wom(an)xiety

[womanxiety]

Safwan Dahoul, “Dream” series

Since the late 1980s, Dahoul’s ongoing Dream series has explored the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing that punctuate the human experience at various stages in life. Partly autobiographical, this seminal body of work uses the formal properties of painting to recreate the subconscious sense of enclosure that surfaces during times of crisis, whether in the event of mourning, estrangement, or political conflict. The artist’s recurring female protagonist facilitates this visceral experience through her contorted body, often-vacant eyes, and minimised yet monumental physicality. Depicted in the confinement of ambiguous settings, her presence is defined by the placement of various objects that seem to deepen the state of her disaffection, as even the familiar becomes a trigger of distress.

- Safwan Dahoul Is Still Dreaming

[tamarrud]

can someone explain to me white women’s extreme fascination with non-white women’s english fluency?

[wordsthat-speak]

the year of letting go, of understanding loss. grace. of the word ‘no’ and also being able to say ‘you are not kind’. the year of humanity/humility. when the whole world couldn’t get out of bed. everyone i’ve met this year, says the same thing ‘you are so easy to be around, how do you do that?’. the year i broke open and dug out all the rot with own hands. the year i learnt small talk. and how to smile at strangers. the year i understood that i am my best when i reach out and ask ‘do you want to be my friend?’. the year of sugar, everywhere. softness. sweetness. honey honey. the year of being alone, and learning how much i like it. the year of hugging people i don’t know, because i want to know them. the year i made peace and love, right here.” ”

Warsan Shire (via wordsthat-speak)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Queer has been the victim of its own popularity, proliferating to the point of uselessness as a neologism for the transgression of any norm (queering history, or queering the sonnet). […] Queerness also refers to the multiple ways that sexual practice, sexual fantasy, and sexual identity fail to line up consistently. That definition expresses an important insight about the complexity of sexuality, but it also describes a state experienced by everyone. If everyone is queer, then no one is–and while this is exactly the point queer theorists want to make, reducing the term’s pejorative sting by universalizing the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power.

Sharon Marcus (via coocoolah)

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Kent Rogowski: Love = Love, 2006-2008

Love=Love is a series of collages that were created using pieces of over 60 store bought puzzles. Although puzzle pieces are unique, and can only fit into one place within a puzzle, they are sometimes interchangeable within a brand. These puzzles were cut using the same die, but depict unrelated images. Using only the flowers and skies from each of the puzzles, I created a series of entirely new compositions by recombining the puzzle pieces. These spectacular, fantastical and surreal landscapes sit in direct contrast to the banal and bucolic images of the original puzzles. (artist statement)

[prettystuff]

[leila-khaled]

Safwan Dahoul, Syrian artist.

Dahoul’s ongoing Dream series has explored the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing that punctuate the human experience at various stages in life. Partly autobiographical, this seminal body of work uses the formal properties of painting to recreate the subconscious sense of enclosure that surfaces during times of crisis, whether in the event of mourning, estrangement, or political conflict. The artist’s recurring female protagonist facilitates this visceral experience through her contorted body, often-vacant eyes, and minimised yet monumental physicality. Depicted in the confinement of ambiguous settings, her presence is defined by the placement of various objects that seem to deepen the state of her disaffection, as even the familiar becomes a trigger of distress.

[soracities]

“It is June.  I am tired of being brave.”

– Anne Sexton, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’

[red-quotes]

Why does the homeless man sleep in the doorway of an empty office building instead of inside the building itself? Because the police have threatened to attack him just like they attacked [United Airlines passenger David Dao]. Why does a poor family go to bed hungry when they could just grab food from the supermarket a few blocks away? Because the police have threatened to attack them just like [Dao]. Of course, these threats of capitalist violence are so credible that few dare to act in ways that will trigger them. But the violence is always there, lurking in the background. It is the engine that makes our whole system run. It is what maintains severe inequalities, poverty, and the power of the boss over the worker. We build elaborate theories to pretend that it is not the case in order to naturalize the human-made economic injustices of our society. But it is the case. Violent state coercion like what you saw in that video is what runs this show.

Matt Bruenig (via red-quotes)

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Sexual harassment works–as does bullying more generally–by increasing the costs of fighting against something, making it easier to accept something than to struggle against something, even if that acceptance is itself the site of your own diminishment; how you end up taking up less and less space.

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (141)

[womanxiety]

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

Social theory has failed … to account for time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change beloved of so many historians.

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (via coocoolah)

[postcolonialfeminist]

Audre Lorde argues throughout her work that we should not be protected from what hurts. We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learned not to notice. We have to do this work if we are to produce critical understandings of how violence, as a relation of force and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others.

- Sara Ahmed ‘The Promise of Happiness’ (via postcolonialfeminist)

[womanxiety]

Pushing back against the implicit humanism in feminist notions of materiality and the anthropocentrism of representationalist theories, feminist scholar Karen Barad (2007, 29) shows how we can understand relationality through notions of diffraction or the “wave-particle paradox” where light electrons act as both a wave and a particle. Unlike transcendence, “Diffraction is a phenomenon that is unique to wave behavior. Water waves exhibit diffraction patterns, as do sound waves, and light waves” (Barad 2007, 28). Wave Diffraction emphasizes ripples, overlap, and entanglements similar to the spiritual currents of Santeria copresences. Diffraction does not fix objects and subjects but rather “illuminates differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Barad 2007, 30). Ontologies are thus crucial to what Barad terms “intra-actions” (as opposed to interactions), radically reworking notions of causality, aliveness, and vitality that do not give precedence to human-centeredness. For Barad, the primary units of analysis are no longer objects with inherent boundaries but rather phenomena that are entangled and intra-acting. This is what she describes as “relationality without relata.” Whereas interaction presumes “relata,” or the existence of independent entities, intra-acting understands relata as only existing within phenomena and therefore emerging only out of relations (Barad 2007, 429).

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. (Columbia University Press, 2015), 76-77.

[cidham]

amir khusrow (1253–1325 CE)