britneyspears_lucky.mp3

[esthergreenwould-blog]

Leslie Jamison, “The Empathy Exams”

[esthergreenwould-blog]

Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

I’m not ashamed Love is large and monstrous

Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)

[aseaofquotes]

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

[heteroglossia]

So you have to wonder,For this, I have abandoned all my other lives. What impossible longing. How you stood there, among white oaks.

Isabelle Shepherd & Jacqueline Winter Thomas (via heteroglossia)

[ablogwithaview]

Women speaking of mirrors and prettiness make it all too clear that even for pretty women, mirrors are the foci of anxious, not gratified, narcissism. The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists’ imaginations; I have yet to find her in women’s books or women’s memoirs or in life. Women spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, but the “compulsion to visualize the self” is a phrase Moers uses of women in her chapter on Gothic freaks and horrors; the compulsion is a constant check on one’s (possible) beauty, not an enjoyment of it.

Joanna Russ, “Aesthetics,” How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983).   (via icedcoffeegirl)

[arterialtrees]

From The Phenomenology of Anger by Adrienne Rich

[arterialtrees]

andrea dworkin 

[arterialtrees]

[arterialtrees]

andrea dworkin 

[elanormcinerney]

Alice Notley | Along a Spectral Trail | Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | Preface to the 1993 Edition | Between Men

[esthergreenwould-blog]

heteronormative love plots + fantasy/desire + the bachelor

1, 6: Suzannah Showler, Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor

2: Misha Kavka, Reality TV

3: Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

4: Roxane Gay, “The Marriage Plot”

5: Elif Batuman, Fresh Air Interview

[lagattamelata]

People learn to identify with love the way they identify with commodities: the notions of personal autonomy, consent, choice, and fulfillment so powerful in love discourse seem to be the same as those promised by national capitalism. At the same time, romance is a vehicle for marketing heterosexuality as the very form of fantasy and also the normal context in which fantasy can be lived, but not in a generic way: the heteronormative love plot is at its most ideological when it produces subjects who believe that their love story expresses their true, nuanced, and unique feelings, their own personal destiny.

Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (via lagattamelata)

[deltaraindream-blog]

I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality. The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.

Lauren Berlant (via deltaraindream-blog)

[poeticque]

Desire has bad eyesight, as it were: remember, that the object is not a thing, but a cluster of fantasmic investments in a scene that represents itself as offering some traction, not a solution to the irreparable contradictions of desire. On your behalf, in an effort to release you from abandonment to autoeroticism — or, more precisely, to restore your autoeroticism to sociability — your desire misrecognizes a given object as that which will restore you to something that you sense effectively as a hole in you. Your object, then, does not express transparently who you “are” but says something about what it takes for you to anchor yourself in space and time. Meanwhile the story of your life becomes the story of the detours your desire takes

Lauren Berlant, in Desire/Love (via poeticque)

[jacobwren]

Emotion doesn’t produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes you epistemologically incoherent—you don’t know what you think, you think a lot of different kinds of things, you feel a lot of different kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can. The pressure on emotion to reveal truth produces all sorts of misrecognition of what one’s own motives are, and the world’s. People feel relations of identification and revenge that they don’t admire, and attachments and aversions to things that they wouldn’t necessarily want people to know that they have.
 It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what there already is—a heap of conventionally 
prioritized but incoherent affective concepts of the world that we carry around. We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.

Lauren Berlant (via jacobwren)

[storiesoflovelustandhim]

If I’m mad, he tries and tries and that’s when I know he loves me more than I do. Someone always loves the other more but that changes everyday. Intimacy is a series of tiny movements, minuscule shifts in power dynamics. Intimacy seems more real than Love, more True. Sex is real but not consoling, intimacy is reassuring.

I wanted to be the knife by sara sutterlin (via storiesoflovelustandhim)