Daily Inspiration Quote by Katherine Dunn

Dunn is poking at a paradox that modern advocacy still can’t quite escape: to win sympathy, funding, or policy change, campaigns often package women as damage rather than as agents. The line is deliberately abrasive because it refuses the comforting script where “raising awareness” is automatically righteous. It suggests that even well-meaning movements can smuggle in an old premise - women as inherently fragile - and then call it progress.

Her phrasing does a lot of work. “Intense campaigns” nods to the moral urgency of anti-violence politics, but “all too often depend” shifts the spotlight to the movement’s marketing logic. Depend is a cold word: not “use,” not “mention,” but rely on, like a structural support. Dunn’s target isn’t the reality of violence; it’s the rhetorical economy built around it, where victimhood becomes the most legible identity a woman can claim in public without being punished for ambition or anger.

Context matters: Dunn wrote from the late-20th-century feminist ecosystem where gains were real, but the public-facing language of harm sometimes became the entry ticket to legitimacy. The subtext is a warning about the unintended backlash baked into that strategy: if you train institutions to see women primarily as victims, you risk justifying paternalism, surveillance, and “protection” that looks suspiciously like control. Dunn’s intent is not to undercut survivors, but to insist that liberation can’t be sold solely through injury without quietly narrowing what women are allowed to be.