Home > Author > June Eric-Udorie
1 " Folks who believe that abortion is permissible in the case of rape, but not permissible in the case of accidental pregnancy from consensual sex, are not actually condemning abortion; rather the moral axis here is the sexual behavior----the blameworthiness----of the pregnant person. "
― June Eric-Udorie , Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism
2 " The problem with mainstream feminism, again and again, is the frivolity of the issues it is concerned with: manspreading, “girl power” and female “empowerment,” articles with headlines like CAN YOU BE A FEMINIST AND WEAR MAKEUP? As they fight these lesser battles, white women ignore the ways that their Black and brown, disabled, and trans sisters are still shackled by multiple forms of oppression. "
3 " The arguments of these trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, are not only false, but represent a reprehensible failing on the part of feminism to include and advocate for a community of women that is already under attack. The rates of assault and murder on trans women are shocking. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, more than one in four trans people have suffered a bias-driven assault, with higher rates for trans women and trans people of colour. A 2011 study from the Anti-Violence Project found that 40 per cent of anti-LGBT murder victims were transgender women. Mainstream feminism’s refusal to take intersectionality into account and to advocate for a group of women who are among the most threatened has devastating consequences. "
4 " The problem with mainstream feminism, again and again, is the frivolity of the issues it is concerned with: manspreading, ‘girl power’ and female ‘empowerment’, articles with headlines like CAN YOU BE A FEMINIST AND WEAR MAKEUP? As they fight these lesser battles, white women ignore the ways that their Black and brown, disabled and trans sisters are still shackled by multiple forms of oppression. "
5 " women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. "
6 " discovered womanism, a term coined by Alice Walker that explicitly focuses on the experiences of Black women. For some time, that label felt more apt because of Walker’s spotlight on Black women’s needs and her inclusion of queer women, writing that a womanist is ‘a woman who loves another woman, sexually and/or non sexually’. I "
7 " Flavia Dzodan, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Mikki Kendall and Jude Wanga, my perspective shifted. "
8 " In 1989, Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to encourage us to think about the ways in which racial and gender discrimination overlap. In her words: ‘Intersectionality … was my attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what I thought they should – highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand.’ Though Crenshaw originally intended the term to apply to Black women, the theory has been widely adopted and expanded. Intersectionality offers us a way to understand how multiple structures – capitalism, heterosexism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and so on – work together to harm women: women who are poor, disabled, queer, Muslim, undocumented, not white, or a combination of those things. "
9 " If feminism is to cease to be a movement for the few, privileged women must start listening to women who are poor, women who are undocumented, women who are queer, women who are on the margins of society, elevating those voices instead of their own. White women must also acknowledge their privilege, despite the fact that they face sexist oppression. "
