Oriol Lladó

“That evening at Steinem’s talk on the University of Texas campus, I was struck by her explanation for how such venomous misogyny could overrun the presidential election in 2016. The moment a woman is statistically most likely to be murdered by her male abuser, Steinem pointed out, is when she escapes. Losing control of her is the unbearable threat that makes the violent ex-husband snap.

Expanding this idea to a patriarchy losing control of half of the U.S. population would indeed explain a lot about recent years: Abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita in 2009, Hillary Clinton’s treatment and loss in 2016, the reliable track record of violence against and hatred toward women among male perpetrators of this century’s mass-shooting epidemic. It would explain, too, perhaps, how a self-possessed, powerful woman like Parton gets turned into a boob joke.

Like Steinem, Parton is an icon of American womanhood in the twentieth century, still going full force today, perhaps with the energy other women their age who made more orthodox decisions must offer to their grandchildren. Steinem did not come from wealth, but the two women nonetheless had different experiences of socioeconomic class: one went to college, and one took a guitar to Nashville. In different ways and with different tacks, they both charted the course for us to nominate a woman for president in 2016.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“Working-class women might not be fighting for a cause with words, time, and money they don’t have, but they possess an unsurpassed wisdom about the way gender works in the world. Take, for example, the concept of intersectionality. A working-class woman of color might not know that word, but she knows better than anyone how her race, gender, and economic struggles intertwine.

There is, then, intellectual knowledge—the stuff of research studies and think pieces—and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

“La biología nos asegura un lugar en sus vidas, pero igual ansiamos que nos elijan como padres. Que alguna vez digan esta frase tan maravillosamente rara: 'Mi padre fue mi verdadero padre'.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Literatura infantil

“En la vida, los destinos están casi siempre separados: quienes comprenden no son los ejecutores, y quienes actúan no comprenden.”
― Stefan Zweig