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kate moss (with carolyn bessette kennedy) in manhattan 1994 photographed by thomas lannaccone for calvin klein

horsefigureoftheday

Horse figure of the day: Gene & Rebecca Tobey "Dust"

acrosscenturiesandgenerations

▪︎ Ewer and Tray.

Date: 4th quarter of the 16th century; 1st quarter of the 17th century (around 1585 - 1615)

Place of origin: Gujarat, India

Medium: Mother-of-pearl, shell.

iloveabortions

Björk (1997) photographed by: Nobuyoshi Araki

dhrupad

IMAGE: Khayal Gatha, The Saga of Khayal (Kumar Shahani | 1989)

TEXT: Ruth Vanita – “MARRIED AMONG THEIR COMPANIONS: Female Homoerotic Relations in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India” in Journal of Women’s History, Vol 16, no. 1 (2004):

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The new move that Rekhti makes in Indian poetry is to sexualize explicitly the Sakhi (woman’s intimate woman friend). Rekhti inherits this important poetic figure not from the Perso-Urdu ghazal but from Sanskrit and Sanskritic literatures.

[…] Female-female sexual relations are mentioned in the Kamasutra as well as in Arabic erotic texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, but they do not seem to be explicitly represented in Riti poetry. However, a suggestive female homoeroticism does appear in Riti poetry. In part, it arises from the ambiguity of the speaker’s gender. Commentators and translators ascribe gender to the speakers, and often do so on the heterosexist presumption that a speaker who praises the heroine’s beauty may be male or female, but when the praise is more eroticized, the speaker must be male. Thus, Krishna P. Bahadur, the modern English translator of Bihari, invents titles for every verse, which gender the speaker: “What he said to her companion,” or “What her companion told him.”

The verses in the manuscripts have no titles—while the speaker is sometimes gendered, in many others she or he is not, and this allows for a playful ambivalence. Even the verses that commentators do attribute to female speakers often express an ardent admiration that has an erotic tinge. In one example, the narrator comments: “Heavens! / How much beauty has god given her! / Even I am bewitched by it, dear lad, / how much more / you!” The translator here has inserted the words “how much more, you.” The original says simply: “Looking at that unique girl, I am entranced. How much sweetness god has given to her beautiful form.”