Marilyn Frye Quotes on Politics
Marilyn Frye's The Politics of Reality (1983) gave second-wave feminist philosophy one of its most influential analytical instruments. The image of the bird-cage — a structure whose oppressive character becomes visible only when one steps back to see the systematic interrelation of bars that, considered individually, seem like trivial restrictions — supplies the analysis of oppression as a structural rather than an episodic phenomenon. The essays on sexism, white women's racism, and the analytical category of the world-traveler develop the broader framework of feminist political analysis that the volume has continued to supply for subsequent generations of feminist philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Oppression is the bird-cage; one bar alone does not make a cage, but together the bars trap.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“To see clearly what oppression is, you must look at the macroscopic structure of the wires.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Anger that wakes the world is the work of philosophy as much as of politics.”
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Attributed to Marilyn Frye:
“Whiteness is a kind of looking that does not know it is looking.”