Catapult

“Sometimes, though no one ever asks, I say that it was moving to the East Coast that led me to understand that I was raced—to understand that the gaze upon my body bore the effects of a system far larger than me. I could no longer think of myself as a neutral subject; no one was, and in that realization there was a kind of relief. Emboldened by my reading, I began to consider my own Asian-Americanness, and within it to draw a distinction between East and Southeast Asian, finally acknowledging the effects of being a repeatedly colonized subject—the ways women who looked like me had been degraded and degraded. Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking, I related to the term ABJECT so much that I made endless puns about it: ABJECT PERMENANCE, ABJECT STORY, ABJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified. Kristeva was the spotlight that illuminated my condition.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“She wanted someone ... who worked with his hands and not with words. Want. She wanted. She needed. The words resounded in her head as she went out the door to the street. And maybe it was the cool wind that hit her in the face, or the moon that still hung in the sky, full and yellow, or the fact that she was still drunk and was going back to her bed alone at one thirty in the morning, but the words hurt her. She felt again, for the second time that night, humiliated and sick of herself.”
― Paulina Flores, Humiliation

“The gaps that bind us span more than the distances between words.”
― Jessica J Lee, Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts

“This weaponization of White Womanhood continues to be the centerpiece of an arsenal used to maintain the status quo and punish anyone who dares challenge it.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color