"   The past is never an opening; at best, it is evidence that what exists is not inevitable.   "

"   The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.   "

"   If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … It is for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts …   "