laborreguita:

YES!

relevant

(Source: chitaray, via fuckyeahhardfemme)

Marc said this thing about penetration recently that was pretty neat to me. I usually say penetration is boring to me, but what I mean is that penetration is way less stimulating, intellectually speaking, than being a prude; (people are way more uncomfortable with my prudishness than they are with my pussy and that’s endlessly fun to me/joke-rich); that privileging penetration when we talk about intimacy/sex/exchange (esp. when talking about with v-havers who luv it pen[etration] so much) is really alienating and stressful to me for reasons; because sexxxual penetration—really of any order—is just too gross for me to like but not gross enough for me to care about; but this really gets to another center of it:

Penetration is boring to me because Sartre and ontological insecurity because things moving in/out of your body or coating your body is boring to me because sex is exciting for a little while but then it’s not exciting anymore and part of the reason it ceases to be as exciting is that all that boundary confusion starts to go away and you go from ohmygd how is that inside me? to how hilarious that anything can be inside me to i guess this is the part where things are inside me

Ofcourse I understand that in equating sex with penetration here we aren’t just talking about putting things in my holes, we are talking also about the penetrative nature of sex to begin with, but I’m suddenly way interested (finally, after everyone else is bored with it) in exploring ways that sex acts can be non-penetrative.

Most of all this really nails the way I feel—literally but also in a theory-space—about sex. I am always, constantly, uncontrollably disrupting my own physical boundaries. Every second of my life is an exercise in taking things that are in me out of me (often first through a penetrative ceremony). It makes sex different for me. It makes boundaries different for me.

But I hate it when I talk about things being interesting or not interesting, because that’s the stupidest thing of all.

CHASTE AND PURE AND NAKED BASICALLY ALL THE TIME

I like Weber and Durkheim. There, are you happy?

Corby’s/Bal’s model of the “encounter” between the particular/general/universal—the mobility of space between particularities [art/author/audience]—and the erotic nature of those distances—encounters between bodies cyber + material—(TRL, Loserkids, the Mall)—CGAF as the erotic—really because loneliness but whatever who cares.

…; feelings, punx.

So what I’m saying is that “Apple Shampoo” is and isn’t “the Death of Marat.”

blairellis:

Helen Cisxous… 

this took me longer to design than any of my other prints… but I think it was pretty worth it

so nice looking

Alloway, Lawrence. “The Arts and Mass Media.”

Collingwood, R. G. “Good Art and Bad Art.”

Eliot, T.S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?”

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style.

Moore, Ryan. Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis.

Owens, Craig. The Allegorical Impulse.

Pollock, Griselda, ed. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.

blink-182. “Dick Lips.”

I was going to post Little Red Car Wreck’s “Teenage Welfare Mother” w/r/t the topics of late: songs I’ve gotten from K’s mixes, and On the oppressions of the childless woman’s body. I don’t have access to a version of it that I can post, though. Girl, didn’t you put that on a mix you uploaded?? Can you help me out with this? The world needs this song (and also maybe if you wanna put all of her discog on SP that would be cool too whatever).

See, there’s a conversation where Aria was like “ugh middle class white women shut up about how yr grandma wants you to make a baby” (she’s so right) and then PS was like “right but that’s a form of regulation of women’s labor/bodies as well” and she is also right. But, like,why? This was such a good post with so much good stuff in it but it’s REALLY not pertinent to the question at hand (ie,is whiny white middle class feminist complaining about your mother’s expectation that you have childrenactually even a regulation of your reproductive labor? because I don’t think it even really is but whatever, maybe I’m just biased because I don’t have a prodding grandma to whine about). Anyway, look at this, it’s good:

but bodies that can reproduce have for a long time been sites where ideologies are projected and made to contest one another rather than being sites where subjects can make their own meanings and bodily choices. so there are conflicting injunctions especially for poor women and women of color: reproduce because it will make your man stay around, or because you made a mistake that you don’t have the resources to address, or because it’s your duty to make and maintain a family (whether you want to or not). i think the converse injunctions not to reproduce (or more likely, to be demonized for having already reproduced) come from people and institutions who have a stake in maintaining the precarity of poor bodies/bodies of color, or in maintaining national borders at all costs, to name a few. these ideologies are super raced and classed, but they rotate on foregrounding women’s fertility as their primary utility—which can threaten or bolster whatever—society, the nation, the family, the working class.

so nobody cares about water cooler talk but i don’t think it’s fair to call social-institutional injunctions to reproduce or not reproduce (cause let’s be real, it’s never one without the other) in order to serve anyone’s interests other than the person with the reproducing body “white middle class feminism.”

I just, honestly, am sick of a few things. I’m sick of how we (we! me included!) always complain about the “foregrounding women’s fertility as their primary utility” when that actually is doing violence to the fertile body itself. (That is, this ultimately privileges the body that is not reproducing and is instead enacting labors which are productive in other ways: by saying “~all women are harmed by the emphasis on their reproductive capacity” then you ultimately allow a conversation which devalues this reproductive capacity as labor in the first place. Like, what if I complain about “foregrounding women’s intellectual labor as their primary utility”? That conversation would skew a lot differently, right?*
*I would complain about that. Brains aren’t even real.)

But mostly what I’m sick of is conversations that go around and around like this forever:
a: right but black women have babies and they aren’t valued, and white grandmothers aren’t asking THEM when they are gonna make with the oven buns
b: right but that’s because they don’t have any choice because of access to abortion
or
b: right but that’s because of a history of eugenics

Which is obviously true, but again: you can’t talk about/try to legitimize reproductive labor while at the same time only affording middle-class options of that labor the credit for being based on some sort of (not-false) consciousness. That’s straight-up choice feminism. (It’s also straight-up racist.) It’s just as boring as anything else everyone is bored by everyday.

And I just have like a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE problem with this exchange:
poor person: middle class feminism is boring, idgaf if your feelings about reproduction are hurt*
educated person: you’re wrong though, because everyone is harmed in specific ways by the regulation of reproductive labor, and also it’s really obvious that my stake in this conversation is that I don’t want babies/I’m sick of my grandma whining about it**
*a valid statement which isn’t necessarily theoretically infallible but also doesn’t need to be
**also a valid statement which isn’t necessarily theoretically infallible but also doesn’t need to be, except that this statement is used to disarm the first statement via the classic “right but let me use words like ‘sites’ and ‘contested’ and ‘injuction’ over and over again because I know and have been told countless times that these are words that I have access to and that you don’t have access to and so I have more right to be engaging in this conversation/am smarter than you***
***again, being the middle-class person who likely falls on the “not exercising fertility labor right now” who then uses education (read: one of the reasons you/we have been afforded relatively “fair” access to choice-making apparatuses when it comes to reproductive labor in the FIRST place) to disarm women/people who are participating in reproductive labor ****
****IE, I could go to my poor aunt and be like “right but when you ask me whether I someday want to have kids, you are inflicting the same violence on me that was inflicted on you when you got married and had kids at age seventeen because you were an orphan/it was the seventies/Flint Michigan. LET ME CITE THEORY TO BACK THIS UP because I made the -choice- to participate in intellectual/middle-class labor instead of baby-making labor and I am now going to use that to completely shut you out of the conversation [and, incidentally, talk a lot about ‘the valuation of fertility as labor’ while slyly devaluing your fertility labor entirely].” And it would be obnoxious, and also it would just be me exercising my Smart Boner and saying a lot of empty things (empty things that may be right but are still totally pointless) and being a dick.

******sorry JB but the internet is ruining you: “the situated body” is like the new fucking “is a capitalist construct”—I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it used in a way that didn’t amount to “STOP TALKING POOR PEOPLE/WOMEN/BLACK WOMEN/TRANS PEOPLE, it’s all about context and your invocation of a lived reality is doing violence to my epistemology”

Also, LISTEN, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT CHILDREN RIGHT NOW OKAY.

(I brought Emily to my family’s house and there were ten children there and Emily’s always like “waahhh I see babies and get all emotional” but then she got there and was like “NO BABIES THIS IS BAD” which I 100% relate to [I feel like I was doing a service to her to remind her that NO BABIES NO BABIES NO THIS IS GROSS WE DON’T WANT BABIES DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE]. Like, if any of y’all want to get your baby urges out of your system, COME HANG OUT WITH MY FAMILY THERE’S SO MUCH BABY JUICE.

But also there is something fully squicky to me about how we are all “oh babies/ovaries/blah blah blah” but when we are faced with the reality of it* we want to immediately disassociate from the scene

*what I mean by the “reality of it” is not poop and crying or whatever but—
hey , we are all comfortable cooing over babies when they are presented in the public sphere with a middle-class white (or ~appropriately ethnic) mothers who BECAUSE OF THIS VERY PROCESS OF REGULATION have been afforded the tools to appear/be in control [ie, present as if they are good/progressive mothers and have freely been offered informed consent procedures to be Moms and thus read as “moms who are in control of their life,” an ~inscribed ideology that you would never operate if you were at the mall in Flint, MI and that mother was a black woman with a weave, LET’S BE REAL]. And, you know, the babies in my family are a bunch of lower-class/nonwhite littleuns with moms in velour shorts or mom jeans or whatever, moms who still pencil their brows on or moms who don’t wear any makeup at all. Moms who say “ain’t” or whatever.)

Onto my own baggage: “the reality of children” is so bound up in my life with a specific sort of classed reality. And there’s this weird distance between
“I cannot be responsible for children because feminism” (which is 100% my feeling, tbh—too selfish 4 life)
and
“I understand that my sense of responsibility for family is a result of ~gender roles and I’m not OBLIGATED to do this but also I’m doing it because of where I come from, which is that EVERYONE IS A TEENAGE WELFARE MOTHER and that’s how things are and we help each other”
(and my reading of the latter is entirely grounded in my training in theory written by white middle-class women)
(but God forbid we ever have a discussion about how teenage welfare mothers understand the gendered nature of their labor but w/e w/e)

And also, right now, I REALLY DON’T WANT BABIES but I hate it when people talk about it in abstracts because it’s just so real to me? I guess? Where I come from women have children as THEIR LIFE but they aren’t walking around with some Feminine Mystique shit over their head or whatever. Like, when did “you like your kids/don’t resent them” come to signify automatic false-consciousness? Or rather, when did that lens begin to be exclusively applied to poor and non-white mothers? And, for the millionth time, why why why why dear god why is that lens employed almost exclusively by the same people who will argue on tumblr that women’s reproductive labor is “real labor”? ? ?  (and as I type that sentence I never ever wanna do it again because god “DON’T WORRY POOR WOMEN, THE LABOR YOU DO IS REAL TOO” is so fucking condescending and I never wanna go there again.)

For the sake of disclosure, my mother was 21 when she had her first kid. She got pregnant then she got married. She didn’t have a high school diploma. My dad’s first wife was in high school when she got pregnant, yet he still got to do a semester at U of M (guess what—she didn’t) (guess what—he’s white and was middle class and she’s indigenous and was not middle class). His second wife was just out of high school. My sister Rebel was married when she was 17 and got pregnant right after that. I think my oldest sister had her first one when she was 20, shockingly. My second-oldest sister barely finished high school then she enlisted but she didn’t even get to finish basic training ‘cause they found out she was pregnant (lol). And all of these people are at least marginally pro-choice.* (*Rebel has said that she doesn’t believe that abortion is right but that it isn’t Christlike to legislate based on what is Christlike, but also she has LITERALLY SAID that if anyone she knows is considering having an abortion she would take care of them and adopt their baby, and the thing is is that she would.)

WHATEVER I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS RIGHT NOW ABOUT HOW MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE ARE GROSSED OUT BY CHILDREN. I can’t even remotely fathom being the kind of woman who wasn’t too selfish to take care of a kid, but that kind of woman is probably the only woman I know in the places I come from. (saving the conversation about rhetorics of selflessness for another time—that is The Story of My Second-Wave Mom for sure.)

And in my mind, I’m thinking about all those women with all those kids and then thinking about a feminism that would look at that scene and think “oh well a woman shouldn’t feel obligated to do all that labor, and the only possible reason she might have chosen to participate in that labor is if she was trying to manipulate a man/if she couldn’t afford an abortion/because she is uneducated. and I am gonna Arlie Hochshild on your asses til my thumbs fall off but in the end I also would argue that having an education means that you would more likely not choose to participate in this type labor, because secretly I don’t actually think it’s valid. And also I’m going to write a bunch about how my childless body is as oppressed by virtue of its childlessness as your ten babies are oppressed because of the devaluing of poor women’s bodies, and I’m going to pretend like that isn’t eyeroll-worthy at best and horrific at worst. And I’m like, this isn’t my shit, get out of my living room.*
*let me get out of your living room

What I’m trying to say is none of you guys should have bothered having this conversation because this song resolved everything anyway
”I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child.”

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I’m a teenage welfare mother, I’ll have more babies if I want to.

bagofshit asked: i had some thoughts and you're the only expert i know on this subject so i had to bring them to you: 1. now that bade is over (is that still a thing?) are they going to make tori/beck a thing, 2. do you find this as barfy as i do, 3. do you think he should date me instead.

(Finally ready to answer this, it’s been sitting in my inbox for at least a month.) The Jori shippers on tumblr aren’t happy about this, because they’ve mistaken Dan Schneider’s habitual fandom-baiting (teasing) for an actual willingness to, someday, incorporate queer characters and stories. AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN, but we can still gif kisses from school plays like our life depends on it.

Anyway, in continuation with my previous post on the transference of lesbian significance between bodies via erotogenic surfaces that have been charged by touch and which move through spaces and between women:

I’m down with Bori because, according to queer theory, if Tori and Beck make out it’s kind of like if Tori and Jade were making out.

Like warming pearls, but Beck is the pearls.

ETA: yes he should make out with Tori so that tumblr can make soft-focusy gif sequences where Tori has little thought bubbles of Jade’s face over her head and she walks away sad. And then Beck should date you, but your storyline would be totally boring sry.

…sites designed to be heterosexual, like male-female dancing at a ball, or bedrooms, are unsettled, so that non-lesbian locations are restructured by the movement of the animated but inanimate object with and between them…
…It is not only about how women touch each other, and so make spaces queer, it is also about the ways in which things can be affected by touch, become themselves subjectified, so that, when they are moved outside the immediately queered space, they transport a queer significance with them…
…In this sense there are [in Elizabeth Grosz’s words] “[e]ncounters, interfaces between one part and another of bodies or body-things [to] produce the erotogenic surface, inscribe it as a surface, linger on and around it for their evanescent effects“…
…accordingly, it is not just about women being in and out of each others’ bedrooms, but it is also about the extension of their touch, the concomitant translation of objects and of their enduring (and changed/changing) significance…
…the space is erotically charged by the lesbian presence, current and past, and by the touching of erogenous objects, previously activated by other women’s hands.*

—Nicky Hallett, “Did Mrs. Danvers Warm Rebecca’s Pearls? Significant Exchanges and the Extension of Lesbian Space and Time in Literature” (Feminist Review No, 74, 2003)

*or tongues

(Source: enchantedschmidt)