She in her madness prays for storms

banana fish + obscure sorrows 

Got diagnosed "Time is a flat circle"

Here's the link because it won't hyperlink in the comments kdjfgkdfs

i don't think truths exist only in a language tho i think language is a flawed/incomplete means of trying to understand truth.

I would say "truth" is dependent on perception so... I think this is fair

im kind of like if camus was a 20 year old tumblrina

i hate mind body dualism. it is not a flesh prison it is you. Those thoughts in your head are also your body. you don't own your body its you!!!

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Unless a political issue is solved or relevant scientific discoveries are found, political text does not become outdated. I can read the words from the very first feminist we have recorded in the early 1800 and find community within them. Those women were fighting the same battle that we're fighting today. Why would we ignore what they learned along the way?

Women, as a class, will get nowhere if we hold ourselves to the standard that all of our political theory has to be recreated from scratch every 20 years.

I am cursed. This is the assigned reading for my philosophy class this week.

I don't know if I can take this. I have to write a 5 page essay explaining why this shit makes sense actually.

Somebody hit me with a brick, force me to drink mercury, stuff my ears with asbestos, push me in front of a train, dunk me in a vat of boiling peanut oil put me out of my misery,

This week in HELL

Oh what does Donna Haraway believe you ask???

Kill me kill me kill me kill me

Mother Mary Daly protect me, Sister Magdalen give me strength, Saint Valerie give me three bullets and a sure eye

the essay I'm planning to write so far... this isn't a literary analysis class but fuckit. I have to write 5 pages from now by tomorrow, wish me luck

this is so absurd and sad OP I’m sorry you’re paying for this

I deserve reparations.

Slightly off-topic, but what's singular about the Stone Butch Blues assignment?

ok so i'm not actually doing the stone butch blues thing but i'll walk u thru my process.

So I read the book last weekend and it blew my mind. If you don't know, it's a semi-autobiography about this working class jewish butch lesbian named Jess Goldberg living in Buffalo New York, frequenting the bar scene, from the 50s to the 90s. Leslie Feinberg, the author , is pretty much opposed to radical feminism because she is possessive of the butch/femme dynamic, disliking radical feminist attempts at androgyny because it erases hers and femme identities that she has fought so hard for—a place for herself—she feels she will be totally erased if feminists "get rid of gender". However, her book only serves to prove that the masculine and feminine identities are not only constructed, but extremely harmful to female sexuality. It is only through repeated sexual torture by males from a young age that the protagonist, Jess, becomes "stone" butch—not, as Butler contends, through a set of random relatonships/signifiers that are performed and parodied randomly. Jess's masculinity does not show the hollowness of masculinity—it shows the futility of "acting like a man" when you don't have a male material reality. Jess and her butch friends are always acting as men do, getting into fights with men, and you know how that always ends? It ends with them getting beaten and raped over and over and over again. Why? because they are women and their material realities dictate that they cannot win fights against men by acting like men because performance does not fundamentally change the truth of their bodies.

Bless her, everyone needs to read this book. Especially because Jess transitions and detransitions, and it's the most honest, heartbreaking account of transition due to misogyny and homophobia I've ever read.

Crying, shaking, crying that Mr Points is considered anything in the realm of philosophy or academia??? And nigh a speck of Andrea Dworkin, the greatest feminist thinker of all time…

Truly a hell dimension.

was thinking again about how atla is a fantastic tool for introducing kids to the dharma, especially kids growing up in western countries who might lack a cultural context for buddhism, and how aang’s journey in particular is exemplar of honoring dharmic teachings even in the face of seemingly insurmountable violence. and this brought me to one of my favorite buddhist concepts, the bhavacakra, or the wheel of life, which is primarily featured in tibetan buddhism, and is pictured below:

“The bhavacakra is an intricate symbolic representation of samsara—the continuous cycle of birth, life, and death—in the form of a circle. It is the wheel that is commonly featured on the entrance wall of Buddhist temples and monasteries. The symbol has been around since the time of Buddha. This “wheel of becoming” or the “wheel of cyclic existence” is described as the concept of rebirth or reincarnation in Buddhism. Buddhists believe that shortly after death, one’s spirit will enter an intermediate state of “bardo” or “antarabhava,” the state between death and rebirth. This exists from the last inward breath until the first inner breath in the new physical body, and so begins a new life. The nature of one’s new life will be determined by the way in which one lived his or her previous life. This is the concept of karma. One can be liberated from the samsara—the endless cycle of reincarnation—through enlightenment.” (via. symbols archive)

according to buddhist teachings, escape from this vicious cycle is only possible through renouncing “the three poisons”  - greed, hatred, and ignorance - symbolized at the very center of the wheel as a pig, a snake, and a rooster. every depiction of the bhavacakra also shows the buddha, who is usually in the upper right hand corner of the image. he is outside the circle because he’s attained nibbana, liberation from the cycle of samsara.  “These images have variety, but you always see Bodhisattvas in the clouds and heavens, and you see a moon. In Buddhism, the moon represents the potential for liberation. The moon is a positive symbol. It is a celestial body that reflects the light of the sun and provides light in the darkness…The moon represents the power of a celestial divinity who is bringing light to the darkness to illuminate the path for those who wish to escape suffering. The Bodhisattvas are those who point the way.” (via. glorian.org)

in atla, the world is caught in a cycle of seemingly endless war. the longer the war continues, the more violence it creates, and the harder it becomes for people to imagine any path forward without violence. this is exemplified by the scene in the finale when aang’s closest friends, his family, and the whole world, implicitly and explicitly demand that he commit murder in order to end the war and fulfill his duty to the world. despite aang’s determination to find a non-violent solution, everyone insists that killing is the only way. aang disagrees. and in the end, aang’s commitment to his beliefs produces a third path, an alternative no one else had considered: instead of killing his opponent, aang removes his power, definitively ending the cycle of war with an act of peace and mercy. like the buddhas and bodhisattvas depicted in the bhavacakra, aang finds a path that exists outside the endless circle of war and suffering.

if the dharma teaches that we can only escape suffering and violence by following a different path, a path that leads outside the bonds of samsara, then aang’s storyline models this teaching beautifully, and would be an engaging and empathetic way to introduce young children to the foundational buddhist concept of non-harm.

(please note: i’m not suggesting atla can substitute for studying the dharma, simply that in a western context the lessons of the show, particularly the lesson of aang’s character arc, can be an accessible and fun tool for both adults and children to begin learning about the meaning of buddhist practice)

@ladyqueth asked me a while ago how I would translate 是非在己，毁誉由人，得失不论. (This, of course, being the philosophy WWX quoted in Chapter 75 when he's all "Don't cry for me Argentina Lan Wangji"). While still not as 言简意赅 (terse), here's my best shot:

Still a bit hard to grasp. If I were explaining it to people, I'd phrase it as:

But of course, for once WWX is speaking with literary eloquence instead of his usual carefree tone, so I wouldn't put that in the actual book translation.

By the way, this specific phrasing was created by MXTX, but it was summarized/distilled from a text written by 旷敏本 (Kuang Minben) in the 1700s.

(Source)

THIS OHMYGOD think of the walls of text tras come up with when they’re asked to define woman, define gender, explain what ‘queer’ means. To fix this wave of feminism we need dialectic materialism.

come to think of it, TERFs' notion of gender abolition reminds me a bit of concrete and abstract capital. they want to purge the oppressive top layer of gender, which they feel is arbitrary and abstract, and get down to the firm, concrete roots of biological sex. by washing away gender we can return to a world dominated by material differences of sex. it assumes sex to be steadfast and real and prediscursive, because it's about bodies and organs, you can see it and feel it, and gender to be something frivolous, a layer of abstraction and aesthetic that just papers over the hard physical realities of Sex.

it's vulgar materialism that pretends to be scientific but is actually violently anti-materialist and tinged with idealism and essentialism all throughout

i think one of the worst impacts of the postmodernist movement was the implication that no "prediscursive" reality exists. To put it another way, that because all our perceptions of reality are filtered through a subjective lens, there is no means or reason to try and talk about an objective reality. A reality that exists beyond human observation and our limited capacity to perceive it. Don't you see it? This particular piece of postmodernism runs counter to all environmental analysis. It centers absolutely the human individual and his perception of events, it tells us to not even try to empathize with that which differs from us.

Listen to how mockingly this person talks about bodies and organs, about actual existence. How can I, as an environmentalist, start a conversation about pollution without talking about bodies and organs? Or about habitat destruction? Or about food insecurity? Or, yes, female reproductive rights? How can we talk about the reasons to oppose climate change without talking about the billions of dead bodies, human and nonhuman, it will create? How can vegans (who are an imperfect group agitating for a more perfect world) talk about animal cruelty without talking about bodies? When I see an oil-covered shorebird freezing to death in the Florida sun, am I supposed to ask it to engage in discursive reasoning and explain if it feels it has experienced harm? Is having a body not enough?

This is the most bizarre interpretation of the dialectics of abstract and concrete that I’ve ever seen. Who are you actually referring to? Marx? Ricardo? What point are you making? You use both materialist and anti-materialist as criticisms of a single stance. I have yet to see a logical definition of gender that is not entirely ephemeral, aesthetic, a-scientific or even entering the realm of spiritual dualism (nonsense). So yes it is entirely abstract and immaterial, it is based on the incorrect surmises of perverse sexologists blinded by their own bigotry.

As for our apparent wish to “return to a world dominated by material differences of sex” I have no idea how you concluded that from a group who wish to make radical and feminist (anti sexist) changes to the world which is catered to the male sex and designates females as second class citizens, regardless of their feelings on the matter or self perception. I also don’t know what lead you to believe that gender ideology has allowed us to depart from that world. Radicals don’t want to “return to a world” they want to change it from the roots. We do not want the world to be dominated by sexism. Pretending that sex and our oppression is not real is not helping.

Humans are male or female, some 1 in 2,000 births experience DSD (Disorders of Sex Development). Human biological sex is dimorphic, secondary sex characteristics can be diverse in individuals and altered by the introduction of medicated hormones and plastic surgeries, but this does not erase the reality of primary biological sex. To say otherwise is merely self flagellating false idealism.

I don’t usually use this blog to make original posts but I cant help but feel like this one needs to make its way out of my head:

No ideology that relies on mind-body dualism can be anything but religious in nature (or at the very least spiritual). The concept of mind-body dualism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it’s normal to take it at face value, that is the only reason the idea of “born in the wrong body” is so easily accepted by many people. It uses the same comforting logic that people rely on to justify the existence of souls, the afterlife, basically every religion…

I am now of the mind that the concept is a male supremacist one. Why separate the flesh from the physical experience of being, if not to better isolate that flesh as something not a person? If not to help you monopolize that body as a product? The idea that we “own” our bodies (even the language of “our bodies” “my body”) is to imply that the body is a thing to be owned by someone, preferably yourself but sometimes, inevitably, others. The fact that mind-body dualism is the main underlying conceit of the same patriarchal religions that wrote disrespect for our female bodies into their very foundations is no fucking accident.

Hey so I cannot emphasize enough that this post is not about transgender ideology. I made the reference to the “born in the wrong body” thing because it is an absolutely on-the-nose and almost laughably straightforward summation of liberal thought, from transgender ideology to plastic surgery culture to the chilling rise of trans-humanistic ideals in the most mundane of places.

It’s important for me to clarify what I mean here for anyone still willing to misunderstand: the idea that we are in any material sense separate from our bodies is a manmade one, and by that I mean male-made. Like most things ingrained in our collective subconscious, it serves male supremacy. It artificially separates us from our bodies in a way that is only ever comforting within the context of the life-denying male society in which we live. There is no logical reason for it to exist as a concept.

Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (via exhaled-spirals)

Just finished a book by philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff in which she dissects at one point a contradiction that often raises its head when people demand social change: the issue is dismissed as simultaneously too big and consequential to allow change, and too small and inconsequential to deserve change. I’m sure modern examples can be found but the one she gives is when 1970s French feminists wanted to have the national motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité changed to Liberté, Égalité, Solidarité so as not to have the word “brotherhood” in there. They were told changing the national motto is impossible due to its prominence and historical weight, but also that this is a trivial concern and don’t feminists have more important fights than nitpicking over a word? Le Dœuff’s rebuttal is “Either this matter is big and significant, and therefore it’s imperative to change it to reflect more egalitarian values, or it’s small and insignificant, and therefore it costs nothing to change it to reflect more egalitarian values.”

— Let them eat text: The real politics of postmodernism by Karla Mantilla (via philo-sophi-a)

- Derrick Jensen, Liberals and the New McCarthyism