No Two Women Have The Same Experience. All Feminism Is Founded Not On Actual Essential Unity, But On

[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.”] 💔

Woman King

King, Florence + the Machine //  Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891), John William Waterhouse // Woman King, Iron & Wine // Macbeth, William Shakespeare // Medusa with the Head of Perseus (2008), Luciano Garbati // Show Your Fangs, The Crane Wives // Gold Dust Woman, Fleetwood Mac // La Belle Dame sans Merci (1901), Frank Bernard Dicksee // Brutus, The Buttress 

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

Joanne Harris // Cecelia Ahern // Illustration by Cecile Richard // Rupi Kaur // Margarita Karapanou // Miranda July // Taylor Swift // T. R. Hummer // Richard Siken // James Joyce

Ok girlies time for our prescription 1-2 hour walk, imagine we r all in line like Madeline

— mimi evangeline, from girlhood is godhood

the love club, lorde | sharp objects, gillian flynn | lady bird dir. greta gerwig | class of 2013, mitski | white oleander, janet french | girl in progress dir. patricia riggen | writer in the dark, lorde | little fires everywhere, celeste ng | electrick children dir. rebecca thomas | mythological beauty, big thief

i’m going thru big trauma hours and reading your compiled research has been very cathartic and oddly healing in a way. i was just wondering if you had recommendations for writing with more trauma-focused/interpretation of Medusa or other horror ish, female-focused works?

i hope whatever you’re going through eases soon. here are some things i hope might help. 

What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa, Jess Zimmerman

Transforming Medusa, Charlotte Currie

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, Leslie Jamison

Nightingale: A Gloss, Paisley Rekdal

The Thread: Forged in Fire, Marissa Korbel

The Thread: Volcanoes, Marissa Korbel

The Girls Who Turned into Trees, Miranda Schmidt

There Is No Way Out of Here: Trauma and Transformation, Andrea Applebee

Make Me a Cold and Pitiless Goddess, Sharma Shields

Xenomorph, Sara Eliza Johnson

The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine, Hannah Williams

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies, Brooke Bolander

Embrace Your Monstrous Flesh: On Women’s Bodies in Horror, Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Horror Lives in the Body, Megan Pillow Davis

Hero Status: Medusa, Hazel Cills

Medusa Writes for Teen Vogue, Dorothy McGinnis

Snake Eyes: The Power to Turn the Patriarchy into Stone, McKenzie Schwark

The Timeless Myth of Medusa, a Rape Victim Turned Into a Monster, Christobel Hastings

OUROBORICISMS, Alice Lesperance 

On the Haunted Lives of Girls and Women, Rachel Eve Moulton

Prey, Kathleen Hale

Medusa Reflects, Jacqueline Doyle

you’ve given me a very broad topic and thus i have tried to give you a wide range of things to read. some of these don’t exactly fit what you requested, but since they helped me, i hope they might help you too. i’m always available if you want more. i hope you find your healing soon, angel 💖

The woman who eschews femininity, who is content with her natural shape and size and smell, who is impatient with the lengthy rituals of femininity, is condemned by both sexes. To women, she is an uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which they have abandoned themselves to the demands of men. To men, she is a threatening warning that their domination is not total and that women still have the power to regain themselves. 

- Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police

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

harry styles for rolling stone magazine / matty healy for dazed magazine