kathars.us

Please keep in mind kathars.us is not mobile friendly.

When reading Living a Feminist Life, I was struck by the relief the prose provided me, more specifically, the feelings of validation I felt as Sara Ahmed articulated her experiences and struggles. Reading Ahmed reminded me of moments from my past, engaging with the works of Zadie Smith, Angela Davis, or Audre Lorde, and the feeling of coming into contact with characters, narratives, experiences, and histories that mirrored much of my own reality. I think what can often exacerbate oppression or hardship are the feelings of apprehension and isolation that come along with them. I wanted to create something that could help someone like myself, acting as an affective mirror and corroborating the experiences that so often go hand in hand with minoritized existence.

As I, in my own recent battles with doubt and grief, found comfort in Ahmed’s words, I wanted to take up her strategies of “citation” (15) to create an emotional archive of sorts. As discussed by Ahmed, I feel clear citation allows minoritized individuals to find, hold on to, and share work important to our struggle, preventing the erasure of minoritized authors. In addition, as such scholarship can often be hard to penetrate, not necessarily because of dense or convoluted language, but because it can be difficult to know where or how to begin. I thought a well cited compilation would allow a user to better engage with writers they may feel kinship towards and possibly encourage them to take up such works.

The quotes I chose are not all uplifting in tone, but simply articulate lived experience. The quotes are featured one by one, each individualized by color. The website functions as a slideshow and there is a moment of pause in between each quote, before the next one loads, to give them each a feeling of closure.

I also wanted the quotes to feel alive, because, at least to me, they are electrified with the energies and experiences of their authors–the living breathing articulation of pain, joy, love, and care. When you click and hold your mouse over the image, the quote distorts more severely, giving it a visceral quality. To me, this ability to render the quote unintelligible and make it squirm beneath your mouse, falls in line with the cathartic feeling of the site. Put most simply, you can treat it the way the world treats you.