Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create

The armed forces as the extreme embodiment of the patriarchal family

The movement for change is a changing movement, changing itself, demasculinizing itself, de-Westernizing itself, becoming a critical mass that is saying in so many different voices, languages, gestures, actions: It must change; we ourselves can change it

Whatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive: abstract thinking, narrow tribal loyalties, every kind of self-righteousness, the arrogance of believing ourselves at the center.

We are not urged to help create a more human society here in response to the ones we are taught to hate and dread. Discourse itself is frozen at this level

But we are not invited to consider the butcheries of Stalinism, the terrors of the Russian counter-revolution alongside the butcheries of white supremacism and Manifest Destiny

I began to experience the meaning of my whiteness as a point of location for which I needed to take responsibility.

To say “my body” reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions

that “always” blots out what we really need to know: When, where, and under what conditions has the statement been true?

“always” blots out what we really need to know: When, where, and under what conditions has the statement been true