Dora 💫

she/her

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

Do you understand the violence it took to become this gentle?

[dorattt-irl]

[dorattt-irl]

"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me."

~ Audre Lorde

[makotoscoffee]

Various cover artworks for Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

[bbrothertedd]

[trixclibrarian]

...rituals as symbolic techniques for making oneself at home in the world.

Byung-Chul Han {The disappearance of rituals}

[funeral]

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld

[funeral]

Laing's important concepts of "ontological security" and "ontological insecurity" in The Divided Self are about our "at-homeness" in the world. The ontologically secure person feels his or her life as "real, alive, whole[,] as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly this his identity and autonomy are never in question". This is not the case for the ontologically insecure person who in ordinary circumstances "may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.

M. Guy Thompson (ed.), The Legacy of R.D. Laing

[metamorphesque]

My love, I’m so pleased you’re putting on the pounds. I love you utterly. I am kissing you, my head-spinning happiness, every little pound by itself …

Vladimir Nabokov, "Letters to Véra"

[shisasan]

Virginia Woolf, The Waves originally published: 1931

[innerchildabortionclinic]

nothing more flattering than someone saying "oh don't get her going" in reference to you when a topic you're passionate about is brought up

[femmefatalevibe]

Essential Feminist Texts Booklist

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

A Vindication of The Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by Bell Hooks

Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by  Shulamith Firestone 

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner 

Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape by Jessica Valenti

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez 

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit

The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women by Alicia Malone

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Is This Normal?: Judgment-Free Straight Talk about Your Body by  Dr. Jolene Brighten

Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D

The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jennifer Gunter

The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women by Anushay Hossain 

Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn 

The Turnaway Study: The Cost of Denying Women Access to Abortion by Diana Greene Foster, Ph.D

Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Orna Donath

[haggishlyhagging]

There is also much truth in the clichés that "behind every man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

[whendidmythoughtsgocrazy]

Nearly everything I’ve learnt about love, I’ve learnt in my long term friendships with women.

k.b. // “everything i know about love” by dolly alderton

[aseaofquotes]

Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

[mournfulroses]

Virginia Woolf, from her novel titled "The Waves," originally published in 1931

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Lina A.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Kait Rokowski, from "The Civil Guillotine" in So Much For the Mercy Kill