User:Michel W/MMM personal readers

꧁Personal readers꧂

Q&A:

✨what do you want to investigate? - The relationships between myself, feminist, cyborg, queerness.

✨what are you trying to find out? - How to integrate an artistic project and my statement related to these topics.

✨what tickles your curiosity in the topics you are currently investigating? - Because I feel the needs to delve into these themes, also it's a way to understand myself more with identities.

What is the versions of feminism for my self-identities?

How do you connect yourself to the cyborg and feminism?

What are these boundaries (come from)?

⭑A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway

Synopsis

Haraway introduces the potential of a completely new ontology of hybridization of nature and culture through the cyborg, a combination of machine and organism. Haraway’s use of the cyborg illustrates her conceptualizations of socialism and feminism in the examinations of dichotomies such as nature/culture, mind/body, and idealism/materialism. Her cyborgs are a blending of imagination and material reality.

Why

I've always fascinated with the hybrid of human with other creatures and materials. I would like to explore the boundaries and possibilities of those. Furthermore, seeking the connections between my self identities and this manifesto.

Quotation

• A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organ­ ism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.

• I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruit­ful couplings. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.

• Utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.

• Nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. The pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.

• Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible.

• There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.

• A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.

• There is nothing about being "female" that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as "being" female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.

• The common achievement ofKing and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.

• What kind of politics could embrace par­ tial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions ofpersonal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective-and, ironically, socialist feminist?

Everything is a cyborg. We are cyborgs.

⭑Craftivism: A manifesto/Methodology - Tal Fitzpatrick

Synopsis

Beginning with a manifesto that sets out the ethos of craftivism, this handbook goes on to define craftivism and provide a set of considerations, strategies and tools designed to help readers develop greater reflexivity and confidence in their practice.

Why

Work as a craft-based traditions and activist practices is one of the main core of craftivism, to question the prevailing of codes of mass consumerism. It is a way to take empowered action for people who feel the need to do something and find voice (another important element of human identity) when moved by injustice in the world. I would like to also demonstrate this concept into my daily life.

⭑The Ethical Sluts: a practical guide to polyamory, open relationships and other freedoms in sex and love - Dossie Easton & Janet Hardy

Synopsis

The Ethical sluts is a self-help and self-learning book, focusing on non-monogamy and polyamorous guidance.

Why

I've read this book several times over the years. For me, it is a book about self-understanding beyond "mainstream sexual ethics," and it guides you through different types of relationships. From my previous projects, love, sex, and relationships are topics that I delve into. Through these practices, I gain a deeper understanding of myself and my identities.

⭑Walk Through Walls: A Memoir - Marina Abramovic

Synopsis

This is a memoir that Marina Abramovic reveals her personal stories about families, life, changes, performances, and spiritual healing journey. Marina also tells how she pushes body and mind beyond the boundaries of pain, exhaustion and fear in her search for emotional and spiritual transformation.

Why

I admire her courage for the performance of uses her own body and tests the limits of her physical and mental endurance, including the transformation to spiritual healing. In April 2024, I've been to her solo exhibition at Stedelijk museum and it impressed me with strong feelings/connections.

Quotation

• 過程其實比結果重要，就如表演比展出物件來得重要一樣。我目睹了製作的過程還有毀滅的過程。這之間並沒有固定的時序時間或是穩定性。就只是純粹的過程。Yves Klein説：「我的畫作不過是我藝術創作的灰燼而已。」

• 我意識到當一個藝術家代表有窮盡的自由。我們所痴迷地談論著的，是一種超越畫作的方式：一種把生命本質注入藝術的方式。

• 疼痛仿佛是一道我走過的牆，而我到達了牆的另一端。疼痛就像一種通往另外一層意識的神聖之門。當你抵達那扇門，另一個境界就開啟了。

• 那是睡眠、夢境以及情慾的聚合處。要是你對生命沒有熱情，你對藝術也不可能有熱情。如果你有一種強烈而濃縮的性愛或情慾能量，你就會把這個能量投射到作品上⋯⋯做愛是我生命中重要的一部分——情色、性慾、熱情——臥室必須是這些事情發生的地方。

• 說到藝術，我只在意內涵：作品代表的是什麼。我相信藝術必須要能產生刺激、必須拋出問題、必須預測未來。只有層次豐富的意涵才能讓藝術恆久遠——如此，社會就能隨著時間推進，但還能從藝術中擷取所需。「我只對能夠改變社會意識形態的藝術有興趣⋯⋯只注重在美學價值的藝術是不完整的。」

• 我現在也還是會問：藝術是什麼？我覺得要是我們把藝術視為某種個別孤立的東西，某種神聖而與其他一切區隔開的東西，就代表藝術不是生命。藝術必須要是生命的一部分。藝術必須要屬於每個人。

• 一名藝術家與寂靜的關係：

一名藝術家應該要理解寂靜

一名藝術家應該要創造自己作品之中寂靜的空間

寂靜就像洶湧海洋之中的一座島

（一名藝術家的生命宣言：瑪麗娜・阿布拉莫維奇）

⭑Orlando - Virginia Woolf

Synopsis

Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen. Now, an ambassador in Costantinople, who changed his gender from man to woman in 36 year-old. Orlando explores herself in gender fluidity, self identities, relationships with women and men, and lived for 400 years.

Why

It is interested to thinking about the genders and identities. For my perspectives, I believe that there’s not only one gender in a person. So I'm fascinated by this book and would like to dig into it.

Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive - Kristen J. Sollee

Synopsis

This book enriches our contemporary conversations about reproductive rights, sexual pleasure, queer identity, pornography, sex work, and more.

Why

I feel a strong connection to the societal misogyny surrounding women's nudity and slut shaming. I've read the book called "The Ethical Slut": A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love which really gives me lots of inspirations and thoughts related to this themes.

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir

Synopsis

The Second Sex delves into the concept of feminism by looking at historical facts and biases, and explains how being a woman implies making yourself smaller so that you can fit in today's society, and how we reacted and fight for it.

Why

I've always intrigued by themes related to feminism, and would like to bring this into my future projects/researches. in her book The second sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. I like her argues about "What is woman?", and that man is considered the default, while woman is considered the "Other". In addition, about the issues of women should get rid of the responsibility of "giving birth" etc.