Double Bind Quotes & Sayings

Both the radical and reformist sides of this debate will insist that their approach will lead to salvation, whereas the reciprocal approach will ultimately lead to doom. (More specifically, reformists will accuse radicals of "holding back the movement," and radicals will accuse reformists of "reinforcing the gender system.") The problem with both these approaches is that they fail to appreciate that queer people are a heterogeneous group. Each of us faces a unique set of circumstances, and therefore we may respond quite differently to any given situation. But even more importantly, these approaches fail to realize that because queer people are marked, we have been placed in a double bind. Neither prescribed solution gets to the heart of the problem: the fact that other people mark us as queer, and by doing so, they will perceive, interpret, and treat us differently than the straight majority no matter what course of action we take. — Julia Serano

Noah presses upon my back to bend me double in preparation for the order. He tosses aside my clogs in order to bind left thumb to right toe, then right thumb to left toe in the form of the holy cross. It has always seemed to me a forgiving God would not condone such abuse of the crucifix. — Janet Graber

Thought: maybe this is what a mother feels like at times. When she can't help one of her children. When she has to just stand by and watch her daughter strike out on the softball field, watch her son fail at math despite whatever effort he may put in. This ache. This defining double bind of roaring, passionate protectiveness and its equal, weighty, leaden uselessness. And even the impatience with it all; and then the guilt about feeling impatient, about finding it a bit oppressive despite the immeasurable love. Maybe this is what mothering sometimes feels like, I thought. — Robin Black

This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. — Stephen Schneider

But artists aren't the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they're often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are "sent back" to recover the territory are always those who don't mind associating with the colored people! And it's a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers. — Bell Hooks

This struck me as something of a double bind. Speak and your possession of an opinion was plain, clear to anyone. Refrain from speaking and still this was proof of an opinion. If Captain Rubran were to say, Truly, I have no opinion on the matter, would that merely be another proof she had one? — Ann Leckie

The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Its emotional character ... is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency - sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying - are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. — David Foster Wallace

It is easy to see how quickly expectations become layered, competitive and conflicting. This is how the shame web works. We have very few realistic options that allow us to meet any of these expectations. Most of the options that we do have feel like a "double bind." When Marilyn Frye describes a double bind as "a situation in which options are very limited and all of them expose us to penalty, censure or deprivation. — Brene Brown

The command to be free is a double bind — Kim Stanley Robinson

A term came to her that they used on occasion at the shelter: the double bind ... They used the expression in much the same way that they would use a term like catch-22. — Chris Bohjalian

Schizophrenia
its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it
remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"
a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms — Gregory Bateson

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old. — Elizabeth Janeway

It described the double bind of women in that moment: they were getting congratulations for being fully liberated and empowered while being punished by a host of articles, reports, and books telling them that, in becoming liberated, they had become miserable; they were incomplete, missing out, losing, lonely, desperate. — Rebecca Solnit

The pressures of the current neoliberal capitalist system of health care and its financing force health professionals into a double bind. Either they spend the time and energy necessary to listen to and fully treat the patient and put their job and clinic in economic jeopardy, or they move at a frenetic pace to keep their practice afloat and only partially attend to the patient in their presence. — Seth Holmes