riti aggarwal

“Today, looking back on the moment I made the decision, I am aware that had I been twenty years younger, I probably wouldn’t have dared request that the case be heard in open court. I would have been too afraid of the looks: those damn looks that women of my generation have always had
to contend with; those damn looks that make you waver in the morning between a dress and trousers, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you or embarrass you; those damn looks that seem to tell you who you are or what you’re worth, only to forsake you as you age. It was exactly that nerve
Dominique pressed when he told me I should be glad my husband still desired me whenever he photographed me coming out of the bathroom. I
was, no doubt, still susceptible to it. It’s foolish, but that’s how we were freer, more autonomous women, yet still afraid of being abandoned, still
longing to be saved. Maybe the shame lifts once you hit seventy and no one looks at you any more. I don’t know. I wasn’t afraid of my wrinkles or my body.”
― Gisèle Pelicot, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides

“The stories I used to read where men transformed into women suggested a kind of instantaneous loss—a sudden vacuum where their manhood had once been, both literally and figuratively. But what has happened to me has actually been a slow blossoming, a colonization of myself with myself. The estrogen dissolving under my tongue will enter my bloodstream and slowly disseminate throughout my body, just as the other pills I am taking will shut down production of testosterone in other parts of my body. Sooner or later, my cells will realize that estrogen is now my dominant hormone and begin to soften my skin, to grow my breasts, to thicken my hair.
We are, none of us, a single set of destinies set by the accident of our birth. We can change and be changed. Our bodies know the language they must speak to make us the people we must become.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“What is objectification? From Simone de Beauvoir to Martha Nussbaum to Catharine MacKinnon, feminist philosophers have long been interested in analysing the concept. Broadly speaking, to objectify a woman is to treat or represent her as a partly or wholly dehumanised, de-mentalised object. There are various ways to do that. Fashion and advertising offer several possibilities for doing so visually. You can represent her as a dazed, passive thing to be fucked, with a vacant expression and glazed eyes, as in many high-end fashion advertising campaigns. Extending this, you can represent her as sexually dominated, with her personal autonomy diminished or removed: bound or gagged, for instance. You can dress her up in animal skins or leopard print and represent her as a kind of wild, highly sexualised animal, something the fashion industry has been particularly fond of doing to black women over the years. You can dress and pose her as a stereotype: the Capable Housewife (in domestic setting, comfortable clothes, tolerant rueful smile), the Brainy Scientist (white coat, stern expression, glasses on end of nose), the Little Girl (kneesocks, pigtails, blowing bubblegum), the Sexy Vamp (cleavage, tongue on front teeth, wink). You can place her in a row with other similarly shaped, similarly adorned women, visually emphasising what they all have in common in looks and dress, so that individuality is rhetorically diminished, and one woman looks replaceable with any other. You can make her just a pair of legs, or breasts, or an arse, focusing the camera on body parts and even omitting the head and face. In all such cases, the thinking mind, personality, autonomy or particular individuality of the woman in the image is downplayed, diminished and ignored, to a greater or lesser extent. She’s ‘objectified’ in the sense she’s made more like an object and less like a fully individuated human being: less rational, less individual, less present, less important for who she actually is. In extreme cases, she can even be used as if or pictured as an inanimate object: a ‘table’ for men’s feet, or as a ‘plate’ for food– as in the Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, using a woman’s naked body as a receptacle for sushi in restaurants.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“In the American Jewish collective consciousness, the Holocaust has functioned as the historical glue of the postwar synthesis. The Holocaust illuminated America’s exceptional goodness by contrast to European barbarism and by virtue of America’s defeat of the Nazis. It confirmed the absolute necessity of Israel as existential insurance policy. It reinforced the necessity of the open, liberal society for Jewish flourishing. Holocaust memory concretized a shared sense of victimhood, a sensitivity to the historically precarious nature of Jewish survival, and a filial duty that, for many American Jews, is often the primary reason they give for their continued Jewish identification. But this is a role the Holocaust can fulfill for only so long. While creative opportunists continue feverishly to mine the event for content, this is just another indication that the Holocaust is leaving the realm of present memory, transforming, like the Spanish Inquisition, into a matter of the distant Jewish past.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life