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

“Spend not the remnant of thy days in thoughts and fancies concerning other men, when it is not in relation to some common good, when by it thou art hindered from some other better work. That is, spend not thy time in thinking, what such a man doth, and to what end: what he saith, and what he thinks, and what he is about, and such other things or curiosities, which make a man to rove and wander from the care and observation of that part of himself, which is rational, and overruling.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Understanding when to speak on an issue and when to listen and learn is an invaluable skill I continue to hone. At times, people treat me like an opinion vending machine, asking me what I think about their favorite television show or a politician running for office or a recent calamity, as if opinion writing is merely emotional utterance rather than a practice that requires care and consideration.”
― Roxane Gay, Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

“He came to recognize that on both an individual and societal level, our physical skin is intertwined with our very being. Foucault argued that any intentional physical change to the appearance of the skin, from Botox to body art, is a ‘technology of the self’.10 We change our bodies ‘in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, perfection or immortality’. When we change our skin, we change ourselves.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ