Ka-womenan

even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing.

-Rayne fisher Quan

as if writing or thinking about your body as a woman is just another thing you can do, an “obsession” as morally neutral and freely available as any other, and as if the only possible factor problematizing one’s engagement with that obsession is that it’s not seen as respectable enough by masculine society. This isn’t satisfying to me, somehow.

-Ra

It is inarguably true that there is nothing intellectually or artistically inferior about exploring the body and the self (and truer still that men write about their bodies and themselves all the time, but they often get to pretend they’re writing about something else when they do and are generally taken at their word — whereas a woman could

I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new.

there is a sickeningly pervasive idea in our culture, by the way, that a young woman can only become interesting and complex by experiencing untold quantities of pain — and so we seek this suffering in an attempt to become artistic, but only end up learning that we were operating from a flawed premise in the first place. pain is nothing but pain

—

All I know is that I want to be wary of defining the air as male and bravely refusing to breathe, as Andrea Long Chu says. All attachments should be interrogated, including my attachment to this identity, to my own unassailable victimhood.

-Rayne Fisher-Quan