on feminist breakdowns

hysteriarama:

Speaking of acting like a “hysterical accident victim” and the way “talking to him was like talking to a chair”-

I have to speak (tumblr style) in the real world, where not everyone knows what I mean and what my misandry is shorthand for-

We sound disgusting which is the point. We sound crazy. It is so obviously patently absurd to Chris Kraus Marie Calloway people who have hurt you, case study revenge acts make you seem pathological.

I’m going to do this feminist lit discussion group which is about us and I think I might sound fucked. Like a terrible activist. Like I’m so intrusive and inappropriate and embarrassing, like I expect other people to take care of my emotional needs, like a loser, like unappealing, like we don’t make good pragmatic activist sense, like if I felt satisfied by explaining myself in simple activist contexts I wouldn’t need to liveblog my feminist breakdown, like who says the “activists” get to define, hegemonically, whatever the fuck violence and care and solidarity should mean.

Like no, like there are codes that seem so vague and intangible and violent to me. Like so what if I seem totally fucked? Like I hate the term self-care and I hate how quiet I can become when I believe that everyone around me is a model human being in a way that I need to mimic or else I’m so fucked, like I can’t explain why I’m so angry but I’m so angry and I know I need to deal with my shit but what if everyone else should have to deal with my shit too? Like Chris Kraus did to Dick Hebdige. Like there’s got to be a reason I feel so alien in most of the anarchist spaces I go to and I don’t know what it is and ugh and ugh and no and also, refusal. And also, speech. And also, remind them of the wound. Refuse to speak of anything else.

i love this. the shorthand problem is so real; so is the urgency to liveblog our feminist breakdowns. i really like this louise bourgeois going around tumblr. but what if we didn’t think of it as revenge? it’s never clear to me that one needs to take revenge—even if it’s sometimes funny to take revenge—because revenge happens anyway. what if we think about it as making things weird in public? what if we are making trauma casual? what if we know we are standing trial, just as we are supposed to? what if, then, it is self-protection? (i often think it is self-protection.) what if we are bearing witness? what if we are staging a great refusal, refusing to disappear, or to die (same thing?)? what if what we are doing is transforming the affects surrounding our own experience? what if we are having fun?