lesbianartandartists:

Chitra Ganesh, The Awakening, 2004 

The Awakening resurrects the warrior queen Rani of Jhansi, an Indian queen who died in battle at the age of 21, and the first ruler to challenge British occupation of India. Based on research into 19th Century Indo-Persian armor I sculpted a suit of armor and weapons using cardboard, tin foil, duct tape, and soldering wire. There is little visual evidence of Jhansi ki Rani or of 19th century techniques for fabricating weaponry – both exist today primarily via oral narrative. I enact the Rani at the moment of her death, where her rebellion and failure collide.

source

The Cursed Interior: Women in Horror

abloodymess:

“Women’s interior lives labor under the two-headed curse of societal and internalized repression. We self-censor our every reaction, debating endlessly with ourselves over which thoughts are permitted and which are forbidden or unclean. Our dreams, or the dreamlike realm of psychosis, are the only spaces in which we can be truly honest with ourselves, our filters and obsessive self-monitoring falling away to reveal the truth of our wants. They’re seldom pretty.

And so, a common thread runs through horror’s visions of female destruction and abandon. Each expresses in some way an unfulfilled desire, an urge to transgress—to violate taboos around what womanhood is and is not.”

The Cursed Interior: Women in Horror

coffincarpenters3:

when sontag said that the whole idea that the way you should look at art is by interpreting the meaning under the surface rather than listening to what it says directly comes from christians trying to make the hebrew bible about christianity, and that instead of trying to interpret art we should focus on how it affects us, whether it’s beautiful and how it makes us feel. when sontag said that it doesn’t matter how deeply a photograph of violence affects you emotionally bc we’re inundated with those images by the mass media, and what matters isn’t that you have an emotional response or worse still perform an emotional response but instead that you do something about it. when sontag said that the idea that physical illness is the product of spiritual illness and that a person’s illness reflects something about their character is deeply enmeshed into how our culture thinks about illness and wellness even though we know logically that that’s not how it works. when sontag said that the gay camp sensibility is the ultimate extension of the metaphor of life as theatre. 

yourlesbianmom:

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

— Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”