[zarzava]

literary fiction fiend and occasional queer romance enjoyer. leslie feinberg fathered me. dont talk to me until ive had my sopranos hbo episode of the day. if you see me posting theory disengage - this isnt cute or heartwarming litblrs only do that when they're IN DISTRESS

book recs

stuff i’m currently reading

[justsomeguycore]

lesbian scifi is so easy. here’s a woman in cargo pants and a tank top on a spaceship. are you with me

[justsomeguycore]

maybe it’s not even cargo pants. maybe it’s coveralls rolled to + tied around the waist. maybe she even has fuckoff boots

[allap0log1es]

Asia is my peak femmespiration

Obsessed w her in Chloe Sherman’s photographs of lesbian San Francisco in the 90’s. Just so gorgeous and feminine in a dyke way

[hellenicgoddess]

Mycenaean daggers/swords, 16th - 14th century BC

National Archaeological Museum, Athens-Greece

[mirandakat]

Medieval lady with red eyes and claws 💅

[baebeylik]

Dagger and Sheath. Sudanese. 18th to 19th Century.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

[christslamb]

German hunting knife, 19th century

[philosophybits]

“An active and sensate democracy requires that we learn how to read well, not just texts but images and sounds, to translate across languages, across media, ways of performing, listening, acting, making art and theory.”

— Judith Butler, “McGill University commencement address”, 2013

[efemmera-archive]

Alison Bechdel, 1984

"Twyla is appalled to learn that Irene is a morning person."

[zarzava]

“Oh, well, she had gone and would go even farther. Raftery was dead, there was nothing to hold her, she was free—what a terrible thing could be freedom. Trees were free when they were uprooted by the wind; ships were free when they were torn from their moorings; men were free when they were cast out of their homes—free to starve, free to perish of cold and hunger."

— Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

[zarzava]

“She could not weep, for a great desolation too deep for tears lay over her spirit—the great desolation of things that pass, of things that pass away in our lifetime. And then of what good, after all, are our tears, since they cannot hold back this passing away—no, not for so much as a moment?”

— Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

[cadaverkeys]

fabulous creature?

[zarzava]

“The spring would come sweeping across Castle Morton, bringing strong, clean winds to the open common. The spring would come sweeping across the whole valley, from the Cotswold Hills right up to the Malverns; bringing daffodils by their hundreds and thousands, bringing bluebells to the beech wood down by the lakes, bringing cygnets for Peter the swan to protect; bringing sunshine to warm the old bricks of the house—but she would not be there any more in the spring. In summer the roses would not be her roses, nor the luminous carpet of leaves in the autumn, nor the beautiful winter forms of the beech trees: ‘And on evenings in winter these lakes are quite frozen, and the ice looks like slabs of gold in the sunset, when you and I come and stand here in the winter. . . .’ No, no, not that memory, it was too much—‘when you and I come and stand here in the winter. . . .”

— Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

[zarzava]

“That night she stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration. She longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel; it was so white, so strong and so self-sufficient; yet withal so poor and unhappy a thing that her eyes filled with tears and her hate turned to pity.”

— Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

[pyritetears-deactivated20260218]

Maya Angelou working on her bed with a Thesaurus, a Dictionary, and the Holy Bible. (1982)

[zarzava]

“Interiorizing the unconscious and all psychic life, the very language of psychoanalysis suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds within him: the terms “complex,” “tendencies,” and so forth imply this. But a life is a relation with the world; the individual defines himself by choosing himself through the world; we must turn to the world to answer the questions that preoccupy us.”

— Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

[zarzava]

"Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degadation of existence into "in-iteself," of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of women is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness."

— Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex