Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Cheryl Clarke.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
Cheryl L. Clarke is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist who continues to dedicate her life to the recognition and advancement of Black and Queer people. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States. For over 40 years, Cheryl Clarke worked at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance. She currently lives in Hobart, N.Y., the Book Village of the Catskills, after having spent much of her life in New Jersey. With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is co-owner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a new, used, and rare bookstore in Hobart. Actively involved in her community, Clarke along with her sister Breena Clarke, a novelist, organize the Hobart Festival of Women Writers each September
For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.
Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen...[Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny.
The woman who takes a woman lover lives dangerously in patriarchy.
So, all of us would do well to stop fighting each other for our space at the bottom, because there ain't no more room.