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"When I was a child, I'd go to my grandmother's house and start writing. When I picked up my pencil, she'd tell me that in her day, left-handers would be forced to write with their right hands, which seemed ridiculous to me. Luckily, those days were over and although my left-handedness is still treated as a curiosity by people who expect me to have terrible script, I can write as I wish - but sometimes I imagine how absurd, not to mention vindictive, a campaign to return to this would look, and wonder if we'll ever reach a similar point where my transition is quietly accepted as a matter of bodily autonomy." [...] "Whereas gay and lesbian activists opposed pathologisation and the resultant aversion therapies, transsexual people understood that mental health services offered access to hormones and surgery, as long as they satisfied the gatekeeping requirements of the psychiatrists - which often demanded that transsexual women show a very tradition

Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 21/11/2011 Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 12/03/2014 EDIT Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 17/09/2014

"In the heterosexual community, aptitude for seduction is a woman's ultimate quality: it is best rewarded, best acknowledged. Any other feature, like expressing yourself, being funny, having ambition, aggression, strength, spirit must be underplayed, so it doesn't get in the way of your seduction. I still have a strong distrust of femininity because it's always primarily defining you in terms of what use others can make of you. Will they be excited, reassured, healed, understood, taken care of? It always distances you from your sincere emotions. [...] To be feminine is a fake power. It is the same as drugs: a very immediate, very intense, very funny experience. But any power that is easily given and obtained should be watched over carefully. It might be a gross hallucination. [...] I respect some people's decisions to spread their wings inside the romantic or sexual seduction field, but I'd claim other fields for women as well, which wouldn't evolve

"The Republican abuse of the term 'feminism' in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language. Where the Right would have once bundled queers, leftists, feminists, peaceniks and other sundry misfits together as internal enemies of the state, when it came to providing reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, the language of feminism was suddenly plucked from the dustbin of history as a specifically 'Western' value. [...] The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked. [...] The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal 'feminist' discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem. Just as the Bush administration neglected to ask their experienced diplomats about other ways in

"La marchandisation fait des subjectivités sexuelles et de genre des identités que l'on peut acquérir en consommant. Rosemary Hennessy (1995) et Alan Sears (2005) s'intéressent à la façon dont le néolibéralisme, qui colonise en général l'ensemble des champs sociaux de manière à les rendre marchands, a investi en particulier les identités sexuelles et de genre pour en faire des ''styles de vie'' ( lifestyle ) qui se caractérisent par un ensemble de biens et de pratiques à acheter, à consommer de façon individuelle. Un ensemble de bars, magasins, produits, vêtements, voyages, etc. constituent un " pink market " qui participe de la construction d'une subjectivité LGBTQI reconnaissable. [...] La marchandisation des identités LGBT (mais la remarque vaut de façon bien plus générale pour la marchandisation de l'ensemble des identités - et du désir - dans le néolibéralisme) engendre de fortes inégalités : les personnes qui n'ont pas les m

"Ungrateful conservatives often complain about the political correctness of liberals, but the liberalism that strives to achieve equality by celebrating diversity is a liberalism that every conservative should love and that opponents of the liberal elite have put to good use. What the commitment to diversity seeks is not a society in which there are no poor people but one in which there's nothing wrong with being poor, a society in which poor people - like blacks and Jews and Asians - are respected. And in the effort to create such a world, liberalism has ended up playing a useful if no doubt unintended role, the role of supplying the right with just the kind of left it wants. What the right wants is culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead of money, it doesn't matter who wins. And the left gives it what it wants". Walter Benn Michaels (2006), The Trouble with Diversity. How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore I

"Dans le champ de la philosophie, ça s'est peut être passé différemment du reste des humanités et des sciences sociales parce que, dans ce domaine, les féministes n'ont jamais réussi à avoir beaucoup d'impact sur le courant dominant de la philosophie analytique. Etant donné la façon dont cette discipline fonctionne, nous avons été forcées de prendre une voie séparatiste, en quelque sorte, ce qui a eu des inconvénients sur le plan intellectuel. [...] Ce que je veux dire, c'est que la philosophie féministe est devenue une discipline en soi et qu'elle n'a jamais pénétré les autres champs. [...] [Aux Etats-Unis], les études de genre, l'histoire féministe, tout cela a changé la façon dont tous les historiens pensent, mis à part pour quelques spécimens paléolithiques, mais la philosophie féministe n'a jamais eu ce type d'impact. Le courant dominant continue comme si nous n'existions pas - et nous avons constitué nos propres sociétés, nos journau

"[W]e love race - we love identity - because we don't love class. We love thinking that the differences that divide us are not the differences between those of us who have money and those who don't but are instead the differences between those of us who are black and those who are white or Asian or Latino or whatever. A world where some of us don't have enough money is a world where the differences between us present a problem: the need to get rid of inequality or to justify it. A world where some of us are black and some of us are white - or biracial or Native American or transgendered - is a world where the differences between us present a solution: appreciating our diversity. So we like to talk about the differences we can appreciate, and we don't like to talk about the ones we can't. [...] Contrasting the obligations of diversity (being nice to each other) with the obligations of equality (giving up our money) [this book] focuses in particular on how the c