stopwiththevicissitude

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“Don’t believe the hype.”

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yes my favorite colors are the warm orange of the windows of a house u see on a walk at night and also the deep blue of the night around it

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Another reason why I dropped gender abolition:

Red isn't inherently an angry or lustful color. it's a shade of light, it can't feel rage or desire. we associate it with those things largely because we associate red with heat, and anger and lust make you physically feel hot (and flushed with blood, which is red). But red doesn't have emotions, and it isn't intrinsically tied to any human feelings.

Yet, I think it would be pretty stupid to try to abolish color theory and say that we should never use colors to symbolize emotion because colors can't have emotion.

Now, if you say that you can apply the color red to things that are angry or lustful, or blue to things that are sad, that would be pretty stupid as well. Because, hey, those are colors, they aren't tied to any emotion by virtue of existing. Colors can have a lot of different meanings depending on your culture; red is associated with luck in some places. Black means death and mourning in the West but others associate white with those things. So trying to be "color essentialist" is stupid because colors aren't inherently anything and their meanings shift a lot based on the social context they are in. Hell, even the colors themselves are constructed to some degree; what's the border between pink and red? Why do group so many shades into the overall category of blue? Because we decided to.

But again, just because colors aren't inherently any emotion doesn't mean using them to describe emotions is bad. If we tried to completely disconnect color from emotion, 1. it would be insanely difficult and result in very little material good, and 2. it would really dull (literally) our art. No more "the curtains are blue" symbolism, no more bisexual lighting, no more use of color to explore people and feeling and culture and life.

That's how I feel about gender. Yes, clothing isn't inherently gendered- it's stupid to act like they are! And gender roles can vary wildly between cultures because they are constructs, and rely heavily on social context. And when they are constricting, it's extremely harmful.

But we really are throwing the baby out with the bathwater by saying that since gender roles can be constrictive, gender itself needs to be done away with entirely because it's all bad all the time everywhere.

I like that suits are masculine and dresses are feminine. Because that means I can play with them! I can wear a suit and makeup or a skirt with facial hair and it's playing with meaning and expectation. I frequently use abstract art with lots of color to express inexpressible emotions, and I do the same when I perform gender. I use red and black and yellow and white to turn into visuals what I feel; I use shirts and lipstick and skirts and boots to do the same.

Masculinity and femininity are concepts we made up, there isn't anything inherently masculine about suits or short hair, or anything feminine about skirts and long hair. If you showed a painting full of pinks and reds to someone, they may not think it's expressing affection, because those colors don't inherently mean affection or love or desire. But that doesn't make the painting meaningless. The painter used color to express emotion, using the social construct of those colors to communicate something.

I very much feel like an artist when I'm putting together my daily gender performance; I'm asking myself, what do I want to express to others? What do I want to communicate about my internal feelings? Patriarchal gender roles constrict expression by saying that only some people are allowed to communicate some feelings through certain gender performances. Gender abolition, to me, also restricts expression by saying that it's bad to try and express these things at all. Must our gender performances be hyperindividualistic, completely detached from social context?

I don't want to paint with clear water. I want to paint with color, and I want my painting to be inextricably tied to myself as a person and the cultural context I am painting in.

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Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of English poetry, then matches its sounds to those that appear in the Chinese language. Those sounds produce their own, separate meaning. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no languages at all, with multiple meanings that can be read many ways.


[Image ID: A line that reads, “早上好” which is Simplified Chinse for “good morning.” Then a line of English text that reads, “good morning,” followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, “gũ dé mào níng.” Then a line of Chinese characters which reads, “孤德貌宁,” phonically the same as the above pinyin, followed by a line of English text which is the translation of the above Chinese, reading, “Even alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.” End image ID.]

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blluish / maragret atwood / daniel popper / ada limon / carolein smit / yasmin belkhyr

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love as consumption of the other

you are the apple, lady lamb / untitled, unknown / intimacy, angelica alzona / nocturne, i.s. jones / breezeblocks, alt-j / bloodsport, yves olade / the notebooks of malte laurids brigge, rainer maria rilke / girl with the heart, edvard munch / give me a god i can relate to, blythe baird / hansel and gretel, anne sexton.

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home is the first grave

@filmnoirsbian x (from @willemdafoegf 's post // catherine lacey // chen chen // silas denver melvin // aloha from hell, richard kadrey // courtney love prays to oregon // @heavensghost // st. lucy’s home for girl’s raised by wolves // x // taylor swift’s “my tears ricochet” // this post @ceemetery

buy me a coffee

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mark of athena, rick riordan // Elizabeth Gilbert //Orestes, Euripides // dancing with our hands tied, taylor swift // the song of achilles, madeline miller

of knowing (and loving anyways)

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i loved you and now you’re gone

1. nicole homer 2. kate mcgahan 3. panic! at the disco; the calendar 4. @ojibwa 5. 朱一龙, 郎朗 Zhu Yilong ft. Lang Lang; 叛逆者 Pan Ni Zhe 6. louise bourgeois

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on loving your siblings

I don't love anyone, Belle and Sebastian//The Reynolds Pamphlet, Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda//The Other Boleyn Girl(2008)//Fleabag, 2x06//NA//Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy//Antigone, Jean Anouilh//Maurice Sendak//Little Miss Sunshine (2006)//The Elektra Complex, @filmnoirsbian //NA

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—the male gaze

the robber bride by margaret atwood // the virgin suicides (1999) // at test of objectification theory: the effect of the male gaze on appearance concerns in college women by rachel m. calogero // ex machina (2015) // a woman’s beauty by susan sontag // lolita (1997) // shame is an ocean, swim across by mary lambert // fleabag // fleabag: the scriptures by phoebe waller-bridge

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“I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight.”

Kaveh Akbar, ‘Do You Speak Persian?’

“I can’t speak my own language - Iesu, All those good words; And I outside them.”

R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh’

“It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,” called “Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved,” called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs”.”

Li-Young Lee, ‘Immigrant Blues’

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”

Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Bilingual Blues

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“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”

I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?