Serina

“That is the worst of it,” he said. “There isn’t any.” I sat up. I stood up. I walked up and down. “No prostitution! I— I can’t believe it. Why, prostitution is a social necessity, as old as Nineveh!”. Owen laughed outright. “Too late, old man; too late ! I know we used to think so. We did use to call it a ‘social necessity,’ didn’t we ? Come, now, tell me what necessity it was to the women?” I stopped my march and looked at him. “To the women,” he repeated. “What did they want of prostitution? What good did it do them?” “Why — why — they made a living at it,” I replied, rather lamely. “Yes, a nice, honorable, pleasant, healthy living, didn’t they? With all women perfectly well able to earn an excellent living decently; with all women fully educated about these matters and knowing what a horrible death was before them in this business; with all women brought up like human beings and not like over-sexed female animals, and with all women quite free to marry if they wished to — how many, do you think, would choose that kind of business ? “We never waited for them to choose it, remember ! We fooled them and lied to them and dragged them in — and drove them in — forced them in — and kept them as slaves and prisoners. They didn’t really enjoy the life; you know that. Why should they go into it if they do not have to — to accommodate us?”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain

“I interpret autonomy as this innermost subjectivity and area of freedom – small as it may be – without which human beings are devoid of their essential human essence and dignity, without which they become puppets or organisms without an element of free will and consciousness, or mere assemblies of organic matter, as is the model of reproductive engineers today. In the concept autonomy, therefore, the feminist aspiration to maintain and strengthen or recreate this innermost subjective human essence in women is expressed and preserved. On the other hand, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that capitalism, by focussing on the atomized individual in its marketing strategies has, to a large extent, perverted the humanist aspiration inherent in the concept of autonomy.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“Such a fantasy has long been a ruling-class obsession, no matter what particular form—feudal or capitalist or patriarchal—that rulership has taken. Every master lives in mortal fear of his own slaves, bile roiling in him night after night as he clings to his ideologies of superiority, falling asleep with prayers on his lips that the slaves continue to believe in their own inferiority as much as he does. The master loathes the slaves, reviles and resents them for his own weakness, his own dependence on their existence, his presumed supremacy spiraling further and further into contempt and hatred. Yet even as he deludes himself to the point where he begins to doubt the slaves’ worth entirely, convincing himself that his salvation lies in the destruction of those who enable his own mastery, he still cannot bring himself to so much as rear back for the killing blow. For the master remains aware that he only exists because his slaves do, realizes that his identity, his being, his self-conception all depend on the continued existence of the slaves. If there were no slaves, no one for him to subjugate, to contrast himself with, to define himself against, he too would cease to be. Unfortunately for him, sooner or later, the slaves realize this too.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“Wittig’s assertion is based on her analysis of heterosexuality as a regime, not merely the ‘default’ sexuality, but a political institution that has structured and continues to structure the organization of society, philosophical modes of thought, and even language itself. She conceptualizes the state of women as an enrollment, at birth, into the heterosexual contract, analogous to Rousseau’s social contract: an arrangement into which they are all entered without consent, whose terms and conditions are never explicated but are enforced all the same, set up to extract all benefits and return precious little (if any) compensation to women-as-a-class. To Wittig, the goal of feminist struggle is not an attempted rehabilitation of ‘womanhood’, a category that was and remains subordinate in its very conceptualization. Rather, the struggle for liberation is a struggle for abolition of this category, a mutual annihilation of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that social existence is no longer defined by a relation of extractive parasitism.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem