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
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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.
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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.
It doesn't matter how many women we get into game production. If the only people evaluating the work we do continue to be men, women's voices will never be heard.
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
It's really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet - which we do.
American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!
Today, despite all of the gains we have made, neither men nor women have real choice. Until women have supportive employers and colleagues as well as partners who share family responsibilities, they don't have real choice. And until men are fully respected for contributing inside the home, they don't have real choice either.