May 9, 2012 • 1 note
It’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.
Eve (played by Katheryn Winnick) on House, MD - Episode: One Day, One Room
April 29, 2012 • 38 notes
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, be the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004)
April 17, 2012 • 1 note
Anger and resentment can stop you in your tracks. That’s what I know now. It needs nothing to burn but the air and the life that it swallows and smothers. It’s real, though - the fury, even when it isn’t. It can change you, turn you, mold you and shape you into something you’re not. The only upside to anger, then is the person you become. Hopefully someone that wakes up one day and realizes they’re not afraid to take the journey, someone that knows that the truth is, at best, a partially told story. That anger, like growth, comes in spurts and fits, and in its wake, leaves a new chance at acceptance, and the promise of calm. Then again, what do I know? I’m only a child.
Lavender “Popeye” Wolfmeyer (Evan Rachel Wood) in The Upside of Anger, 2005
April 16, 2012 • 6 notes
People don’t know how to love. They bite rather than kiss. They slap rather than stroke. Maybe it’s because they recognize how easy it is for love to go bad, to become suddenly impossible… unworkable, an exercise of futility. So they avoid it and seek solace in angst, and fear, and aggression, which are always there and readily available. Or maybe sometimes… they just don’t have all the facts.
Lavender “Popeye” Wolfmeyer (Evan Rachel Wood) in The Upside of Anger, 2005
April 9, 2012 • colorlines.com

What’s the major contradiction facing activists fighting to end violence against women?

On the one hand, we should applaud the courageous efforts of the many activists who are responsible for a new popular consciousness of violence against women, for a range of legal remedies, and for a network of shelters, crisis centers, and other sites where survivors are able to find support. But on the other hand, uncritical reliance on the government has resulted in serious problems. I suggest that we focus our thinking on this contradiction: Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male dominance, class-bias, and homophobia and that constructs itself in and through violence act to minimize violence in the lives of women? Should we rely on the state as the answer to the problem of violence against women? […]

The major strategy relied on by the women’s anti-violence movement of criminalizing violence against women will not put an end to violence against women—just as imprisonment has not put an end to “crime” in general.

I should say that this is one of the most vexing issues confronting feminists today. On the one hand, it is necessary to create legal remedies for women who are survivors of violence. But on the other hand, when the remedies rely on punishment within institutions that further promote violence—against women and men, how do we work with this contradiction?



- Angela Davis, political activist, scholar, and author

March 21, 2012 • 1 note • warscapes.com

What’s the Definition of a Survivor?

[…] A survivor: someone whose very effortless, instinctive act of breathing and functioning is elevated to a status, a badge of abiding sustenance. You are no longer merely living, like all the other breathing, eating, defecating people around you. You have lived through something, and that notion of being a survivor will always remind you that your life is now clustered in some quantum way around one single moment in time, one particular episode in history, that defines everything fundamental about you from that time onwards. Whatever it does to your life afterwards, you don’t count as a casualty unless you die as a direct result of shrapnel or falling rubble. […]

 

- Excerpt from the prologue of “The Meaning of Being Numerous”, an upcoming novel by Lina Mounzer

March 17, 2012 • 13 notes • shop.holstee.com
This Is Your Life - The Holstee Manifesto

This Is Your Life - The Holstee Manifesto