representation

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

It may sound like I am making too much out of all this, but the only way you can allow a kid to truly dream is if you expand their idea of what is currently possible. A kid who has nothing, sees nothing, and is taught nothing can only dream of breakfast. They can only hope to get to the next moment successfully. I want more than that for my kids...just like my mom wanted more than that for me. And I want them to want more than that too.

If we really want to represent God in our day and time, we must embrace knowledge.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives__heir avatars__n the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the __ssue_ books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, __orry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different._ You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

There should be no single representation in the autism world. Think about this if someone got up on stage and talked about having __on-autistic syndrome_ and made the assumption every one with this syndrome is the same we would be in big trouble. That applies to autism as well - it isn't one condition, there are profile differences between Autism and AS and all autism "fruits salads" are different. That is how diverse autism is.

The characters so many Bollywood actresses portray are ultimately flat, uncomplicated, two-dimensional stock characters that typically range between the girl-next-door and the diva. They may be flawed in small ways, but ultimately lack nuance, conform to and reinforce cultural expectations of a wholesome but ultimately submissive Indian women. The likability of these flat and boring characters hold the actresses' off screen reputations in good stead but reinforce the very norms that imprison and render so many Indian women vulnerable to disrespect and sexism.

Entertainment in its broadest sense- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-- has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.

America Is A GunEngland is a cup of tea. France, a wheel of ripened brie.Greece, a short, squat olive tree.America is a gun.Brazil is football on the sand.Argentina, Maradona's hand.Germany, an oompah band.America is a gun.Holland is a wooden shoe.Hungary, a goulash stew.Australia, a kangaroo.America is a gun.Japan is a thermal spring.Scotland is a highland fling.Oh, better to be anythingthan America as a gun.

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative__he purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory__t is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we__e to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

I just like to say I'm from London, I don't have any specific area I represent. I'm not representing for a small group of people. I'd like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody's a bit nerdy. I'm more interested in that than in where they're from. I'm more interested in what people do.

It is more substantial to represent a purpose, rather than just a title.

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates __hiteness._ These folks left the film saying it was __mazing,_ __arvellous,_ incredibly funny,_ worthy of statements like, __idn__ you just love it?_ And no, I didn__ love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

Big government = oligarchy. Simple equation. Big government = loss of representation.

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.