Maurice Berger Quotes & Sayings

While an increasing number of male academic, political, and cultural figures have felt comfortable enough in recent years to proclaim themselves feminists, absorbing aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, their gestures are most often built on an essentialized and static dichotomy between men and women. But men must do more than admit their complicity in patriarchy; they must begin to rethink the very boundaries that shape and define what it means to be a man.

Conversely, women must play an important part in this reevaluation, an idea suggest by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwikc's admonition that "when something is about masculinity, it isn't always 'about men'." Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone. — Maurice Berger