Related Recs

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“self-creating sexual subject” ?

Reading this afternoon https://open.substack.com/pub/reactionaryfeminist/p/you-dont-lose-your-virginity-you?r=1uhghb&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

@catie_baaaby

Jan 28, 2024

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THE ART OF GENDER

I am making a zine about the art of performing, producing and affirming our gender. A few weeks ago I was struck by a video of a piercer talking about gender-affirming piercings that exposed my bias. I, (a nonbinary hyper-femme glittery diva, obsessed with exploring, manipulating, and playing with expression, using my face, body, and essence as a canvas), realized I assume that "gender-affirming" actions, such as getting a piercing, would only refer to trans folks. There was this unconscious part of me that still gripped to the narrative that "gender" was somehow real... that cis people did not need to perform, produce, or affirm their own identity... that gender was static. This piercer exposed a hideous blind spot. They opened with a story of little girls getting their lobes pierced. This beautiful ushering into womanhood, this ritual of adorning similar style jewels to the brave and courageous women in your life. And then mothers. When mothers get their nose pierced to reclaim their bodies, to reclaim their autonomy after literally sharing, giving, everything to bring a child into the world. We all use art express our gender. We all everyday wake up and perform gender - yes sometimes in the theatrical sense, gender is drag of course - but also in the Judith Butler sense, that with every act we create a new reality. I don't know. The whole thing has just got me thinking. Especially with the state of the world today, authoritarianism on the rise globally, transgender history literally being deleted from government websites... a joyful celebration of gender, a leaning into the playful aspects of what gender can, of what it should be... is at least what I need. If you, cis, trans, unsure, whatever, have a story of a gender-affirming moment in your life, please share:) And if anyone wants to be a part of this project .... eeeeee that would be sick!

@crabbyblabbyabby

Feb 19, 2025

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The human figure in a dress, Mary Jo bang

Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my back so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head.

@millixisme

Jul 17, 2024

Top Recs from @greeneyedlocoman

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FRANK FRANK FRANK O’HARA

Frank leaving me bereft, coiling, somehow so gay isn‘t it, wanting to stay drunk on friendship, impossibilities, language shared always shared. No more language to come here just the poem to read.

@greeneyedlocoman

5d ago

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CASTLE FAGGOT - DEREK MCCORMACK

‘They’re faggots. They’re writers—quelle surprise!’ I had to ask Gay’s the Word to order Castle Faggot in for me. I used a £7.99 discount token from their pay-it-forward scheme to buy it when it arrived, povo that I am. I spent that £7.99 on one pint at some Bloomsbury pub and read it all in one sitting, twisting the book upside down, inside out, trying to make sure every toff in a gilet could see what I was reading. This is one of the reasons the book is such a powerful object: it branded me. It’s by a faggot, for faggots. No hetero would be caught dead with it in his hands.  In the book’s afterword, Dennis Cooper says ‘It does everything it’s doing in three-dimensions.’ Castle Faggot is a real space, an orgy of dead faggots and an amusement park. It’s a scatological Disneyland and a place for faggots to die. It’s a book that at once inspired and destroyed my own work, took a real big shit on it. Derek, as I try to, leans into consumerism with joy and horror simultaneously, locates us in the products we buy and the sugary cereal we crave. It’s also totally absent of literary goop, full of human goop, faggot goop; it’s slender ninety pages make it the perfect artefact. He doesn’t mince words, but he’s a mincer. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be.  I hold a real space for myself in my writing and feared it came off as forced, the I character always some more handsome version of me. Derek doesn’t need to include his name for us to know what sickly disturbed fag is talking. When he does do it, it comes off as a joke. As if we didn’t already know. His input is never conceited or dishonest; he pushes out from every shit-smeared hole laughing, screaming, self-loathing. He made me better at inserting myself into my writing and inserting myself into another man. Castle Faggot isn’t just one of the most important pieces of post-AIDS writing, it’s one of the most current pieces of post-AIDS writing. It writes to a world which, honestly, didn’t really experience that tragedy, but which is littered with its bodies. Derek McCormack saw a dead faggot and thought, I’m gonna write on this, or I’m gonna write in this, or I’m gonna write with this. The whole book is a dead faggot crying out against our century, lost in an amusement park, how is this even possible? It’s a mass grave of a book. At some point in the book you have to flip it upside-down, be reminded you’re holding an object; but you’re also forced to read backwards, rescind into a haunted past of faggotry and debauchery. He plays physical tricks with his work that make him a sort of architect. Nothing has ever been written like it, but we need more, and that’s why this book is so important. It sets a precedent. Derek takes the faggy artists of old—the fin-de-siecle writers, or ‘fag-de-siecle’—and transforms them into post-AIDS monuments, puerile shit-filled replicas. It’s a children’s book for faggots. It’s the children’s book I always needed as a child but didn’t know I did. It’s a book that reminds us that, as faggots, we’re already dead; but in being written, existing, it encourages us to go on and create. It’s like the faggots’ nuclear bomb, our weapon of mass seduction. It’s hot enough to melt Walt Disney. Castle Faggot is, to me, the logical progression of all faggot art, the consolidation. It’s an exhibition piece on communal existence with AIDS and a call for young faggot writers to acknowledge that they come from a lineage of shit and death, that it’s inescapable, but that there are new things to be done. It explodes traditional narrative expectations and arrives at some other end of the novel, some new territory. It faggots the writing process and the book itself is a dead fucking faggot.  When I finished reading Castle Faggot I held it the whole way home. On the tube I wore it like a band t-shirt. By this point, though, I didn’t just want to be branded, an obvious faggot where I’ve before been called ‘the straightest person’ gym bro in my art class had ever seen; I wanted to be a model for Derek’s work, for someone, anyone, some faggot, to look it up, read it, and start writing, start breaking the mould.

@greeneyedlocoman

5d ago

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MARGERY KEMPE BY ROBERT GLÜCK

Bob, I don’t know how you do it but my body responds in this fucked up way to your language. It’s actually one of the greatest feats in artistic history I think. I want your mind in mine and I bet you were a great fuck back in your day.

@greeneyedlocoman

4d ago