Books I've devoured, which is proof to myself I still "can focus", and will again:
- Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
- Flowering Wand + The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand
- When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
- The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon
- How To Do Nothing + Saving Time by Jenny Odell
- Unearthing by Kyo Maclear
- The Power of Story by Harold R. Johnson
- Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

All these books have a spiritual and "environmental" slant to them. (I put environmental in quotes because that's how they'd be classified in the mainstream I guess, if we want to assign labels, but nature, gardening, archeology, human spirit/shortfalls, are all intertwined and written about like... they're one and the same, not separated. It's not, "alrighty, now here's a passage about the tree outside my window" but more like "I felt grounded deep within my place, an old butternut sturdy in the earth," you know? Lol, that was the best explanation my tired postpartum brain could come up with!)

When I look at my reading journal, so many books are unfinished, and my bookshelves have new books with a receipt to mark the page somewhere in the middle. I used to see those as "failures" (sheesh loosen up girl!) but now I'm like, they just didn't captivate me and I'm ok with that.

• says I again, Chloe Bellefontaine on this 18th day of Aug. 2023

Butler:
- “gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed”. She then quotes the claim Nietzsche makes in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything” (1887: 29), before adding her own gendered corollary to his formulation: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (GT: 25).
- whereas performance presupposes a preexisting subject, performativity contests the very notion of the subject
- there is no identity outside language
- repeatedly refutes the idea of a pre-linguistic inner core or essence by claiming that gender acts are not performed by the subject, but they performatively constitute a subject that is the effect of discourse rather than the cause of it: “that the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality,”
- Gender is a “corporeal style,” an act (or a sequence of acts), a “strategy” which has cultural survival as its end, since those who do not “do” their gender correctly are punished by society; it is a repetition, a copy of a copy and, crucially, the gender parody does not presuppose the existence of an original, since it is the very notion of an original that is being parodied.