Cries and Whispers is the world women have been assigned to — to use Ingmar Bergman’s film title — not that of dialectical thinking.
In our culture, they’ve been assigned the world of feeling, because what men are supposed to take care of is action and strength and executive ability and capacity for detachment and all of that, so women are the repositories of feeling and sensitivity. The arts in our society are conceived of as basically feminine activities; certainly they weren’t in the past. That’s because men didn’t define themselves so much in terms of the repression of women.
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling… which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment.
We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts.
I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world.
Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.
Susan Sontag, Rolling Stone Interview
Matthew Frye-Castillo 