The Wave Breaks

There is a danger in making suffering beautiful.

[watercolourstorm]

my problem with a lot of body positivity / progressive beauty culture stuff is that it focuses on expanding the definition of beautiful rather than deconstructing the idea that physical beauty indicates worth. my difficulties with living in a body (and therefore with living, period) often come back to the fact that no matter how tightly i control my body, i am viewed as either object of disgust or object of desire (occasionally both simultaneously). i can never be neutral. i can never be subject. my difficulty with existing would not be assuaged, at least not for long, by winning the game of “beautiful.” winning is not the same as having agency or personhood. we don’t need to change the rules of the game. we need to stop playing.

[antronaut]

Gustav Klimt - Freundinnen (1913)

pencil on paper 55 x 35 cm

[aseaofquotes]

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

[seeselfblack]

We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction… 

                                              —  “all about love: New Visions” by bell hooks

[smallnouns]

It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing.

—Jack Gilbert, from “Horses at Midnight Without a Moon”

—Brecht, “Motto” (trans. John Willett)

[asloversdrown]

[chaloloo-moved]

Visit Original Link

I could not get through September without a battle

I faced death, I went in with my arms swinging

but I heard my own breath

I had to face that I’m still living

I’m still flesh, I hold on to awful feelings

I’m not dead, there’s no end, my face is red

My blood falls harshly, my heart beats loudly

My chest still draws breath. I hold it. I’m buoyant

[wlwellbutrin]

we train young girls to ignore their hunger, to walk and stand and sit like ladies, to paint over or cover their pimples and stretch marks and cellulite, and then we are shocked when they grow up and become women who are alienated from their own bodies

[wlwellbutrin]

people really want to miss the point of this post huh! when you starve yourself to reach a “preferred” body type because the one you have is called ugly; when you moderate every aspect of your movement to fit a feminine ideal; when you perceive harmless features of your face and body as “flaws” that must be covered—that’s being alienated from your physical form! that’s viewing yourself as two you’s, the mind and the body that must be fixed and controlled. that’s my point. not whether or not putting on eyeshadow is enjoyable for you personally. practice some critical thinking.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

James Baldwin, from “The Fire Next Time,” published c. 1963

[aly-semi-archived-deactivated20]

Pics of white women in pussy hats posing with cops tells you fucking everything you need to know about white liberal feminism tbh.

[niktipolos]

I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn’t it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn’t it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.

Power Politics, Arundhati Roy. (via gothhabiba)

[adonnisism]

Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you … And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking

Audre Lorde (via adonnisism)

[watchoutforintellect]

Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental, I’m willing to admit a part of me, crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still.

Sandra Cisneros, from “One Last Poem for Richard” featured in My Wicked Ways

[dappledwithshadow]

[dappledwithshadow]

Vincent van Gogh, Blossoming Chestnut Trees by a House, 1890.

[fullpraxisnow]

White women’s feminisms still center around equality…. Black women’s feminisms demand justice. There is a difference. One kind of feminism focuses on the policies that will help women integrate fully into the existing American system. The other recognizes the fundamental flaws in the system and seeks its complete and total transformation.

Brittney Cooper | Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why its future is not up to white women  (via heisenburger)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

And it’s just as though I can feel you imprisoned inside yourself, which fills me with anguish.

Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre c. April 1953

[drnandi]

We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it (from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus). We also have a tendency to subordinate it to resemblance (from the point of view of perception), to opposition (from the point of view of predicates), and to analogy (from the point of view of judgement). In other words, we do not think difference in itself.

Gilles Deleuze,

Difference & Repetition

(xv)

I’ve never read Deleuze. Can someone explain this to me?

(via johnbrownsbodyy)

never formally studied philosophy so this is just my (possibly bullshit) explanation, but basically he’s saying that we tend to only talk and think about difference in terms of corresponding identities, like, this difference is of X type or it resembles X, it’s the opposite of X, it’s analogous to X… an example would be describing difference as like, abnormal or insane: it doesn’t say anything about difference “in itself”, it just counter-poses it to the identity terms ‘normal’ and ‘sane’. So he’s all about trying to turn this around and find a way to privilege difference over identity, not thinking in simplifying, ordering terms of like, binary oppositions, rules, representations, categories, limitations -  but trying to articulate the groundless, formless chaotic swarm of differences that dissolves identity and resists classification