Revenge is an admission of pain; a mind that is bowed by injury is not a great mind. The man who has done the injury is either stronger than you or weaker: if he is weaker, spare him, if stronger, spare yourself.
On women’s anger
From “Loving to Survive” by Dee L. R. Graham
Lidia Yuknavitch & Sarah Gerard – How to Harness the Energy of Female Rage, Creative Destruction & the Cosmos
Yoko Ono, Stone Piece, from The Riverbed, 2015
Since the early 1960s, audience participation has been a crucial aspect of Ono’s work. To make a village is a political gesture, as well as a formal one. Audience participation is key to completing the THE RIVERBED through everyday action coupled with contemplation; they are collaborators with the artist, similar to the collaboration between the artist and the two galleries. Additionally, it is significant to Ono that all three “principals”— the artist and two gallery leaders—are female; the support and participation of women in power is one of Ono’s longstanding concerns.
Conceived as two room-sized installations shown in two spaces—a whole in two parts— visitors are encouraged, via instructions, to visit both spaces in order to experience and fully understand THE RIVERBED. Both galleries will have a pile of large river stones that Ono has selected and gathered. She will inscribe the words like remember, dream, and wish on the stones, which have been honed and shaped by water over time. Visitors may pick up a stone and hold it in their lap, concentrating on the word and letting go of their anger or fear, transforming the stone into an emotional object to be placed upon the pile of stones in the center of the room.
Judy Chicago
Left:
Sad Face, 2012, Glass paint on starfire glass
Sad Face, 2007, watercolor on tempera on paper
Right:
Angry Eyes, 2012, glass paint on starfire glass
Angry Eyes, 2007, watercolor on tempera on paper
from Child Abuse: A Project by Louise Bourgeois for Artforum1982
Doris Lessing | The Golden Notebook
Dana Becker, Through The Looking Glass: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder
Rage and Politics should never have been separated. Without the first, the second is lost in discourse; without the second the first exhausts itself in howls.
– Betty McLellan, Beyond Psychoppression: a feminist alternative therapy, pg. 70
Okay but fuck racist radfem Mary Daly and fuck Betty McLellan because Audre Lorde definitely wrote “The Uses of Anger” circa 1981. And considering that Mary Daly didn’t fuck with Audre Lorde—not since 1979 when lorde wrote a letter critiquing her white supremacist views and behaviors—I am highly suspicious of this clear paraphrasing of Lorde’s argument which according to McLellan’s citation was written in 1984 after Lorde’s essay which was published as early as 1981.
This is the 1981 publication of “the uses of anger” that I found. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005441
Here’s Audre Lorde’s 1979 essay “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordeopenlettertomarydaly.html
Fuck the historical erasure of queer Black women’s words, ideas, and activism. Fuck that.thank you for pointing this out.
audre lorde was a lesbian though- she used the words lesbian & dyke- let’s not say “don’t erase queer black women’s words” when by doing so you are obfuscating and rewriting the very important lesbianism that informed her politics.
Little Bristling Soul 