#identity

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. ↗

— Gayle Rubin

#diversity #history #identity #labels #lesbian

Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas. ↗

— Dave Reichert

#america #areas #been #belong #chaos

I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene. ↗

— Marc Ribot

#because #claimed #germany #i #identity

I don't know what kind of great I'm bound to be," Dove considered his prospects calmly, "all I know for certain is I'm born a world-shaker. ↗

— Nelson Algren

#identity #prospects-on-life #life

The thing about acting is you don't want to let on how enjoyable it is or then everybody would want to become an actress. But it really is. It's a pleasure to go and exchange your identity. ↗

— Gena Rowlands

#acting #actress #become #enjoyable #everybody

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals. ↗

— Abdolkarim Soroush

#difficult #equilibrium #establishing #identity #intellectuals

As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being. ↗

— Abdolkarim Soroush

#awareness #being #came #consciousness #decline

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms. ↗

— Abdolkarim Soroush

#different #different shapes #express #expression #feels

Yes, your home is your castle, but it is also your identity and your possibility to be open to others. ↗

— David Soul

#castle #home #identity #open #others

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#idle #personal #personal identity #requires #sense