i’m supposed to be writing a conference paper on marie’s work, but i’m stuck on my own blog post, “i will never doubt tracey emin again,” from 2009.  

“Tracey Emin might be the ultimate 90swoman. But in the spirit of her confessional art, I have a confession of my own: I’ve never been sure I’d like her very much in person. But at a reading last Saturday I found out that my skepticism could not have been more misplaced. She was hilarious, smart, self-aware, and complicated. She confidently read a short sketch about all the boys she fucked when she was 13 and 14 but refused to read the end of another story because she said she was far too embarrassed. (Even exhibitionists have their limits.) She brought a glass of wine up to the lectern—it’s true, her pleasure-seeking always gives me a little thrill—but she never took a sip from it.

She is unapologetic about how much she likes sex—“sex used to get me out of bed in the morning,” she said—but she’s also deeply romantic.”I think we all know how that feels,” she said at the close of one of her sexually explicit, emotionally vulnerable stories. It’s funny that she’s always called a narcissist, considering how much of her work is about the intense ways in which humans need, want, and affect each other. During the Q & A, someone asked the excellent question “Do you ever stop longing?” She said: Sometimes, but it’s only momentary. Some of the questions–like “are you a sex addict?”–were far less kind. But then, pretty much any female artist who deals with sexuality is going to be semi-covertly accused of sluttiness.

Emin’s relationship with/to straight men seems totally representative of 90swoman heterosexuality. Including that she’s insinuated that she isn’t exactly heterosexual. But maybe this is a subject for a different post.”

tracey emin, suffer love ii, 2009

"electronic contact, however, cannot be divided into the ‘safe’ and the ‘dangerous’ based on content because the risk of exposure underlies all electronic exchanges."

wendy chun, control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. i would say “all exchanges.” i’m often surprised that anyone talks to me at all, although 99% of even the best things never end up on this tumblr. 

"so, was or is the internet a tool of freedom or control? does it enable greater self-control or surveillance?…these questions and their assumptions are not only misguided but symptomatic of the increasingly normal paranoid response to and of power. this paranoia stems from the reduction of political problems into technological ones—a reduction that blinds us to the ways in which those very technologies operate and fail to operate. the forms of control the internet enables are not complete, and the freedom we experience stems from these controls; the forms of freedom the internet enables stem from our vulnerabilities, from the fact that we do not entirely control our own actions."

wendy chun, control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics

marie calloway, “adrien brody” in what purpose did i serve in your life 

lookerlooker:

today i tried out a different yoga place than i usually go to, near my new apt, and during the last shavasana the teacher read aloud a thing about vulnerability.

i started a book club with one of my friends two years ago and now we are starting a “radical vulnerability” club, or an oversharing salon, where we will get together and cook for each other, and drink wine, and talk about our lives. which is what we do as friends anyways, but something about formalizing it is really nice. making it intentional.

i first started thinking and writing and reading about vulnerability after finding emily gould’s tumblr, after reading and the heart says whatever (at the recommendation of riese from autostraddle - whose personal memoir/blog i had also obsessively read) and also finding karaj’s tumblr through emily’s tumblr and then through karaj so many more. and it’s kind of magical to me how i needed these voices and then i found them and once i found one, that led me to another and another. and i know this is just my way into this, there’s lots of other ways.

sometimes tumblr is overwhelming, sometimes i feel like i spend too much time on here, but i mostly i am so thankful for this space and the people i follow and being challenged and inspired by so many lovers and fighters, making me want to dig deeper and live harder and write more, write about everything, write it all down, write it for others to read, speak it.

lizgip:

Come here me talk about Gran Fury and performing radical vulnerability!

And learn about trans* YouTubers and the uncanny (Liza), and  about how  post-modern dancers appropriated voguing (Ali), and about how Grindr is a homonormative tool used to erase POCs and fat bodies (Kellie).

Bring your friends! Bring your dog! Bring your grandma!

It’ll be great all around. I promise.

foxesinbreeches:

Stills from Intercourse with… by Hannah Wilke, 1976

In this haunting performance, Wilke conflates the private and the public as autobiographical theater. The audience “eavesdrops” on a series of phone messages intended for Wilke, recorded from her answering machine. This voice-over litany of messages becomes an intimate if one-sided narrative of Wilke’s life, a diary of personal and professional relationships — family, lovers, friends, colleagues — that is oddly elegiac. Wilke strips to reveal that her body is covered with the names of the individuals we have heard speaking; she then methodically removes the names until all traces have disappeared.

“Since 1960, I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female, a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are namable and at the same time quite abstract. Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions. Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter, making love, shaking hands … Eating fortune cookies instead of signing them, chewing gum into androgynous objects … Delicate definitions …Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed … continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs … gamboling as well as gambling.”

this nyt review of renata adler’s books uses so many of the key words. 

"like most oppositions, moreover, individualism and community have a common logic underlying their polarity which makes it possible for them to define each other negatively. each entails a denial of difference and desire to bring multiplicity and heterogeneity into unity, although in opposing ways. liberal individualism denies difference by positing the self as a solid, self-sufficient unity, not defined by or in need of anything other than itself. its formalistic ethic of rights denies difference by leveling all such separated individuals under a common measure of rights. community, on the other hand, denies difference by positing a fusion of the social subject as a relation of unity composed by identification and symmetry among individuals within a totality. as sandel puts it, the opacity of persons tends to dissolve as ends, vocabulary, and practices become identical. this represents an urge to see persons in unity with each other as a shared whole."

the ideal of community and the politics of difference, iris marion young (via sylvides)

i don’t really believe in either.

materialworld:

No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt

Heather Davis: What is it about love that makes it a compelling or politically interesting concept?

Michael Hardt: One healthy thing love does, which is probably not even the core of it, but at least one healthy thing it does, is it breaks through a variety of conceptions about reason, passion, and the role of affect in politics. …

Lauren Berlant:….. I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality. The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.

The question of duration is also important in this regard because there are many places that one holds duration. …. As a formal relation, love could have continuity, whereas, as an experiential relation it could have discontinuities. When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land you’re probably going to fall, or hurt your ankle or hit someone. When you’re asking for social change, you want to be able to say there will be some kind of cushion when we take the leap. What love does as a seduction for this is, and has done historically for political theory, is to try to imagine some continuity in the affective level. One that isn’t experienced at the historical, social or everyday level, but that still provides a kind of referential anchor, affectively and as a political project.

perfect reblog timing.