Intersectional Feminism Quotes

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”
― Audre Lorde

“Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.”
― Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries

“Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation. Polite white people who respond to calls for respect, for getting boots off necks with demand for decorum, aren’t interested in resistance or disruption. They are interested in control. They replicate the manners of Jim Crow America, demanding deference and obedience; they want the polite facade instead of disruption. They insist that they know best what should be done when attempting to battle and defeat bias, but in actuality they’re just happy to be useless. They are obstacles to freedom who feel no remorse, who provide no valuable insight, because ultimately, they are content to get in the way. They’re oppression tourists, virtue-signaling volunteers who are really just here to get what they can and block the way, so no others can pass without meeting whatever arbitrary standards they create. And if you get enough of them in one place, they can prevent any real progress from occurring while they reap the benefits of straddling white supremacy and being woke. They have less power than they think, than anyone realizes, but like any small predator, they manage to be flashy enough to be seen.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Men avoid women's observations by accusing us of being too "visceral".”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“But the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The best support Western feminists could give their global sisters (she said), was to listen first and speak later, following the lead of and partnering with local feminists, giving economic and other support from a position of ‘solidarity’ rather than ‘saving”
― Sayantani DasGupta

“I don't get why men feel insecure when they meet a confident woman! As for me, I'd feel much more secure if every city, every state, every nation in the world is run by women than men.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becoming increasingly self-assertive and female oriented.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“In our country we use different words [than feminism] which mean the liberation or the emancipation of women. Of course I believe in the emancipation of women. It will change a lot of things in society for the better.
But, you know, the class patriarchal system under which we live oppresses men too and the discrimination from which women suffer is not good for the life of men. Don’t you think so?”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

“If white feminism is a weapon, then intersectional feminism is a pressure bandage. It can't heal the wounds, but it can stop the bleeding and give a community a chance to heal on its own.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Staples pleads his cause by saying capitalism has left the black man only his penis for fulfillment, and a "curious rage". Is this rage any more legitimate than the rage of black women? And why are black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why isn't that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his fulfillment, namely capitalism?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls "a collective appetite for black male blood." Yet it is my female children and my black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“And if Black men choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason- raping, brutalizing and killing Black women- then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“This continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive system within which we live.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very
illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“There's nothing more reassuring than the sight of a confident woman.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“Know that everything's gonna be alright when a woman takes charge.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“Patriarchy wants to control vaginas, but it also wants to control who has the right to even say the word “vagina.” Not only that, patriarchy screams “decorum” when we dare to fight back.”
― Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

“In our imperfect world, if conditions are such that those who have the least are taken care of, we will all be closer to freedom and justice.”
― Jamia Wilson, This Book Is Feminist: An Intersectional Primer for Feminists in Training

“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Denial of the fundamental role of class relations and struggles in the production of oppression and inequality defines intersectionality’s macro-level assumptions about the relationship among its key elements. Regardless of the politicised vocabulary, i.e. references in the intersectionality literature to imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, class, and so on, intersectionality – like the RGC perspective that preceded it – is an abstract analytical framework which, like sociology, approaches the study of social phenomena ahistorically, i.e. in abstraction from their capitalist conditions of possibility”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Many black intellectuals spoke about the experience of racism mainly, and sometimes exclusively, from a black male perspective, highlighting the various ways their humanity had been degraded and denied. While this discussion was something I cared about deeply, it was rarely balanced with one about all the unique ways in which black women have suffered. Even the scholars who spoke about race without focusing so much on the particular experience of black men still failed to fully capture and dissect the compounded challenges black women faced as they dealt with racism and sexism. The result of discussions of race being unfairly tilted toward the male point of view is that the experiences of black women have taken a backseat to those of black men, although they've suffered in ways that black men haven't. Racism and sexism were stacked against them. And too often they've borne the brunt of the very masculinity that has been historically debased in black men when black men asserted their power over the only people they could - black women...The hard truth is that black men have contributed to these struggles both subtly and overtly...we contribute to the degradation of black women by glorifying the kind of common rap that reduces them to bitches, hoes, and body parts.”
― Zachary Wood, Uncensored

“Mott saw anti-slavery, peace, and women's rights as part of the same reform impulse to liberate the individual from the bonds of tradition, custom, and organized religion.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Instead of empowering women, intersectional feminism encourages them to be victims. It is an endless marathon to find out who is the most hard done by. And it forces women to do and say the politically correct thing, in order to keep the sisterhood happy. This goes doubly so for women like Sommers, given the racial politics of identity that sees white women constantly forced to apologise for being the oppressor due to our privilege, race and skin colour. And if we are not on board with forfeiting our individual experience and spruiking an endorsed narrative – – then we are the problem.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“Feminism? Oh, it's totally unnecessary today. Just like seat belts and life jackets.”
― Anubha Saxena

“feminism for the 99 percent seeks profound, far-reaching social transformation. That, in a nutshell, is why it cannot be a separatist movement. We propose, rather, to join with every movement that fights for the 99 percent”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Ask yourself who you don't see and understand why you don't see them and understand how important attention is for them. We use attention as a way to arm ourselves against the invisibility that patriarchy wants to impose on us.”
― Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls