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Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”
Because if the outsiders called the characters “he,” it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them;
Words change depending on who speaks them;
Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy
We were surprised at our shock, as it revealed a passive, naive trust that the arc of the moral universe, however long, tends toward justice.
Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).
if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.
You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows.
And the thing is, even you don’t always know.
the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please.
Very little about George and a lot about Mary.” It’s her autobiography, you fucking moron,
(“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations)
becoming in which one never becomes,
a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.
In the face of such narrative, it’s a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade,
it’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.
somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary.
On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.
there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything.”
That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom.
Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way.
Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks.
a measure of fatigued trepidation, the result of years of fielding unwanted monologues from cabdrivers about how women should live or behave.
It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by “add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.”
In an age all too happy to collapse the sodomitical mother into the MILF, how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality?
