remembrance of:

homosexual, female, and dangerous

[remembranceof]

Hi all! For the sake of simplicity I have decided to move my activity to my main Tumblr account, which has been standing empty for a few years now. If you have enjoyed the content here, please feel free to follow me on auto-theory.tumblr.com. It’s pretty empty right now, but posts will accumulate as time goes by. Thanks, and lots of love!

[remembranceof]

Recently I received in the mail a literary magazine that featured an interview with Anne Carson in which she answers certain questions — the boring ones? the too personal ones? — with empty brackets [[ ]]. There is something to learn here; I probably would have written a dissertation on each query, prompting the reply I’ve heard countless times in my life: “Really, it’s terrific — it’s just the people upstairs who say we’ve got to trim it back a little.” The sight of Carson’s brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table. But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.

Maggie Nelson, from “The Argonauts”

[remembranceof]

I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.

Paul B. Preciado, from “Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era”

[aliashawkat]

You know this guy? Jackson Pollock. The drip painter. He let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random. Some place in between.  They called it automatic art.

[remembranceof]

'What's your pleasure?' you asked, then stuck around for answer.

Maggie Nelson, from “The Argonauts”

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”  ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil, from an April 13, 1942 letter to poet Joë Bousquet

[remembranceof]

I seemed to be confronted everywhere by force, never by necessity.

Simone de Beauvoir, from “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”

[remembranceof]

Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself. I had forebodings of all the separations, the refusals, the desertions to come, and of the long succession of my various deaths.

Simone de Beauvoir, from “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”

[remembranceof]

from “Good Girls,” created by Jenna Bans

[remembranceof]

From Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette”

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Just as gay marriage was never the right solution to correcting the problems of the institution of marriage, with its exclusionary and regulatory mechanisms, so transgender bathrooms will not be the solution to the problems with gender-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, clubs, lounges, gyms, and schools.

Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (135)

[remembranceof]

Dyke anger, anticolonial despair, racial rage, counterhegemonic violence, punk pugilism - these are the bleak and angry territories of the antisocial turn; these are the jagged zones within which not only self-shattering (the opposite of narcissism in a way) but other-shattering occurs. If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly,  impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.

Jack Halberstam, from “The Queer Art of Failure”

[wotamelonshuga-deactivated20220]

Landslide – Fleetwood Mac 

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (via nemophilies)

[remembranceof]

Though I don't remember, I remember my birth was my first yes. Though I was pushed, yes. Though there was screaming, yes. Though the light hurt, yes. I wanted the yes to last forever so badly later on I told myself: We’re built like drums. We couldn't make songs if we had never been hit. It was a desperate theory. [...] My yes never fit into the no of this world. I was just a little girl trying to get rid of the just and the little, got rid of the girl instead. Got rid of my yes trying to make a no so big it could go back in time, swallow everything that happened that should not have happened. And that’s how I lived. I mean, that’s how I’d been living. Decades of no no no no no no And that’s okay, an accordion could not make a song if it never closed. But then I met you and I started feeling myself open, started feeling my yes coming back and it was the sweetest thing I had ever known the reverse of being haunted, like taking a deep breath and pulling the fog off the glass. My love, my yes,

Andrea Gibson, from “Good Light,” published on the full length album “HEY GALAXY”

[natalieweepoetry]

Here’s the weight of first love in your palms, the miracle of her heart rabbiting in your mouth. Here’s un-blooding the pre-wound. Here’s lightning irradiating an open field. Here’s the moment before the glow diffuses into its bruised afterimage, when you can still see yourself haloed in the eyes of a girl who loves you. Here’s your falling star, whole.

Natalie Wee, “During” (after Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls Like Girls”)

[remembranceof]

The poetry of trans experience includes the body. How could it not? The body is the locus of so much pain, brutality, brilliance, beauty, change. I want MORE poems about our bodies: destabilizing, uncomfortable, powerful, and wise: deforming the forms that history and oppression have forced us into. Names, families, burial, et cetera: there is so much poetry here.

Chase Berggrun, untitled statement on Beyond Special Issue