Yvonne Aburrow

“The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body – especially women’s bodies, and especially black women’s bodies – because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy. Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go – our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed.”
― Yvonne Aburrow

“I believe that the reason religions seek to control, limit, and even prevent sexual pleasure is because it is an independent means of accessing spiritual states such as a sense of oneness with the universe. They also fear the independence that these experiences bring because they give people direct access to the Divine. They fear women’s sexuality because it is held to be polymorphous and wild. Women are associated with the body, sometimes referred to as “the flesh.” This was the result of an ascetic and world-denying approach to spirituality and religion that arose in the early part of the Axial Age (the era when individual prophets founded several new religions).”
― Yvonne Aburrow, Changing Paths