Michelle Risa

“I am often interested in identity politics. That phrase is often weaponized to dismiss the concerns and lived experiences of marginalized people. It is used to derail conversations about how identity shapes the way we move through the world and the way the world moves through us. It is an accusation that implies that we can somehow separate ourselves from the very things that contribute to who we are. It implies that we can’t both acknowledge and embrace our identities and be part of a broader community. To decry identity politics, to suggest you are not political, that you are simply human before anything else is, in fact, an identity politic. And that in itself interests me, as one of the ways that people can so utterly lack self-awareness while denying the lived experiences of everyone different from them.”
― Roxane Gay, Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Girls start thinking about their ideal body at a shockingly early age. Thirty-four percent of five-year-old girls engage in deliberate dietary restraint at least “sometimes.” Twenty-eight percent of these girls say they want their bodies to look like the women they see in movies and on television.1 To put this into context, important developmental milestones for five-year-olds include the successful use of a fork and spoon and the ability to count ten or more objects. These are girls who are just learning how to move their bodies around in the world, yet somehow they’re already worried about how their bodies look, already seeking to take up less space.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women—and Its Impact on Health and Happiness