The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

The Scarlet Letter 

All the world had frowned on her,—for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman,—and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died.

The Scarlet Letter 

...when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Their Eyes Were Watching God 

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Bathsheba, Far from the Madding Crowd 

90% of the time drag is a way for conventionally unattractive gay men to touch roided up clones without any qualms because theyre not seen as human and it depresses the hell out of me

i can't depend on anyone but myself tbh.......... like this is a fact lmfao. uh i dont know what im doing with my life n im fukken crazy i need to get shit under control and im dying not having a job or structure rn. i dont know if i want to move to la or nyc or stay where i am and try to make things happen. like i have 10k rn and i can either buy a laptop, a car, a phone, or a video camera and idk which one to go for first. i only need the car if i want to move to los angeles which i do because im very serious about acting but realistically there are very few roles for me out there so i would have to write them myself and to be a good writer i would need time to write which i have at home... and a laptop to write on which i dont have. the laptop is the necessity but the one i want is 2k but reliable but i dont have that kind of money to put down right now. if my last job didnt make me want to die i would go back to it in a heartbeat bcs i was making 3k a month but now i need to be like... a barista or something. and im not good at anything... im stressed. i also want to move to nyc when im yung but i would be by myself and bored as hell anyway so idfk! theres so much things i want to do still and can only do if im idle but i hate not working. i must b strong. unless i buy my camera and start making shit happen and soon im not fckn staying in the bay area another year and idc if it means going solo which lbr is like... the reality.

i want to write an in-depth study on why something like the night porter is considered art for the most part while something like the gestapo’s last orgy is not and i keep getting stressed out bcs this is the most problematic subject to tackle, especially since im not jewish and have no cultural claim on this experience to say what is tasteful or explorative and whats exploitation. tbh both have elements of both and the cultural memory of the holocaust was different even in israel in the 60s/70s than it is now (we associate it more with racial genocide now as compared to moral depravity, see: stalag fiction). both last orgy and the night porter use nazism/fascism as a background for their psychosexual s/m parable to play out against but one is seen as art or at least approaching it and the other is considered a derivative yet they tackle very similar themes. what makes last orgy stand out among the rest of nazisploitation is that it explicitly states the heroine is jewish which was rare in those films (usually they were coded or implied to be political prisoners to avoid racial allegations)... and the night porter were left to assume that she's in the concentration camp for political reasons which might have more to do with why its easier accepted as a kind of art/also considering its relatively high production values. but while the heroine and her captor are gunned down after a spiral of sadomasochistic self-destruction, Lise from last orgy gets her revenge on her own time on both her captor who dehumanized her and in some edits brings justice upon herself for the horrors she complied with to survive. last orgy to me is more a story of an individuals survival at the expense of others than night porter which cops out by 1. not directly addressing the racism of nazism and 2. using nazism in the loosest way as a matter of moral decrepitude in which sadomasochism is the likely outcome (though arguably from a sadean, feminist angle as the director is a woman and apparently a lesbian -- another reason its elevated to the level of art). and what both have in common is nazism as the central conflict from italian directors when the fascism of italy at the same time is more an apparent cultural claim for what both films try to use nazism as a metaphor for. i need to read more on this because i dont understand all of it or what im trying to say-- but i do think a cultural reevaluation of something like last orgy is a valid request because too often cinema is divided into exploitation and without meaning and art and with meaning even when the line is proved time and time again to be incredibly thin.

this disgusting old white man is terrifying me i hope his time (on the computer) is almost up!!! but also his life!

i wish i was cooler and could say tlc or something made me a feminist (they made me a better feminist) but the demoness kathleen hanna takes that title and its so tragique... this is also why i was racist as hell while still identifying as a feminist until i was 17 n read audre lorde who did more for me in every way than bk ever did. this is all to say my interest (not taste) in music peaked when i was like 16 so i still think bikini kill goes off.... like tbh

im really stupid about film like... i dont read a lot of theory because i a) don't understand it and b) it almost always spoils films which i hate lmfao. so i dont know a lot. the most ive learned about is horror theory which i still dont have an eloquent grasp on and like... what ive learned from reading imdb reviews. i just know when i like something, but i can only be critical of things thru its depiction of -isms, not exactly from a filmcraft or philosophical point of view. i wish i had a better understanding of these things so i dont come off like a dumbass but i also think its really important to cultivate that within yourself first? like i may not be aware of theories and be able to view things thru that lense but that doesnt mean that im not engaging critically with the medium in my own way that ive created? or found out for myself. uhh theres this freak ass disgusting old white man next to me in the library and he's giggling like a fuckn pervert but maybe thats just his regular laugh ANYWAY im disturbed and cant finish my thoughts on this.

me teas

im such a blonde </3 loves it

men bring this back!!!!!!!!!!!!!

same

bae type looks

even tho im on like ........ 3 different medicine i still think "if i died tomorrow nobody would care" and know it to be true outside of like 20 people max and that is terrifying and i have no way of changing that i think i need to start volunteering bcs this extra time is freaking me out and i would benefit from giving back more than most people.... being a good person is the only thing that makes me feel good

i think im gonna make a feminist and reactionary horror list but not for Giallo Looks just for here i don't like speaking authoritatively but heres a rough draft just lightly perusing the CONTEMPORARY cannon (NOTE most giallo exists outside of these classifications as does THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD- both which i think are definitely not reactionary but not exactly feminist either)

FEMINIST:

• TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, HOOPER
• OPERA, ARGENTO
• SUSPIRIA, ARGENTO
• HALLOWEEN, CARPENTER
• FRIDAY THE 13TH, MINER
• BLACK CHRISTMAS, CLARK
• ALIEN, SCOTT
• SCREAM, CRAVEN
• THE SHINING, KUBRICK
• THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, DEMME (GENDER)
• THE DESCENT, MARSHALL
• CARRIE, DE PALMA
• THE FLY, CRONENBERG
• A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (TBH IDK WHERE THIS FITS SOMETHING ABOUT IT HAS ALWAYS RUBBED ME THE WRONG WAY BUT YA GIRL IS RESOURCEFUL AS HELL I ADMIT. TRUTHFULLY, IT PROBABLY BELONGS SOMEWHERE BEYOND THIS LIST)

REACTIONARY:

• ROSEMARY'S BABY, POLANSKI
• THE EXORCIST, FRIEDKIN
• THE EVIL DEAD, RAIMI (SORRY I LOVE IT BUT LETS BE REAL - WOULD PROB NOT BE HERE IF NOT FOR THE "TREE RAPE". THE REST IS MODERATE)
• THE CONJOURING, WHOMEVER
• PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, WHOMEVER
• PSYCHO, HITCHCOCK
• THE BIRDS, HITCHCOCK
• THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, DEMME (GENDER IDENTITY AND EXPRESSION)
• HAUTE TENSION, AJA (TBH THIS BELONGS BEYOND THIS LIST TOO AND I STILL FUX W IT. I STILL FUX W A LOT OF THESE)

hmm..

tbh................ i love tess of the d'urbervilles and other fictional womyn who suffer from events outside of their control n usually end tragically/die and its fckked up but i identify lol this 2 deep im going to sleep

Come to me, come to me, and save me from what threatens me.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

I'm so happy I'm not a lowkey TERF like 99% of Tumblr and that I'm not on Tumblr anymore and that I'm going on vacation this weekend and don't have to think about the internet or interacting with anyone for 3 whole days.

Pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still. It forced reality on me and kept me sane.

- Kindred, Octavia Butler

I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject--even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of happy darkies in tender loving bondage was more than I could stand.

Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books--a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. 

Kindred, Octavia Butler

In Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol Clover advances the idea that the primary pleasure for male viewers of the genre is a masochistic rather than a sadistic one, but her concern with gender is strictly limited to male viewers. In The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed, who turns her attention to female monstrosity, maintains that the monstrous-feminine in the horror film speaks to men about their fear of women, but she has little to say about how it might speak to women about female power. Both books center the male viewer and neglect the question of female audience pleasure in the horror film. This question has by now become a structuring absence of horror film criticism. 

My discussion of the horror film is motivated by a desire to disrupt the facile assumption that the genre does not speak to women but only about them, and that it does this in a degrading manner. The postmodern horror film's routine staging of the spectacle of the ruined body, particularly the female body, calls for a feminist analysis. Moreover, the historical conjunction between the emergence of the postmodern horror film and the advent of the second wave American feminist movement in the early seventies begs the question: How have feminist protest and antifeminist backlash informed the character of the contemporary horror film?  

[...]

Although I agree that it matters what representations of women abound in culture, the tendency to see the horror film as monolithically destructive of female subjectivity overlooks the contradictory dynamics within the genre as well as the complexity with which audiences respond to it. The antihorror discourse sees only how the genre has been formed by antifeminist backlash but overlooks how feminism has informed the genre. The horror film is a contradictory form that must be understood in all its complexity lest we misinterpret popular culture or underestimate its subversive potential.

Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing

'Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:

'"May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man's meat? I'm an angel on all fours, with a child's feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!"

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

'I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the "indecent" eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.'

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

She began to walk again. 'I have been loved', she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.' Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. 'It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,' Nora said. 'It's too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can't, I can't wait for ever!' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart! 

'In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the "forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. 

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

"You went about the house like someone sunken under lightness. you wer ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame. When you went out looking for someone to go mad with, they said, 'For god's sake, look at Nora!' For the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle. Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I'm the other woman that God forgot."

"There's nothing to go by, Michael," she said. "you do not know which way to go. A man is another person--a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me, but his laughter is my love."

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

“Hispanic as an ethnic label for all people who reside in the U.S. with some distant connection with the culture brought by the Spanish during the conquest of the Americas is a gross misnomer. The word promotes an official negation of people called “Hispanic” by inferring that their ethnicity or race is exclusively European rather than partly Native American (as are most Chicano/as), or African American (as are those descendants of the African slave trade along the Caribbean coasts). 

The term Hispanic is a misnomer because one-fifth of South America—Brazil—does not speak Spanish. A large population of Guatemala speaks indigenous dialects as a first language and maintains its own indigenous culture. Chicano/as and Puerto Ricans may have little to no fluency in Spanish having been brought up in an English-dominant society, having attended its monolingual schools, and having been discouraged, in general, from pursuing the language of their ancestors. In fact, despite the provisions made by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 to allow Spanish speakers in the Southwest to retain their native tongue, Spanish was prohibited in schools and work-places. The debate rages on among educators and government alike. 

If Hispanic refers to all natives and descendants of Latin America, it is including no less than twenty countries—whose shared pattern of colonization may allow them to be called Pan-American, but whose histories and cultural attitudes are nevertheless diverse in very particular ways. 

How can people from the Caribbean states, whose economies depended on slave trade be generically called Hispanic? Is it because they are from states that are presently Spanish speaking or were once colonized by the Spaniards, although they may presently be under another country’s dominion? In the Caribbean, Hispanic includes Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans. While Cuba’s official language has remained Spanish since Spanish rule, many of its people are of African ancestry. Citizens of the Dominican Republic are considered Hispanic because they speak Spanish, but the residents of the other side of their island, Haiti, speak French (and more commonly, as I understand, patois). Are there enough major racial differences between these two nationalities on the same island to justifiably classify one as Hispanic but not the other? The Philippines were once colonized by Spain and now have English as a dominant language, but they are not classified as Hispanic. They are placed in another catch-all term, Asian. 

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U.S. legislature when they saw they couldn’t get rid of us. If we won’t go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all. 

This erroneous but nationally accepted label invented by a white supremacist bureaucracy essentially is a resignation to allow, after more than two hundred years of denial, some cultural representation of the conquistadors who originally colonized the Southwest. Until now, in other words, only Anglo-Saxons were legitimate informants of American culture. 

To further worsen the supposition that we can be Hispanic—simply long forgotten descendants of Europeans just as white people are—is the horrific history of brutal and inhuman subjugation that not only Amerindians experienced under Spanish and other European rules in Mexico and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, but all those of mixed blood.”

 — Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994)

Case 13: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century “Transvestite”

In Magnus Hirshfeld’s The Transvestites [the first book-length treatment of transgender phenomena], “Case 13” consists of letters, written in 1909, from a person known variously as Jenny, Johanna, and John, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later moved to the United States. Hirschfeld considered this person to be “a typical representative of the group which we are concerned with.” These reminiscences are abridged from the original. 

I was born in 1862. I did not want any trousers and put up such a fuss, and since my sister was one year older I could wear her clothes until Mother died in 1868. My aunts then forced me to wear boys clothing. I clearly remember that I always only wanted to be a girl, and my relatives and acquaintances would tease me. 

I wanted to go to the teacher’s seminary, because later, I thought, when I finished, I could go around as a governess or a children’s teacher. Even at the time I had firm plans to become a woman. When I saw that they were not going to allow me to study to be a teacher, at the first opportunity I stole from a girl who was my size. I put on her things and took her certificate of domicile and burned my boy’s things that night. Everything boyish I left behind and went to Switzerland where my relatives would not know where I was. 

I first went to work as a nanny and did general housework. At the same time I learned embroidery. I grew strong and not ugly, so that boys would lie in wait for me. At that time I felt fully a young woman, except when the fellows got fresh with me, and it would occur to me that, unfortunately, I was not one. 

At 16 1/2 a man tried to rape me. I protected myself, but he gave me a bad name as being a hermaphrodite, so I had to move away and went to France. I had a friendship with a girl, who, like me, was in opposition to her sex, namely manly, and when she went to St. Quentin to the embroidery factory there, I followed her. There I had the opportunity for the first time to come together with women who with other women lived like married people. 

In 1882 I left France and went to New York. Here, I soon found work as a maid on a farm because I thought I would be able to live there inconspicuously, but one day the farmer’s wife was away and he became fresh. I was afraid of discovery and left that place and got a good job in Jersey City. 

I became acquainted with an embroiderer who found out I was no young woman. He threatened to call the police and tell them I was playing a masquerade. He forced me into sodomy and fellatio and a few months passed during which I got more miserable each day. One morning I packed everything together and, when he was away, sold everything of worth. I went to Montana as a woman cook. There, however, betrayed again, I took myself to San Francisco in 1885, and still live there today. 

I am now 47 years old and today it is still my deepest wish to wear a new princess dress, a new flowered hat, and lace petticoats. I decorate my bedroom in the manner of women and a man seldom enters my room, because I am no friend to men. Conversations with women satisfy me more, and I am envious of educated women, because I look up to them. For that reason I have always been an activist for equal rights.

- from Transgender History, Susan Stryker

pleasure beach dir. arthur j. bressan jr. (1983)