was being free 𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒔?

FRANCES | TME | HYSTERICAL

[an-ruraiocht]

Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’

One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of st

[an-ruraiocht]

The underlying idea is that in some people – and I stress some people – chronic illness might look like this: a very ancient and primitive part of the brain and nervous system believes it has detected danger, possibly a tiger or something like that, and so it produces pain or a whole range of symptoms in an effort to get the sufferer to close down and protect herself. The nervous system does this very effectively and it can carry on doing it for decades. It is really very inventive. I feel that mine ought to be eligible for some sort of prize.

[endless-formsmostbeautiful]

Then I told him that I felt that Norman Bates, if he were a painting, would be painted by Hopper, and he agreed. So we had kind of that discussion, writer and actor, about the character. He had an incredible grasp on Norman Bates and the situation that he was in. I think Tony Perkins must have known what it was like to be trapped. —Joseph Stefano, screenwriter, in The Making of Psycho (1997)

PSYCHO dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

HOUSE BY THE RAILROAD by Edward Hopper (1925)

[conradandfaulkner]

“One mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.”

— Precarious Life

[derangedrhythms]

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.

Sheridan Le Fanu, from 'Carmilla'

[raisinchallah]

ok joanna russ lets say more

[hypokeimena]

image: screenshot of text starting mid sentence. text reads: this behavior is almost identical with my explanation of K/S: "the woman recognizes in the faggot a socio-erotic position she herself would like to hold, as the recognized peer and the lover of a male, a position impossible for women in sexist culture to secure."[5] /end ID

[ramenheim]

Emi Koyama has passed. 🥀

[genderkoolaid]

Extremely sad to see. She was apparently only 51.

Folks, if you don't know who Emi Koyama was, you should. Her website (eminism.org, which is a delightful pun) has a ton of her work entirely for free.

You can read the Transfeminist Manifesto in particular here. Emi considered it a historical document and she wrote a very good self-critique in 2008 (included in the document) on the subject of the Manifesto, white feminism, and the lack of inclusion of trans and genderqueer people who aren't trans women. I highly encourage everyone who wants to involve themselves in transfeminism to read her work, not because it is perfect, but because I do think Emi Koyama's Manifesto represents the best intentions for transfeminism: the desire to challenge cissexism, to take activism seriously and compassionately, and a commitment to being open and honest about where we fall short and how we can do better.

I really appreciate this quote from her, which I hadn't seen before, on the subject of feminism needing to "fit in" trans people:

Cis feminists do not own feminism. We don't need to "fit trans people into feminist theory"; we simply need to challenge cissexism in feminist movements and theories. Trans people do not need to be explained by feminist theory; we need to start from the fact that trans people exist and matter.

And it would be a crime to not mention how hard she fought specifically for women of color, to challenge racism and imperialism (white/western and non-white/non-western) in feminist spaces and in general, as well as her intersex activism, and far more. She had such a drive to contribute to, engage with, and push for more and better feminist discourse.

You will be remembered fondly, Emi Koyama. Thank you for all your work and for all your life.

[spacesheeeeeep]

La pianiste (2001) dir. Michael Haneke // Marnie (1964) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

[plaguedocboi]

I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.

It was not until well into my adulthood that I realized most people do not have complicated feelings about movies where people have to kill a scary alien monster, nor is that necessarily meant to be part of the narrative (unless it very obviously is). They just want the scary thing to die because it’s scary. I don’t have a real conclusion to this I just started thinking about it for some reason.

[toiich]

Vampyr (1932), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

[blackfolksintime]

25-year-old Cab Calloway photographed by Carl Van Vechten on January 12, 1933.

[grotto-esque]

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”

—Susan Sontag, On Photography

[abridurif]

“Nous ne croyons pas en général que la sexualité ait le rôle d’une infrastructure dans les agencements du désir, ni qu’elle forme une énergie de transformation, ou bien de neutralisation et sublimation. La sexualité ne peut être pensée que comme un flux parmi d’autres, entrant en conjonction avec d’autres flux, émettant des particules qui entrent elles-mêmes sous tel ou tel rapport de vitesse ou de lenteur dans le voisinage de telles autres particules. Aucun agencement ne peut être qualifié d’après un flux exclusif. Quelle triste idée de l’amour, qu’en faire un rapport entre deux personnes, dont il faudrait au besoin vaincre la monotonie en y ajoutant d’autres personnes encore. Et ce n’est pas mieux quand on pense quitter le domaine des personnes en rabattant la sexualité sur la construction de petites machines perverses ou sadiques qui ferment la sexualité sur un théâtre de fantasmes : quelque chose de sale ou de moisi se dégage de tout cela, trop sentimental en vérité, trop narcissique, comme lorsqu’un flux se met à tourner sur soi-même, et à croupir.”

— Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Flammarion, 1996

[shamebats]

The drug addict is today's scapegoat. Viewed honestly, much of our culture is geared towards enticing us away from ourselves, into externally directed activity, into diverting the mind from ennui and distress. The hardcore addict surrenders her pretence about that. Her life is all about escape. The rest of us can, with varying success, maintain our charade, but to do so, we banish her to the margins of society.

From 'In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction' by Gabor Maté.

[charnel-grounds]

Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

[friendsxfamily]

COLORS Magazine, Issue 3.

[beatainfernaluz]

Painting by the great Christopher Fisher

[hauntedbyillangelsonly]

Shape-shifting is one of fairy tale’s dominant and characteristic wonders: hands are cut off, found and reattached, babies’ throats are slit, but they are later restored to life, a rusty lamp turns into an all-powerful talisman, a humble pestle and mortar becomes the winged vehicle of the fairy enchantress Baba Yaga, the beggar changes into the powerful enchantress and the slattern in the filthy donkeyskin into a golden-haired princess. More so than the presence of fairies, the moral function, the imagined antiquity and oral anonymity of the ultimate source, and the happy ending (though all these factors help towards a definition of the genre), metamorphosis defines the fairy tale.

—Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers