Tag Archives: Soraya Chemaly “Rage Becomes Her”

Jul 17

Soraya Chemaly, Rebecca Traister Quotes

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Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it. Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger 

Now more than ever, the personal is political. Anger is personal. Anger is political.

More quotes follow.

I. Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018)

A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

Gendered ideas about anger make us question ourselves, doubt our feelings, set aside our needs, and renounce our own capacity for moral conviction. Ignoring anger makes us careless with ourselves and allows society to be careless with us. It is notable, however, that treating women’s anger and pain in these ways makes it easier to exploit us—for reproduction, labor, sex, and ideology.

In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation.

We minimize our anger, calling it frustration, impatience, exasperation, or irritation, words that don’t convey the intrinsic social and public demand that ‘anger’ does. We learn to contain our selves: our voices, hair, clothes, and, most importantly, speech. Anger is usually about saying “no” in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but “no.”

If #MeToo has made men feel vulnerable, panicked, unsure, and fearful as a result of women finally, collectively, saying “Enough!” so be it. If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world. If they feel that everything they do will reflect on other men and be misrepresented and misunderstood, take a seat. You are now honorary women.

II. Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018)

The British feminist Laurie Penny tweeted in July 2017, “Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.”

Perhaps the reason that women’s anger is so broadly denigrated–treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational–is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it.

What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger–via silencing, erasure, and repression–stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.

Sep 11

Women’s Anger: Suggested Books

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Eloquent Rage…Rage Becomes Her…Women & Power…The Logic of Misogyny. These are parts of book titles that Rebecca Traister, author of the upcoming Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, has suggested.

I. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018)

Publishers Weekly review excerpt: “Cooper, Cosmopolitan contributor and cofounder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, provides incisive commentary in this collection of essays about the issues facing black feminists in what she sees as an increasingly retrograde society. Many of the essays are deeply personal, with Cooper using her own experiences as springboards to larger concerns.”

As Cooper states, “…(T)here’s this stereotype that dogs so many of us that we’re ‘angry.’ We get accused of being angry even when we’re not, and we’re just sort of going about our lives.” She then asks, “What does it look like to both say, ‘Yeah, we’re mad as hell about the ways that the world treats black women consistently and relentlessly,’ and then think about what it looks like to have that rage, to own it and to use it in ways that are beneficial to us, rather than letting other people weaponize it against us?”

II. Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018)

Chemaly on CBC Radio: “We talk to girls about a wide range of emotions but parents don’t really talk to girls ever about anger. Whereas they talk to boys almost not at all about the full range of human emotion, but specifically about anger.”

Kirkus Reviews: “Women who step out of line to assert themselves become targets of what Chemaly calls the corrosive ‘drip, drip, drip’ of microaggressions that ultimately become ‘the building blocks of structural discrimination’ (among countless others, see: Hillary Clinton).”

III. Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017)  

…(O)ne satiric stunt on US television featured a fake severed head of Trump himself, but in that case the (female) comedian concerned lost her job as a consequence. By contrast, this scene of Perseus-Trump brandishing the dripping, oozing head of Medusa-Clinton was very much part of the everyday, domestic American decorative world. You could buy it on T-shirts and tank tops, on coffee mugs, on laptop sleeves and tote bags (sometimes with the logo TRIUMPH, sometimes TRUMP). It may take a moment or two to take in that normalisation of gendered violence, but if you were ever doubtful about the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded or unsure of the continued strength of classical ways of formulating and justifying it – well, I give you Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.

IV. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017)  

From the review in The Guardian (Moira Weigel):

“Down Girl is full of sadness about Clinton. Some of it I agree with; some of it I don’t. (I would prefer never to argue with another woman about Clinton again.) But American feminists cannot accept that a female leader will always, necessarily be doomed – for the sake of…Gillibrand or Kamala Harris, or whoever comes after, as well as all of us. Not only is misogyny ‘still a thing’. As Trump and his cronies eviscerate the state, and appeal to their base’s wounded masculinity, it is poised to become more of a thing than ever.”