Empowering Ideas, Theories, and Writing About Literature, Gender, Sexuality & Identity
Exploring & creating new possibilities in experiencing more awareness, freedom, and power
in our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world.
Identity Gender Sex
Literature Language Society
Relationship Love Connection
Your Daily Inspiration / Affirmation:
“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it
then I can achieve it.”
Jesse Jackson, 1983
The Poetic & Revolutionary Love Life of Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 27, 1946) and Alice B. Toklas (April 30, 1877 - March 7, 1967) met on the first day Toklas arrived in Paris, in 1907. Toklas moved into Stein’s residence in 1910 and they were life-long partners until Stein’s death. In...
Understanding & Defining Gender & Sexual Variancy
On Gender… For the majority of people one's gender is simple, clear, and defined: one is either a man or a woman. There is nothing complicated about it. Our society has certain "womanly" or "manly" behaviours, traits, and expectations around what a man or...
A Short History of Sex & Sexuality … Retelling Truths
“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings” (Shakespeare, Macbeth) To consider and be comfortable with authentic displays of variant genders and sexualities seems such a basic, healthy, productive, powerful, potentially opening and enlivening premise; yet,...
Switching 101
What is Switching... To switch, and the process of engaging in the action of switching, can most broadly be described as dwelling in, and having the intention of, honoring, exploring, and sharing different, switchable aspects of a person: multiple or varied states of...
Identity, The Mind & Love in Jeanette Winterson’s Powerbook
“You need a label. But I’m not a piece of furniture with the price on the back.” (Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook , 65). A facet at the heart of Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook is the freedom that comes when no identity is present, when identity is not...
How Pink is Your Melon, Joy? The Erotic, Sexual Language of Gertrude Stein
Ulla E. Dydo, Stein scholar and editor of the selected works collection titled A Stein Reader: Gertrude Stein, asserts that Pink Melon Joy is “the most lighthearted, humorous, and erotic work” of the early World War I time; further, she writes that Pink Melon Joy...