Body Politics Quotes

Women's bodies have always been used as a spectacle and objectified.

Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.

Women are put in a position of feeling embarrassed about their bodies. It's so ridiculous, but also astounding - we have to always be apologetic about having created the human race.

My existence in Hollywood is a political statement, because there are so few women who are plus-sized or above a size 6.

My love is political. My body is political. I talk even when I don't speak.

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter.

The human body is always treated as an image of society.

I dance as a political statement, because disabled bodies are inherently political, but I mostly dance for all the same reasons anyone else does: because it heals my spirit and fills me with joy.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul - politics does the same thing for the body.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'

For a while, I became a model scout and agent, thinking naively I could change the industry from the inside, and even kicked off the famous 'size zero debate' with an article I wrote to the 'Evening Standard' about my concerns from behind the curtain of the business, back in 2005.

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done.

A woman's body and a woman's image is a very political thing, so I trust another woman to understand what that's like and how to portray it in a way people can relate to.

While the political right may moralize sex, the political left is doing it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.

I'm used to being told by society that I must regulate my body to fit the norm. I'm used to the fact that images of unaltered women are seen as unacceptable.

I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance - the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.

Because Melissa McCarthy actually is a fat woman, she isn't allowed to make brash statements about body acceptance. She has to apologize for her body.

Why do women always get pointed at for their bodies?

Women's bodies have become a real battleground for politics.

If someone is going to say something nasty to me about my body, that means my body is powerful. If you really stopped your day because you needed to say something to me, that's power.