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One Dimensional Woman QUOTES

One Dimensional Woman QUOTES

1 " The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

2 " Organizing among agency workers is structurally impossible, and the enforced atomization of the agency worker is rephrased as ‘individual choice’, ‘your freedom’. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

3 " Any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off – this individual woman has betrayed the economy! All the while, women working full time receive 17% less than male counterparts while part-timers are paid on average 37% less.21 The model female worker, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or make undue demands, is both desirable and cheap. When "

― , One Dimensional Woman

4 " The Republican abuse of the term feminism in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

5 " If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man (Miller), being pro-choice (Valenti), being pro-life (Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

6 " At the very moment where some sort of collective response might be appropriate – for example, campaigning against discrimination of pregnant women at work – the language of choice is invoked: ‘it was her choice to get pregnant, why should we have to work more to cover her time off? "

― , One Dimensional Woman

7 " When people talk about the ‘feminization of labor’, then, their discourse is often double-edged. The phrase is at once descriptive (work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past) and an expression of resentment (‘women have stolen proper men’s jobs! It’s their fault - somehow - that we don’t have any proper industry anymore!’). "

― , One Dimensional Woman

8 " The glorious world of work stumbles at various obstacles: pregnancy, age, lack of education, desperation (particularly of migrant and illegal workers, the nannies and cleaners who work so that richer women can do the same). The job market continues to differentiate between men and women – the most blatant is the surprisingly resilient pay differential for the same jobs, and the predominance of women in part-time and badly-paid work. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

9 " If men’s wages too have been depressed, if there literally aren’t enough jobs, or enough money to pay for them (what with the dire need to pay CEOs so many more times more than anyone else, not to mention the precious shareholders), then the category ‘woman’ remains a useful one for the ‘first fired, last hired’ policy that has characterized the employment market for much of the last hundred years or so. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

10 " The discourse of work as pure emancipation depends on blocking out class and age constantly. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

11 " It is the time of the token woman … Paradoxically the triumph of the rhetoric of feminism has taken place exactly at a time when the actual conditions of women’s lives have worsened, and this rhetoric has been used to justify policies which will harm women.3 "

― , One Dimensional Woman

12 " Zillah Eisenstein uses the term ‘decoy’ to describe the way in which ‘imperialist democracy’ covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: ‘The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics.’4 Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn’t so far. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

13 " While one of the lasting achievements of feminism is to re-establish the link between household labor, reproductive labor and paid labor, capitalism has to perpetually pretend that the world of politics has nothing to do with the home. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

14 " As Virno puts it ‘correctly understood, post-Fordist “professionality” does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits.’25 At this point in economic time, those character traits are remarkably feminine, which is why the pragmatic, enthusiastic professional woman is the symbol for the world of work as a whole. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

15 " I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man. Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community –– everybody –– to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman –– and I have raised two children, alone –– is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units –– people need a larger unit. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

16 " The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal ‘feminist’ discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

17 " As Katha Pollitt puts it: US invasions have made the work of Muslim feminists much more difficult. The last thing they need is for women’s rights to be branded as the tool of the invaders and occupiers and cultural imperialists.11 "

― , One Dimensional Woman

18 " As Katherine Viner puts it: Feminism is used for everything these days, except the fight for true equality – to sell trainers, to justify body mutilations, to make women make porn, to help men get off rape charges, to ensure women feel they have self-respect because they use a self-esteem-enhancing brand of shampoo. No wonder it’s being used as a reason for bombing women and children too.12 "

― , One Dimensional Woman

19 " Clearly if something is to be salvaged of the ‘fight for true equality’, the meaning of feminism must be clear. It must also recognize the way in which it has been colonized not only by warmongers, but also by consumerism and contemporary ideologies of work. "

― , One Dimensional Woman

20 " If men and women are at all times supposed to be a kind of walking CV, constantly networking, constantly advertising themselves, then this ‘body’ is the prime locus for any understanding of the way in which the logic of employment overcodes our very comportment. "

― , One Dimensional Woman