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“Counter culture? Capital will commodify it, instigate it, reproduce it and sell it. There is no outside the loop.”
— Monsieur Dupont. Anarchists must say what only anarchists can say. [Monsieur Dupont’s New Year Message]
“There’s a much quoted proverb in the world of finance that I hate: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. I say bullshit to this. Do the poor really not know how to fish? And what good is it to know how to fish if the rights to fish are owned by powerful landlords? And if the river is polluted by upstream tyrants? And what good is it to be taught to fish if the price and distribution of fish is controlled by conglomerate monopolies?””
— Ananya Roy, “Who Profits From Poverty?“ (via whoiscamillepaglia)
i think the horror genre as a medium to express female trauma is really good and can be done in a way thats truly impactful and beautiful but when men utilise it to fulfil some fantasy of theirs and completely miss the mark and it just turns into them getting off to women’s pain makes me wanna truly commit unspeakable acts and by that i mean storm hollywood and kill every male director in sight
What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.
What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.
I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.
WHAT’S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line. In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by a gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milk Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang. How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?
Tommy Pico, from Nature Poem (via bostonpoetryslam)
Controlling us via our bodies is a core component of misogyny. The depersonalization of women’s bodies and deconstruction of us into parts, into sundered physical components we don’t personally own yet must tend to as communal property, is traumatic and intended to be. The body of a woman, in irreducible actuality as such, is never extraneous to womanhood, to misogyny, to gender as a construct; all are entwined.
To declare womanhood, meaning women’s lived experience, somehow a distinct, independent metaphysical essence unconnected to our material selves is as malicious as it is nonsensical. Yet, as women, by assignment or by recognition, our lived-in selves—our own bodies—are already so estranged we’ll accept such a ludicrous declaration when presented as some principled if esoteric means to overcome its own paradox.
Treating our embodied selves as meaningless and uninvolved impedimenta of no relevance to Actual Womanhood can seem ideal, almost, when misrepresented as recourse instead of what it is: more control wielded over us, more denial of womanhood as a complex and diversiform material experience.
To declare misogyny via material association, via bodily deconstruction, a nonentity is a strange loop of a misogynistic ouroboros. The societal discomfort caused by reclamations of women’s physical selves as our own private territory is so immense we’re afraid to say its name. The simplest acknowledgments of women’s selves as material and as material which inherently belongs to us, as women, as people, are derided and labelled suspect by any means convenient.
That bodily alienation can serve liberation or inclusivity or any good end is a lie; it serves only control. Warping it to appear distinct from more plainly status quo edicts on women-as-body-parts and body-parts-as-women is universally pernicious—except to cis men. The cis male embodiment alone is unimplicated, unimpinged upon. That speaks volumes (and by “speaks volumes” I mean screams misogyny).
“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”
— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman
“what if she likes it?” yes but WHY does she like it? why are women now overwhelmingly aroused by the thought of being the victim of sexual violence? why should we ignore this trend without question and pretend that all sex happens in a vacuum?
“In somali when we see injustice we say ‘dhiiga kuma dhaqaqo?’ which translates into ‘does your blood not move?’”
— Warsan Shire, water (via safanoora)
It is not the question “how do I access the same structures of power as my oppressor” that needs to be answered, on the contrary. The force that drives us is “how do I destroy these cruel and unjust structures?” Anything else seeks to obtain advantages that only exist because others suffer.
*jenny holzer truism font* EROTICISING WOMEN’S ANGER IS ANOTHER WAY OF DISMISSING IT
Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
when andrea dworkin said “no woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized”
“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas… . Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?”
— Toni Morrison
And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.
Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, 1972. (via megairea)
“Identity is not a bunch of little cubbyholes stuffed respectively with intellect, race, sex, class, vocation, gender. Identity flows between, over, aspects of a person. Identity is a river – a process.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa (via b—chhouse)
“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.” - AOC
“This nightmare in New Zealand feels unfathomable. Except it isn’t. The hate that killed Muslims praying in Christchurch is the hate that killed Jews praying in Pittsburgh is the hate that killed African Americans praying in Charleston is the hate that killed Sikhs praying in Wisconsin. If we don’t face white supremacy it will destroy all of us. Please God, let all of us who know the pain of being targeted for who we are have patience with each others’ imperfections. So we can join together. And be safe together. And get free together.”
— Rabbi Mike Rothbaum
Maria, “Coming Home” in A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Rakesh Ratti
“The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.”
— John Berger - Ways of Seeing