Being taught to despise your body is being taught to perhaps admire someone else's body more than yours - being taught that your body is good for certain things and not for others.
Gold and precious gems are, in many places, the one form of wealth a woman can use to protect and enhance herself within the elaborate structure of patriarchy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how women use wealth, specifically gold and gems, to assert their autonomy in a patriarchal society.
Wangechi Mutu's quote reflects the complex relationship between wealth and gender. In societies governed by patriarchal structures, traditional forms of wealth such as gold and precious gems can empower women, allowing them to fortify their social status and provide a means of self-advocacy. This reflects the challenge women face in a system that often limits their rights and freedoms, showing that material wealth can serve as a tool for self-protection and expression within these confines.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a women's empowerment seminar to discuss financial independence.
More from Wangechi Mutu
All quotes βThe ocean is the source of life. We all come from there. I think about these one-celled creatures, and I think about the planet. It is related to my obsession with biology, even if it's only a layperson's obsession. The way I visualise what's at the bottom of the ocean is very much to do with how I feel when I'm swimming in the sea.
I've always loved the idea that you think you know what you're looking at from a distance, yet when you come up close, it gets intricate and nutty and obscene and provocative.
Similar quotes
Women have much to tell us. Women are capable of seeing things in a different angle. Women can pose questions that we men cannot understand.
It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.
The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.
When I started, the press credentials said 'No women or children in the press box,' ... There are a lot of things in the workplace that you can attempt to hide, and I could not hide the fact that I was a woman. I was always the only woman in the press box, and they didn't even have ladies rooms.
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.