Of course, women have always worked, that is to say, raised children, tended to the home, grown crops, etc., and how different the history of the world would have been had this been from the start been regarded as labor to be rewarded.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“If men and women are at all times supposed to be a kind of walking CV, constantly networking, constantly advertising themselves, then this ‘body’ is the prime locus for any understanding of the way in which the logic of employment overcodes our very comportment.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“generalized imperative that all femininity be translatable into the logic of the market. If the body is a useful part of the ‘package’, then all the better. Men too are increasingly prey to this imperative, to be an all-round self-seller, but it is in this heavily politicized continuum from (bad) hijab-wearer to (good) proto-porn actress that the contemporary ideology of work is most clearly seen – and it is primarily played out in the circulation of female bodies.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“As Katha Pollitt puts it: US invasions have made the work of Muslim feminists much more difficult. The last thing they need is for women’s rights to be branded as the tool of the invaders and occupiers and cultural imperialists.11”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man. Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community –– everybody –– to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman –– and I have raised two children, alone –– is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units –– people need a larger unit.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Zillah Eisenstein uses the term ‘decoy’ to describe the way in which ‘imperialist democracy’ covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: ‘The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics.’4 Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn’t so far.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“As Virno puts it ‘correctly understood, post-Fordist “professionality” does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits.’25 At this point in economic time, those character traits are remarkably feminine, which is why the pragmatic, enthusiastic professional woman is the symbol for the world of work as a whole.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Don't be misled: The imperative to 'Enjoy!' is omnipresent, but pleasure and happiness are almost entirely absent.”
― Nina Power

“The discourse of work as pure emancipation depends on blocking out class and age constantly.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“The personal is no longer just political, it’s economic through and through.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“When people talk about the ‘feminization of labor’, then, their discourse is often double-edged. The phrase is at once descriptive (work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past) and an expression of resentment (‘women have stolen proper men’s jobs! It’s their fault - somehow - that we don’t have any proper industry anymore!’).”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“From the same Badiou piece: Strange is the rage reserved by so many feminist ladies for the few girls wearing the hijab. They have begged poor president Chirac… to crack down on them in the name of the Law. Meanwhile the prostituted female body is everywhere. The most humiliating pornography is universally sold. Advice on sexually exposing bodies lavishes teen magazines day in and day out. A single explanation: a girl must show what she’s got to sell. She’s got to show her goods. She’s got to indicate that, henceforth, the circulation of women abides by the generalized model, and not by restricted exchange. Too bad for bearded fathers and elder brothers! Long live the planetary market! The generalized model is the top fashion model. It used to be taken for granted that an intangible female right is to only have to get undressed in front of the person of her choosing. But no. It is vital to hint at undressing at every instant. Whoever covers up what she puts on the market is not a loyal merchant. Let’s argue the following, then, a pretty strange point: the law on the hijab is a pure capitalist law. It orders femininity to be exposed. In other words, having the female body circulate according to the market paradigm is obligatory. For teenagers, i.e. the teeming center of the entire subjective universe, the law bans any holding back.16”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“Alain Badiou has identified the contradictory imperatives behind the recent anti-headscarf laws in France as an example of this logic: Grandiose causes need new-style arguments. For example: hijab must be banned; it is a sign of male power (the father or eldest brother) over young girls or women. So, we’ll banish the women who obstinately wear it. Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. It’s a little like saying: ‘This woman has been raped: throw her in jail.’… Or, contrariwise: it is they who freely want to wear that damned headscarf, those rebels, those brats! Hence, they shall be punished.”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“At the very moment where some sort of collective response might be appropriate – for example, campaigning against discrimination of pregnant women at work – the language of choice is invoked: ‘it was her choice to get pregnant, why should we have to work more to cover her time off?”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman

“It is the time of the token woman … Paradoxically the triumph of the rhetoric of feminism has taken place exactly at a time when the actual conditions of women’s lives have worsened, and this rhetoric has been used to justify policies which will harm women.3”
― Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman