I want people to be sensitive about how women feel and think.

There are some people who still feel threatened by strong women. That's their problem. It's not mine.

I do want to inspire people - young girls who may like to wear boys' clothes and who romanticize women and feel nothing wrong with it.

People feel feminists are aggressive, men-hating women with a little moustache. I think it's got a bad reputation because when feminism came into being, we were facing so much opposition that we had to be strident and aggressive.

Women in their 40s have gone through quite a few different things, and so the roles are going to reflect that. People say, 'Oh, it's done by 40,' and now everyone knows it's not. I actually feel like the roles are a lot more interesting.

This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come - this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don't we want it to be mainstream?

I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.

I was in Toronto when the big Women's March was going on, and I thought, 'Well, I've never been to a protest, and I can't sit this one out, and they're having a gathering here in Toronto, so I may as well go,' and gosh, I didn't expect 60,000 or 65,000 people to be there - it was huge! It was something that I didn't feel I could sit out at all.

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