bellemaddox

feminism.politics.theory

[bellemaddox]

"What many of us discover, however, when we begin making decisions according to our internal integrity instead of externally imposed authority, is that what we have always called our conscience is really an internalized version of external authority, an inner self-hater that gets us to do what it believes is right by means of domination, threat, fear, and guilt - by telling us the stories of estrangement."

- Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, p. 36-37

[bellemaddox]

If you want to know what the undercommons wants, … what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people (the ‘we’ who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after 'the break’ will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.

Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” as it appears in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study” (6)

[bellemaddox]

love can’t look away from itself vibrating in the cell fluttering breathless into sustained migration i feel you like dust feels water and remembers the home galaxy -- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

[bellemaddox]

Slowness is a divine thing. We have lost the habit of it. With slow, regular, harmonious movement, the consciousness immediately finds its place. The body begins to enjoy the smallest thing. Attention is heightened. We take in the world's full freshness. We communicate. We open our senses to the plenitude.

Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love (71)

[bellemaddox]

The quality of the mother's life--however, embattled and unprotected--is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist.

Adrienne Rich, quoted in Andrea O’Reilly’s Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (2016) (p.75)

[bellemaddox]

One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. … What is needed is the realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

Martin Luther King Jr., appearing in Maija Lanas and Michalinos Zembylas’ essay, “Towards a Transformational Political Concept of Love in Critical Education,” Studies in Philosophy of Education 34, no. 1 (2015): 31-44.

[flowerinaflame]

From The Creative Spirit: Children’s Literature (1977), June Jordan

[dadalux]

Sushe Felix - “Mountain Valley Storm” 36” x 48” acrylic on panel

[happiersuggestion]

there are people you haven’t met yet who will love you

[bellemaddox]

"According to Anzaldua (1987: 3), 'borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.' She also defined borderlands as 'vague and undetermined spaces created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition.' Why do we set B/borders between the ways we love each other? Why do we keep forcing ourselves to love in limiting/limited ways? What formas de queremos could exist beyond the socially constructed B/borderlands that limit our experiences of 'radical interconnectedness/interconnectivity' (Keating 2007: 44)? What are the borders we need (or not) to love?

"The notions 'affective B/borderlands' and 'B/borderland affects' can be theoretical tools that might serve as a starting point to envision and embody forms of relationality yet to be created, explored, and named. 'Affective B/borderlands' are those contradictory, complicated, and blurred emotional locations that we have been taught to fear - to avoid like minefields. They are the residue of the unnatural boundaries established among the ways in which we love each other. We enter those borderlands when we start to reject hierarchical modes of relationality."

- Krizia Puig, "The TransAlien Manifesto: Future Love(s), Sex Tech, and My Efforts to Re-member Your Embrace" (2019)

[bellemaddox]

Mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their children, extended family and friends, community caregivers, radical childcare collectives, all of us breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we need urgently to transform are m/othering ourselves.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, m/other ourselves:  a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering, in Revolutionary Mothering:  Love on the Front Lines (2016) p. 21-22

[bellemaddox]

What has been called, in some limited but powerful circles (like mainstream media and even alternative media) ‘mothering,’ has been almost entirely white mothering, to the point where it needed not even be said. The word ‘white,’ which dominates, calls itself by no name, no color, so much so that ‘mothering’ can be code for ‘white mothering’ and we find this extremely dangerous. We find it important to counter that narrative in real practical ways.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens and Mai’a Williams, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016) p. 4-5

[baby--blue]

[bellemaddox]

And now, after living beside you for all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness -- as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the foresaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, however loose) -- I'm no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

[bellemaddox]

“We had happy years together, nine of them, the last four she was mine alone. ...

Since her second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways perhaps; since the father longed for his child and had a right to some of her society; and since the child had a right to know and love her father -- I did not mean her to suffer the losses of my youth -- this seemed the right thing to do. No one suffered from it but myself. This, however, was entirely overlooked in the furious condemnation which followed. I had ‘given up my child.’ ...

I lived without her, temporarily, but why did they think I liked it? She was all I had. ...

That was thirty years ago. I have to stop typing and cry as I tell about it. There were years, years, when I could never see a mother and child together without crying, or even a picture of them. I used to make  friends with any child I could so as to hold it in my arms for a little. ...”

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman on allowing her daughter to live with her father, in The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, An Autobiography (1935) p. 162-164

[bellemaddox]

Childhood is a transient condition; what we are trying to 'raise' is a competent adult. Just 'minding' under compulsion, does not train the mind to govern conduct by principle or by consequence later in life.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an Autobiography p.157

[bellemaddox]

“Now Love is more than wanting. Love is the infinite desire to benefit, a longing to give not merely a hungry wish to take.”

-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1994)