Photos from the back covers of the Dykes to Watch Out For  series

1. Dykes to Watch Out For (1986)

2. More Dykes to Watch Out For (1988)

3.  New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For (1990) / Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For (1993)

4. Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel (1992)

5. Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (1995)

6. Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For (1997)

7. Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For (1998)

8. Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (2000)

What South Africans had to look at every day for four decades.

The first way to strip literature of its pretensions of ahistorical truth is to do what Orpheus did in order to save Eurydice, whom he loved: he gave her up. This is what the modern poet does: s/he gives up the contextual embeddedness, the networks of relations of words that is language; s/he gives up speech; s/he gives up communication. In silence and solitude, then, the poet confronts the poetic word as a solitary object. Barthes calls this the Orphean dream of a writer without literature, and it illustrates the double bind in which Barthes locates the modern writer. The gods permit Orpheus to bring Eurydice back from the underworld on condition that he should not look at her, that he blind himself to what he loves; if he looks, she goes back. If Orpheus does not look, he does not have her; if he does look, she will not be there to see and to have. The lover without a beloved, the writer without literature.

(via heteroglossia)

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Metropolitan LA, Los Angeles, 1993

GUYS THIS IS AMAZING

SERIOUSLY

6000 YEARS

STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS

STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW

STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME

STORIES

We did this in Baltimore, Nothing changed @pepsi ~ @YeahItsWilly This tweet is a response to a recent commercial by Pepsi that features model Kendall Jenner offering a Pepsi to a police officer. The commercial was criticized as trivializing recent protests.

hey guess what, if brands are using social justice movements for the purpose of promotion and profit 

it is not revolutionary

you are not bettering the world by buying their products

they just want your money

that’s it

using a legitimate cause to further capitalist exploitation is fucking gross

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (47)

I look in the mirror and I am fixed by the male gaze. I wonder if I can ever look at my body and not simultaneously see its monstrous excess and its pathetic lack. I put my hand on my belly; it is too soft, there is too much of it. I am bloated, swelling with self-disgust. If I explode will I cease to be? 

I will be my own woodworker; I will take this knife to my body and excise my fleshy folds until I am all but flat planes and lines, a sketch, an idea of a woman – or the perfect woman. I will whittle myself out of existence.

Marilyn Mugot (French, b. Paris, France, based China) - 1: Electric Pink, Hong Kong, 2016  2: Clown Costume, Guilin, 2016  3: Folklore Dream, Chongqing, 2016  4: Homes, Guilin, 2016  5: Colorvision, Guilin, 2016  6: Air Drying Show, Chongqing, 2016  7: Between Two Worlds, Chongqing, 2016  8: Night Mirage, Chongqing, 2016  9: Backstairs, Hong Kong, 2016  10: Conquest of Paradise, Chongqing, 2016  Photography

1920s German flapper

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via vintageanchorbooks)

Women wearing qipao riding bikes in the streets of Beijing in 1939. The photo was found in Sense of China.

Félix Vallotton – Clouds,1890

Ruth Negga for AnOther Magazine Spring/Summer 2017, photographed by Collier Schorr