7 Quotes by Nivedita Menon

There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe.

If we are all bad women, then patriarchy had better watch out.

[D]emanding wages for housework (…) forced recognition of the fact that the domestic work which women do has economic value. But many feminists feel that this demand leaves untouched the sexual division of labour - indeed, measures like paid maternity leave (…) can be seen as a form of’wages for motherhood’ but(…) it fixes women more rigidly into work defined as ‘women’s work’.

An ideal feminist world would not be one in which abortions were free and common, but one in which women would have greater control over pregnancy, and in which the circumstances that make pregnancies unwanted, would have been transformed. Until then, in a hugely imperfect, unfair and sexist world, I believe feminists must defend women's access to legal and safe abortions, whenever they decide to have them, whatever the reason for their decision.

[E]ven today, when confident and self-affirmative lesbian identities have emerged and are available to women, images of `lesbianism’ are still regularly appropriated by a male heterosexual pornographic imagination which cannot accept that this is one party to which men are not invited and at which their presence is not necessary.

The whole point about ‘romance’ is that the woman is somehow always smaller, more diminutive in a cute sort of way, while the man is adult.

This entire system functions on the assumption that women do housework for love .