I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.
So now I can’t stop obsessing about ahistorism, specifically what’s going on - both psychologically, in repeating historical abuses between women within feminism, and the remarkable hypocrisy while undermining WOC talent - when Audre Lorde seems to be the author of choice for white feminists to quote during conflicts with WOC. Like, to quote AT them.
Is this just a tumblr thing? I wonder, then remember the Sex Wars with that endless misquoting of Uses of the Erotic AT Black sex workers, so probably not.
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us… we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that part of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us.
[Image Description: Image is a tan poster with a portrait of poet and activist Audre Lorde. She is a black woman with glasses and short hair. Her name is across the top of the poster in large black letters. Underneath it in smaller text is “Born February 18, 1934. Died November.” Phrases and quotes pertaining to Lorde continue down the poster:
“Gamba adisa”
“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house…”
And underneath her portrait in large bold letters it reads “Black lesbian mother warrior poet.”
“She who makes her meaning known” - The meaning of her African name “Gamba adisa”
who do the legacy and gains of Black, Lesbian, Poet, Fighter, Mother, writers who never apologized for self love or the complex, messy, aspects of ethics belong to?
Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.
“
—
Audre Lorde, “Lessons from the 60s” (via wordsandsteel)
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered - to leave and to be left - to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like to fantasize the core of it, my pearl, a protruding part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way
HEY! Tumblr ate the bio i had here for years. Will come back to that.
Basic FYI = in Australia, been organizing for decades across sexual, union, land rights and landcare politics, but this is not a political Tumblr. My usual byline is something about beauty, as a state of mind and usurping the gaze. Which confuses people but whatever
Following is only recommended if you embrace the food sovereignty, art, LGBTI, history, fashion and politics pastiche.
