LAST ONE BORN IS NORMAL IS HAPPY IS FREE WINS

— Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, c. 1978.

male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

Elaine Castillo, America Is Not The Heart Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Ijeoma Umebinyuo, ‘Confessions’, Questions for Ada Mohamad Hafez, Baggage series Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited Anne Carson, ‘The Glass Essay’, Glass, Irony, and God Margaret Atwood, ‘November’, You Are Happy Richard Siken, ‘Boot Theory’, Crush

Olena Kalytiak Davis, Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities

Sharon Olds, True Love

Stephen Crane, In The Desert

Cameron Awkward-Rich, Meditations in an Emergency

ANTIGONE: The fields were wet. They were waiting for something to happen. The whole world was breathless, waiting. I can’t tell you what a roaring noise I seemed to make alone on the road. It bothered me that whatever was waiting, wasn’t waiting for me.

Jean Anouilh, Antigone

Etel Adnan, The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage

I’m trying to give you everything I have. But I can’t find it; I can’t find it yet.

Alice Notley, In The Pines

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

& if I were to forgive you (& I know I could)

who would be left

who would be left

to forgive me?

Hieu Minh Nguyen, Afterwards

Mahmoud Darwish, Mural

Fariha Róisín, How to Cure a Ghost

“You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only / the sun has come this close, only the sun.”

Shauna Barbosa, GPS

Mahmoud Darwish, Mural

Forough Farrokhzad, Another Birth

repetition in poetry // part i

(part ii) (part iii) (part iv) (part v)

a short collection on catering to men. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012) A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1879) The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (1993)

Hi, could you please make a web weaving about the childhood that you know won't come back?

oumaima, I Will Be Leaving the Party Early

@traumacure (x)

Li-Young Lee, A Hymn to Childhood

Taylor Swift, Never Grow Up

Gregory Orr, Origin of the Marble Forest

Andy Muschietti directing It: Chapter Two (via)

Mitski, Two Slow Dancers

Adonis, Celebrating Childhood (trans. Khaled Mattawa)

[ID: excerpt from The gender of sound, Anne Carson

“Putting a door on the female mouth as been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.”

poetry line by Meggie Royer @writingsforwinter

“A woman’s first blood doesn’t come from between her legs but from biting her tongue.”

excerpt from Hunger makes me, Jess Zimmerman

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.”

excerpt from The unruly woman: Gender & the genres of laughter, Kathleen Rowe

“…voices in any culture that are not meant to be heard are perceived as loud when they do speak, regardless of their decibel level.”] 💔

that’s literally why she’s so me

From The Art of Loving and Losing Female Friends by Rachel Vorona Cote

“Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet? […] No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Then there’s the girl who put on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe. There are Cinderella’s two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White’s stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers. […] There was this one woman who walked east of the sun and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found him. Take our word for it, he wasn’t worth it. What do you think happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dryer? Laundry is hard, travel is harder.”

— Kelly Link, from “Travels with the Snow Queen”, Stranger Things Happen