“Lyric Conceptualism imagines herself a boat, fluid, without handles, able to slip through definitions, anchor at will.”

— “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto In Progress” by Sina Queyras

“[Queyras’s] use of the pronoun “she” throughout the manifesto is telling: in post-minimalism, the most compelling work was driven by a feminist preoccupation of deconstructing procedural and rational processes that were identified with masculinist tendencies in a largely male-dominated field.”

— “The Soft Grid: A Response to Sina Queyras’s Lyric Conceptualist Manifesto” by Kenneth Goldsmith

Why do I write mutant love letters
to men who don’t even read?

It’s like a botched cosmetic surgery
when all they want is push-up bra love.

— Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook

“A woman” “a crazed woman—” “seems crazy” “crouches naked, in a corner”

[…]

“What you think are “yours'” (“Says to me,”) ” ‘It’s all made by” “a man” “You were made by” “men, made out of man-thought” “All women now,

all of this here,” “man-made—”

—The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

(I was interviewed for a teaching job last week, over the phone. I was asked about Heroines, what my thesis was, by the interviewer, a male philosopher. After some stuttering about various feminisms and girls, I finally answered: my writing doesn’t have a thesis).

— “All The Sad Young Pretty Girls” by Kate Zambreno

Although masculine egotism surely existed in the Surrealist Group, what is known of [Simone Kahn Breton]’s correspondence refutes the temptingly simple but shallow argument that the relatively small production of the first women surrealists can be blamed on male chauvinism alone. What held these women back, more than likely, was a complex of inhibitions and fears inherited from centuries of French and European patriarchal, capitalist, Christian culture: notions of “feminine reserve,” “woman’s place,” and “biological destiny” that they had internalized more or less unconsciously as children and which continued to wreak havoc in their psyches in later years, despite themselves.

— pg. 9, Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont

A Naked Body is seen as Deliberately Sxual / Attention Grabbing in our Culture because we are so Rarely witness to it. What would Other Wise have been an Aesthetic Choice / Personal Liberty is made to look like a Seedy, Underhanded Grab for the Wrong Kind of Attention; the Work Surrounding the Nudity Less Valuable as Art, Especially when it is an Attractive Young Lady making the Art. To Challenge this Negative Stereotype, I add Blatant and Often Sxually Blatant Nudity to my Serious, Intellectual and inSightful Literary Criticism. The Physical Nudity is meant to reinforces the Intellectual Honesty I am attempting in my Work. I offer my Naked Thoughts, so I offer my Naked Body, as they are One and the Same: the Thoughts come from the Body.

— “Why the Naked Pics, yo?” by Andrea Coates

When I contracted the “female disease”
the Normopath said I would be manicured
in no time

[…]

Q: Is it really necessary to make such abominations?

A: It is absolutely necessary to make such abominations.

— Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum

What is it.
Aim less.
What is it.
Aim less.
Sword less.
What is it
Sword less
What is it
Aim less
What is it.

— Patriarchal Poetry by Gertrude Stein

The essay is a form I’ve always found oppressive, a form so conservative it begs to be dismantled.

— BARF Manifesto by Dodie Bellamy