Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

A commune is supposed to dissolve hierarchy, but Hersh’s line quietly indicts how even utopian experiments can reproduce the same old sorting mechanisms. “I grew up in a commune” sets the scene with a whiff of countercultural idealism, then she drops the knife: “where no one considered me female, particularly.” The odd, dangling “particularly” is doing heavy work. It suggests not a clean liberation from gender, but an ongoing, half-articulated refusal to see her as she understood herself - or a refusal to pin her down in any stable category at all.

The intent feels less like a tidy claim (“gender didn’t matter”) and more like a bruise being pressed. Communes often sell a fantasy of neutrality: no patriarchy, no bourgeois roles, no rigid identities. Hersh hints at the cost of that neutrality when it becomes erasure. Not being “considered” female can read as freedom from sexist expectations, but it can also mean being denied the social and bodily realities that come with girlhood: vulnerability, desire, violation, even simple recognition.

Contextually, Hersh comes out of an alternative-rock lineage where autobiography is delivered in shards, not diary entries. The phrasing is spare, almost offhand, which makes it land harder; she’s not pleading for understanding, she’s reporting a fact that still refuses to settle. The subtext is that identity isn’t only self-made. It’s negotiated, granted, withheld - and communes, for all their ideals, are still made of people.