Alina > Recent Status Updates

“About gender, then, it is not only important to dislodge from grammar and linguistics a sociological category that does not speak its name. It is also very important to consider how gender works in language, how gender works upon language, before considering how it works from there upon its users.”

rereading this novel through the lens of Jamison’s Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain is interesting. if the narrator weren’t a bitch, she would only be sad. her story would be melodramatic. she would be criticized for being self-pitying—women’s pain has been excessively belabored in media. the fact that she’s unbearable, then, adds another dimension. whether that is good requires more thought.

it is an interesting irony that her perpetual sleep is the very thing preventing her from moving on. she stops time from passing, so she cannot be born anew

“[Words] are a condensate of abstraction and concreteness, and in this they are totally different from all other mediums used to create art. Colors, stone, clay have no meaning, sound has no meaning in music, and very often, most often, no one cares about the meaning they will have when created into a form. One does not expect the meaning to be interesting. One does not expect it to have any meaning at all.”

“Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the "masculine" not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. The result is that there are the general and the feminine, or rather, the general and the mark of the feminine.”

For example, in terms of language will we be able to keep the terms "humanity," "human," "man," "l'homme," "homo," even though all these terms in the abstract mean first the human being (without distinction of sex)? Shall we keep these terms after they have been appropriated for so long by the dominant group (men over women) and after they have been used to mean both abstractly and concretely humanity as male?

“But for us there is no such thing as being-woman or being-man. "Man" and "woman" are political concepts of opposition, and the copula which dialecti-cally unites them is, at the same time, the one which abolishes them.”

“I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals.”

“This real necessity for everyone to exist as an individual, as well as a member of a class, is perhaps the first condition for the accomplishment of a revolution, without which there can be no real fight or transformation. But the opposite is also true; without class and class consciousness there are no real subjects, only alienated individuals.”

“Once the class "men" disappears, "women" as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters. Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate "women" (the class within which we fight) and "woman," the myth. For "woman" does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while "women" is the product of a social relationship.”

“In the case of women, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call "natural," what is supposed to exist as such before oppression.“

“The category of sex is the product of heterosexual society that turns half of the population into sexual beings, for sex is a category which women cannot be outside of…For the category of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be conceived of outside of it. Only they are sex, the sex, and sex they have been made in their minds, bodies, acts, gestures.”

Did I request Thee, Maker, from my clay
To mold me Man? Did I solicit Thee
From darkness to promote me or here place
In this delicious garden?

ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

i hate this 13 year old

"Why were they here? Why had they found us? Because they knew Clifton? Or for the occasion his death gave them to express their protestations, a time and place to come together, to stand touching and sweating and breathing and looking in a common direction? Was either explanation adequate in itself? Did it signify love or politicalized hate? And could politics ever be an expression of love?"

These fellows whose bodies seemed—what had one of my teachers said of me?—"You're like one of these African sculptures, distorted in the interest of a design." Well, what design and whose?

end of book 2