Body Politics Quotes

“Believe in the vending machine. Become the vending machine. I am a vending machine. I will understand my body!”
― Hirukuma, Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon, Vol. 1

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol [of] insubordination and [of a] valuable property that needed to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.

The question of European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure − when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations.

Contemporary records reveal that this was happening [during] a period of social and political uncertainty, and that the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“For those of us who can and do choose to 'eat right,' understanding the cultural politics of dietary health presents a particular kind of call to awareness and accountability. Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually go unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with dietary ideals or inhabit the kinds of bodies that imply we do may think that our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate, but history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health