And The Grocery Store Is Never Just The Grocery Store. I'm Staring At Cereal Boxes Trying To Find One

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 

No two women have the same experience. All feminism is founded not on actual essential unity, but on political coalition and affirmation of shared political needs and goals.

Race, culture, class, birth assignment, religion, and countless other factors mean all women experience womanhood differently. Excluding trans women because we have a different life experience misses the point that all women have different life experiences. This idea isn’t even new, its not even specific to trans women, its literally the point Crenshaw and Collins and Mohanty and countless other woc and third world feminists have been making for decades now.

Do you have something on Platonic love?

well, there’s definitely elements of it in the love tag, but i haven’t really differentiated between romantic and platonic in the tag system. concepts like love as attention etc aren’t strictly defined as either imo & also, it definitely depends on the context of the specific text/the author i feel..? it’s all tangled up and complex!

anyway, there’s this one which just came across my dash 😳 i think it fits this theme well! and this platonic love quotes by @4400lux​ is an absolute gem 💓

& here’s a couple from the friendship tag 

this one! / two / three (this one has i’d say the strongest focus on the ‘all friendship is romantic’ slant) / to sit in hell with you / the heartbreak of friendship

a lot of these themes come up in a few of the above but it depends on what type of relationship you’re considering? they’re all forms of platonic love but perhaps there’s different trappings to them like: 

the mothers tag / other familial love which. i don’t think i have tags for currently oops...

there’s also the whole ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’ angle, love for found/chosen family! !! there’s quotes in some of the above links :’) 

love for humanity! for yourself !! for strangers (this compilation!!) just the inherent connection... the love we all send out to the world 🥺 

love for nature!! for being alive!! would highly recommend mary oliver’s poetry for this... and the love for your pets, again off the top of my head, would rec ‘dog songs’ by mary oliver, it’s very sweet 

& have a couple of other quotes n stuff! 

this tenderness photoset by wing shya about brotherhood 

this very sweet story about kafka and the doll traveler (or tumblr post here) !! “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

- ray bradbury

The other element of friendship is tenderness.

- ralph waldo emerson 

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. 

- c.s. lewis

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships — certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person. (...) You can tell how strong the friendship is by the silence that envelops it. Lovers and spouses may talk frequently about their “relationship,” but friends tend to let their regard for one another speak for itself or let others point it out.

- andrew sullivan

...the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

- david whyte

“But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe.” 

- jeanette winterson 

ok these are, for the most part, friendship focussed but going to stop now otherwise this post would be wildly long aha but i hope this helps! 💓

My grandmother told me a story of how after her mother died she had a dream where she was walking through water and her mother told her that she has to leave her behind. She told me she didn't need anyone to interpret it, but she knew that it really was her mother speaking to her.

Funeral, Phoebe Bridgers/La Lune, Jacques Prévert/Dream States, Henrik Uldalen/The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Anderson, illustrated by Helen More/Leviton 3, Quang Ho/Some British Ballads, Arthur Rackham/Hamlet, William Shakespeare

sorry to chime in but thought i’d bring up ada limón’s someplace like montana where she also calls her friend by the name - not as blatantly about friendship, but it is about making plans/dreams with friends even if you end up in different paths. one of my favourite poems ever <3

YES i love this poem too!!! the ending especially made me go ! the first time i read it. to paraphrase ada limón i love the way people love <3

https://instagram.com/p/BJ4TOcwAJTj/

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

paperswallow:

When I say girlhood I mean to bleach and bind and braid. I mean that soft gape-mouthed mirror face. I mean the slight, tight discomfort of hair scraped into a ponytail lifting the skin of the forehead. I mean pleasure-pain. I mean knowing how to hurt. I mean the fixed quality of attention bestowed by your best friend as she grips your chin to apply your lipstick, half-sensual half-ritual all hush, like communion. Sad as Sunday night television. I mean following those flow-charts in teen magazines that tell you which movie star you’re going to marry, looking for clues about the unknown quantity of yourself. I mean the sense of waiting for upheaval. I mean having an itchy soul. I mean girls are cruellest to themselves. I mean a fire in a dollhouse. 

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 💖

for @augustsjanes — we are each other’s mystery ♡

adam smiley poswolsky / bts, in the soop / nicole callihan, the end of the pier / henry james, the portrait of a lady / hanya yanagihara, a little life / holly warbs, swim / sarah kay, no matter the wreckage / david whyte, consolations / @piglitzart (x) / jacqueline woodson, weight / avatar: the last airbender, s3 ep6 / wicked, for good / sedat pakay, james baldwin & friends, istanbul / schnall, harber, stefanucci, & proffitt / @euritsua (x) / jean little, oranges / c.s. lewis, the four loves / anne magill, by the river / taylor jenkins reid, the seven husbands of evelyn hugo / isabel norton / pinterest / bts, friends / lorde, a world alone + pinterest / holly warburton, the old aquarium / lany, pink skies / jeanette winterson, written on the body / @edomrode (ig) / arnold lobel, frog and toad are friends / @piglitzart (x) / conan gray, best friend