Rachel Kushner Quotes

I've never played on my gender.

My parents never told me, 'You're supposed to wear pink,' or 'You're meant to do this because you're a girl.'

I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.

I'm an only child, so I never had sisters to tell me what I should like based on my gender. I liked what the boys were doing and thought: 'Why let them have all the fun?'

We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

I think human beings have a really broad spectrum of traits, and I almost feel implicated when we say, 'Men are like this, women are like this.' Nobody was telling me, 'Don't get dirty, don't play in the mud, girls don't do that.'

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

Why does 'writer' have no gender, but 'actor' has a gender? What is that?

We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of.

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

Physical, emotional, psychological and social differences [between the sexes] exist and dare not be disregarded.

I was really raised in a gender-neutral household. I always knew I was a girl, but it never occurred to me that there was a limitation.

Clearly, we are not programmed at birth to behave a certain way based on our gender. Instead, we are trained throughout our lives to conform to our gender norms.

There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.

I'm totally fine with myself. It's the other people I run into out there who are so hung up on gender. The way it trips them up is their problem, not mine.

I rarely felt or noticed any real divide between girls and boys when I was growing up. Maybe it was because I was so involved in sports and competed with the boys. Maybe it was my mom and dad, who constantly instilled confidence in me and never made me feel as though there were boy activities and girl activities.

You have your assigned sex but gender is more of a construct and I think one that is incredibly disillusioning and I think when we buy into those constructs then we start to maybe, unbeknownst to ourselves, cause real damage to our psyches.

I never had an issue with gender.

Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.

I've always seen the world as very gender-neutral.

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.

If we keep on talking about masculine and feminine and following those stereotypes, then we will make women suppress and despise their so called masculine qualities and men suppress and despise their so called feminine ones, and that's where all the trouble starts.