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Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics QUOTES

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics QUOTES

1 " [T]he 'subject-in-process' [is] a term I use heuristically to capture the idea that subjectivity is constituted (by language, discourse, or power), inessential and thus perpetually open to transformation. "

― , Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

2 " I am not arguing that everything is political, which would, by making politics ubiquitous, render it a meaningless category. I am also not claiming that anything is either inherently political or apolitical. I am interested here, rather, in how the ways in which politics is defined enable certain phenomena and disallow others. "

― , Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

3 " The primacy of class in politics was challenged during the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, by the rise of the 'new social movements' (including feminism, gay and lesbian liberationism, the anti-nuclear movement, and environmentalism). The proliferation of these movements, and the increasing recognition that no subject's identity could be explained exclusively in terms of one axis (race, gender, or sexual orientation) brought forth disquiet with one dimensional accounts of oppression, such as Marxism (with its sole focus on class). "

― , Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

4 " My argument in this book is that embracing the idea of the subject-in-process, far from depoliticizing feminism, breathes new political life into it. It opens up spaces for political contestation and allows for the flourishing of new forms of politics to sit alongside its more conventional ones. Feminism does not need the stable unitary subject to guarantee its politics. It needs a deeper understanding of the political nature of subjectivity and of the dynamism of politics. "

― , Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics