When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.
They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as ‘men,’ as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who has endured white-supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission.
Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.
The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.
I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me? As.
Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.
As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.
Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy.
Masses of the people think that feminism is always the only about women seeking to be equal to men. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.
I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it’s a decision, it’s a judgement, it’s a promise.
Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.
Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps up face betrayal without losing heart. And it renews our spirit so we can love again.
Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.
What the world needs now is liberated men who have the qualities Silverstein cites, men who are ‘empathetic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.’ Men need feminist thinking. It it the theory that supports their spiritual evolution and their shift away from the patriarchal model. Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily.
Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject... Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.
We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.
With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.
Embracing love ethic means that we utilize all dimensions of love – “care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge” – in our everyday lives.
A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving... There can be no love without justice.