4 Quotes & Sayings By Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a poet, writer and translator from Kolkata, India. She has been living in the United States since her early twenties, and has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California at San Diego, a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia Extension Program, an artist-in-residence at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, and a writer-in-residence at the University of California Santa Barbara. In addition to writing poetry, she has published several collections of short stories as well as essays on literature and art. Her work as a translator includes books on Bengali literature and poetry by contemporary writers from Bengal Read more

Samhita Mukhopadhyay teaches creative writing for fiction through UVA's MFA program. She is currently on the faculty of CUNY's Queens College and edits a literary journal called Spring Journal.

1
The notion that women shouldn't care about personal success -- or the work that gets them there -- is disengenuous; it is impossible for women not to have jobs anymore, so it doesn't make sense to expect them to structure their lives around getting married. The real failure is our cultural incapacity to make room for women to live and thrive outside of traditional conceptions of femininity and relationships. After all, we can eat without marriage, but not without work. Samhita Mukhopadhyay
2
It is hard to feel safe and comfortable when the only measures for what is safe and comfortable are normative ideas you don't abide by. Samhita Mukhopadhyay
3
The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man.. As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women's attainment of better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity. Samhita Mukhopadhyay