Dynamics of Desire  by Del La Grace Volcano (an excerpt)

“Images exist; things themselves are images… Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement…”

Gilles Deleuze As a photographer who deals in seduction and exchange I have been wondering why it is that people allow themselves to be photographed by me in what you could call comprising positions. Although I usually pay travel expenses, give them prints and occasionally a bit of money, if I am being paid, the incentive to ‘pose, perform or model’ for me isn’t financial. I ask them to submit to my fantasies and to confess their own to me. At times they may be in great physical discomfort and occasionally at risk, from the law or the less than law abiding, who wish to censor their display. Is it any more than narcissistic pleasure? Or an overwhelming desire to speak sex and hear it spoken?”

In this piece I want to examine what I call the ‘photographic moments’ in terms of some of the processes involved. Those seldom seen and rarely talked about moments that exist before the images is created and after the images is ‘consumed’ by the spectator….

(via d e l    l a g r a c e    v o l c a n o    |    t e x t s)

mkarmstr:

Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays.

cassket:

My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Series Q)
By Amber L.Hollibaugh

Amber L. Hollibaugh is a lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. My Dangerous Desires presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh’s writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including “A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home,” “My Dangerous Desires,” and “Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism.”

In looking at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire or how sexuality can be intimately tied to one’s class identity, Hollibaugh fiercely and fearlessly analyzes her own political development as a response to her unique personal history. She explores the concept of labeling and the associated issues of categories such as butch or femme, transgender, bisexual, top or bottom, drag queen, b-girl, or drag king. The volume includes conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherríe Moraga. From the groundbreaking article “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With” to the radical “Sex Work Notes: Some Tensions of a Former Whore and a Practicing Feminist,” Hollibaugh charges ahead to describe her reality, never flinching from the truth. Dorothy Allison’s moving foreword pays tribute to a life lived in struggle by a working-class lesbian who, like herself, refuses to suppress her dangerous desires.

Having informed many of the debates that have become central to gay and lesbian activism, Hollibaugh’s work challenges her readers to speak, write, and record their desires—especially, perhaps, the most dangerous of them—“in order for us all to survive.”

Wonderful political/personal memoir. Michelle Tea, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and some authors at Homofactus Press are more contemporary femme writers, if anyone’s interested.

superflyyarns:

3000km:

breakflows:

Janine Antoni, Gnaw (1992)

The 600 pound blocks of chocolate and lard, that Antoni gnawed from, before making her ‘chocolate box of chocolate’ and lard lipstick from the bitten off pieces.

bonesarecoralmade:

Deana Lawson, Binky & Tony Forever

LO: Your work deals with representations of the black family, and is specifically about your family, and also about the black female body. Please explain what your work is about in more detail.

DL: When I talk about my photographs, I try to stay away from categorizing the work as “the black female body” or “the black family” because these terms carry with them certain expectations or non-expectations. But I am interested in the flesh and the familial, from the most profane to the sacred. Contrasts and in-between spaces are teased out in my work, i.e. the erotic in the context of death, the husband in the context of a Succubus, children as the beholders of adult knowledge, and injury in the context of lust. The family has been central to my work because it’s where the beauty and torment happens; it’s where we form our individual identities while experiencing love, deception, intimacy, celebration, jealousy, and hatred. Flesh….the skin…I see as a very visceral and carnal covering, which contains or unleashes our identities, our desires, our being.

via thepublics