Kim Chernin Quotes & Sayings

A woman obsessed with her body is also obsessed with the limitations of her emotional life. — Kim Chernin

It frequently happens that when the dominant culture loses a vision or actively suppresses it, this lost knowledge arises again among those excluded from that culture. — Kim Chernin

What unites the women who seek to reduce their weight is the fact that they look for an answer to life's problems in the control of their bodies and appetites. A woman who walks through the doors of a weight watching organization and enters the women's reduction movement has allowed her culture to persuade her that significant relief from personal and cultural dilemma is to be found in the reduction of her body, thus, her decision, although she may not be aware of it, enters the domain of the body politik and becomes symbolically a political act." p.101 — Kim Chernin

Whenever women have made any social gains, whether it's being accepted as athletes or moving into the professions, it's going to be contradicted with an image of woman as small, diminished, reduced, brought back to a childish body. The result is that a lot of extraordinary power is going to be diverted into making oneself smaller than one is meant to be. — Kim Chernin

Fortunately, the mind is restless; when it uncovers a layer of its own deception, gives up an illusion, exposes a lie, it does not stand idle for long before the collapse of its earlier assumptions. — Kim Chernin

I fear, as any daughter would, losing myself back into the mother. — Kim Chernin

Where hunger is imposed by external circumstances, the act of starvation remains literal, a tragic biological event that does not serve metaphoric or symbolic purposes. It is only in a country where one is able to choose hunger that elective starvation may come to express cultural conflict or even social protest. — Kim Chernin

Secretly, we wish anyone we love will think exactly the way we do. — Kim Chernin

It is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day. — Kim Chernin

Science is not neutral in its judgments, nor dispassionate, nor detached ... — Kim Chernin