ANXIETY: FEM Spring 2018

FEM NEWSMAGAZINE SPRING 2018

EDITOR’S NOTE FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

This is my last print issue as FEM’s Editor-in-Chief, so in many ways, “Anxiety” is fitting. Along with hundreds of other graduating seniors, I am all too familiar with the feeling and its wild, seemingly uncontrollable surges. And it’s not just seniors – almost everyone experiences anxiety in its most personal form: as unexplainably tight shoulders, short breath, and racing thoughts. It appears as a fear focused on some distant, blurry, moving target that feels far in the future but also too close for comfort.

We deal with the personal, embodied nature of anxiety in this issue (pg 13), but also discuss its political and theoretical uses. For the past few months, we’ve been talking about how meaning-making is at the very heart of being - the foundation of every single human societal organization has been the creation of a narrative - origin stories, myths, and theories that explain why the world is the way it is and why we are the way we are. Storytelling is a foundational human activity. In other words, culture, religion, and other such institutions are a way to make sense of lived experience – life itself is a constant process of meaning-making. This process is at the very core of what it means to be a person - the story that you tell about yourself, how you connect to your community, and to the world around you.

The shifting web of identity and politics, we realize, is based on a constant management of a very basic anxiety: the constant presence of absence, of death, of non-being. The stories we tell about ourselves create the fantasy of coherent identity, as it is couched in nationalisms, feminisms, religions, and other ways of relating to the world and the people around us. In this issue we discuss the anxiety surrounding the Muslim “other” as the basis of American nationalism (pg 27), the exploitation of immigrants’ anxieties to ensure constant supply of cheap labor (pg 26), and the creation of illusory anxieties in capitalist artificial scarcity (pg 4), amongst other issues.

This theme is particularly close to my heart, for its most powerful lesson is not that a world ridden with suffering at the hands of imperialism and transnational capitalism creates a particularly pressing set of anxieties (which is true), but

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rather that anxiety, instability, and non-being are in so many ways necessary parts of life that can be managed in a million different ways. Each possibility is its own universe, revealing all the different ways we can care for ourselves and the world we live in. Euro-American theory in particular develops a frustratingly pessimistic way to deal with the imminent fear of death, accepting a vision of the self as always fractured, always punctured with a lack. The incompleteness of desire and the elusive nature of “true happiness” is a source of even more anxiety. But this is not a model that we should resign ourselves to, despite its supposed inevitability. As I hope we have shown in this issue, poetic and theoretical investigations of anxieties can reveal important facts and patterns about how objects, things, and people interact, and even lead us to avenues for change.

Anxiety is often a meta-feeling, a feeling about other feelings. It can seem like a rabbit hole but it can also lead us to envy, fear, or paranoia, which can tell us more about our relationship to the anxiety-inducing object, and ourselves.

Anxiety about graduating college is not often about graduation itself – it’s about a fear of failure and loneliness, of yet another life transition. But this realization creates a space for recalibration, to buckle up and address these issues (what does “failure” even mean?), perhaps to re-evaluate our relationships and build strength within ourselves.

On that note, I hope this issue does all this and more for our readers and help to expose the web of anxieties we are all implicated in. I’m so grateful to have had FEM staff’s constant love and support for all four years of college – FEM will always be cherished memory and I’m leaving it in more than capable hands next year. I am confident that under Becca’s leadership FEM will go on to do great things and start bigger conversations – I’m so excited to see us take the next step! In the meantime, it’s my turn to take my next steps into the world outside UCLA. Signing off, Tulika

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2

3

editor’s note

artifical scarcity: capitalism’s imagined

anxiety

6 - 7

the positives of anxiety: the logical

paradox

22 - 23

anxiety and mental illness: normal as an

oppressive concept

24 - 25

widow

table of contents

4

5

21

the leap 26

diaspora & dissent

27

imaginary enemies: islam and the middle

east in american film

28 - 29

rape anxiety and the courtroom:

a silent perpetuator

millennial humor

8 - 9

it’s never enough: capitalism, college,

and anxiety

10 - 11

internet anxiety: domination over

our data 30

toxic masculinity: to be or not to be?

12

the queer threat: heterosexual

masculine anxiety in blockbusters

31

the lost song

13

anxiety felt corporeally

32 - 33

false equivalences: outcasts and

violence in my favorite thing is

monsters and my life as a dog

34

design credits

35

staff page

14 - 15

living under threat: how risks of

deportation affect child education

16 - 17

the existential threat posed by

sexual violence

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

: CAPITALISM’S IMAGINED ANXIETY

American society is governed by a capitalist economy. However, this economic model is not a mere product of limited natural resources and human productivity. Instead, it constructs these “limitations” in order to maintain social inequalities that withhold many people’s fundamental access to survival.

Artificial scarcity is a falsely perceived lack of goods or resources. It creates an illusive anxiety that certain resources are limited, when, in reality, an abundance of goods or the means needed to eliminate this scarcity already exist. In turn, profit maximization creates artificial scarcities that drive insidious business models and withhold necessary resources from people.

The insidiousness of artificial scarcity is apparent in agribusiness, such as Monsanto and its agricultural patents over genetically modified seeds. In 1996, Monsanto introduced its Roundup-ready seeds, which were genetically modified to be resistant against Roundup. Produced by Monsanto since 1974, Roundup is the most widely used agricultural pesticide in history. These pesticide-resistant seeds could lead to more abundant, regular harvests, especially in countries that rely on the soybeans, maize, and other resistant crops as main food sources.

Alternatively, these plants are over-planted and funneled into a commodified food industry in a manner that further destroys the planet. Companies like Monsanto rely on earth-killing practices such as deforestation, which clears land for farming, contributing to climate change. Moreover, the food industry uses 30 percent of the world’s petroleum products for fertilizer production, food processing, and other energy-intensive activities. These practices — which are definitely not sustainable — are intended to perpetuate artificial scarcity. In doing so, they create very real and irreversible natural scarcities.

Inducing artificial scarcity can turn a profit for corporations that produce or monopolize rare goods, especially when their products are in high demand. For example, patents in the pharmaceutical industry allow drug companies to monopolize new drugs, effectively restricting people’s access to necessary medication by charging exorbitant prices, and preventing other researchers from further improving similar products.

Many corporations employ business models that rely on creating artificial scarcity to maintain worker inequality. One example is Walmart — once the largest private employer in the world. Walmart’s

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employees make less money than unionized workers, and the size of the corporation’s market continues to reduce the number of union jobs available. Because Walmart pays its millions of workers an insufficient minimum wage, it relies on the federal government to make up the difference between workers’ paid wages and what is actually needed to cover their basic living costs.

A May 2013 study by the Democratic Staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that Walmart employees relied on about about $6.2 billion in public assistance programs, even though Walmart earned about $13.5 billion in 2013 from nationwide food stamp sales. The company also spent a large portion of its profits lobbying for right-wing policy, which further strips rights away from the working class that constitutes the bulk of its workforce and consumers.

Walmart’s business model is one marker of a low-wage economy that characterizes American capitalism. The minimum wage in the U.S., which can vary from $7.25/hour to $13/hour, is far below what constitutes a living wage that can account for food, housing, healthcare, and transportation. Low-wage jobs are characterized by a perpetual lack of job security, little to no benefits, and irregular scheduling. These are all factors that further hinder low-wage workers, who often have to take on multiple jobs to survive. They remain in this vicious cycle of struggling to make ends meet while facing lack of security or advancement. This is the reality of capitalism — the inherent challenge to survive in a social economy that seeks to preserve and continuously expand inequality under the guise of a free market.

Critics argue that raising the minimum wage will only lead to a decreased workforce; employers can only afford to pay their employees by either firing some employees or raising the prices of their products, which could drive away customers and decrease profits even more. This argument is not mere economic law, but an ideological choice to keep a disempowered majority in systemic poverty. Raising the minimum wage negatively impacts the millions of individuals who receive the least amount of money possible, but it does not affect CEOs and other corporate executives, earning thousands of dollars per minute, the same way. Wage labor is based on the concept that human labor is a commodity worth a certain fixed value, and the wages a worker earns will reflect this prescribed value. Can these values be

considered “fair” when an exponential disparity exists between millions in inescapable poverty and the few with wealth so extravagant it’s explicit?

Modern low-wage jobs are usually associated with food and service industries. Workers in these industries are often looked down upon as lazy and unsuccessful, and the labor itself is often considered demeaning and subservient. However, low wages do not reflect the type of labor performed, but rather the structures that determine what classifies low-wage labor and class disparity in the first place. In the 1970s, low-wage labor began to shift from industrial factory jobs to service industries, causing it to become less unionized. Simultaneously, the low-wage worker demographic gradually increased in its percentage of members from marginalized communities.

Furthermore, the rise of neoliberalism in the last 40 years has led to an increase in low-wage jobs in congruence with backlashes against collective rights. Neoliberalism favors economic growth as a panacea to social and economic problems, but as economist John Schmitt found in 2012, the economic growth of multiple globalized countries from 1989 to 2009 had no relation to the percentage of low-wage jobs. The discourse of artificial scarcity creates and sustains the notion that there are “not enough jobs” whereas, in reality, there are too few jobs with sufficient pay and opportunity for advancement.

The American economy is headed towards further insecurity as jobs become outsourced and less permanent. Many large corporations, such as Amazon and Walmart, now rely on temp agencies that allow them to hire workers without benefits or opportunity for advancement. The shift of the American manufacturing economy to a service economy further targets poor communities and the working class — people who are unable to navigate investments and must endure the consequences of fluctuating living standards.

Capitalism produces artificial scarcities, from corporations that challenge science and law while monopolizing fundamental necessities, to more widespread and severe anxieties, like the historical struggle of many to survive without sufficient earnings or basic resources.

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The Leap

By Laura Jue

Last night I had a dream.

I was standing on a high ledge and the wind was at my back and my toes touched the crumbly edge, almost going over but not quite. I couldn’t go backwards, as much as I wanted to. As much as I really, really wanted to. Before me, softly nipping at my toes, was a vast black void.

For most of my life I’ve been able to see the future. My gift took the form of sporadic visions that appeared in my brain as if dropped there from on high. Most people would imagine seeing the future like a movie playing in your head. But it was never like that. It was never specific scenes or events I could identify. If someone told me to read their fortune, I couldn’t ever do more than give them a feeling and a vague gesture. Most people left dissatisfied.

I call them visions, but I wasn’t really seeing anything. They were like listening to a movie soundtrack with my eyes closed.

The story is obvious: soaring strings or slow, minor motifs bring all the right, expected emotions. I can feel them blossoming in my chest, emotions that feel fake because they’re being planted in my mind, irrelevant to anything in real life, and yet, at the same time, they’re so vivid and real. That’s what seeing the future was like for me. My gift gave me a sense of security. Things rarely surprised me.

I got my first future-vision early, when I was in fourth grade, shaggy-haired and rosy-cheeked, gripping my No. 2 pencil in my fingers, forming curlicues and curly Q’s on wide-ruled paper.

“This is an important skill,” my teacher said. “You’ll need it in high school.”

I “saw” myself then, holding big textbooks to my chest, my locker filled with notebooks of scrawling, impeccable cursive.

I loved how my Jansport backpack and Converse high-tops made me look. I felt the comfort of all my fourth grade friends who were there with me. I never wrote in cursive again (I didn’t say my visions were entirely accurate) but in that moment it felt inevitable and my heart ached with excitement for the days and years to come.

In my dream, I expected the void to howl, high and piercing in my head as it pulled me into itself, a kind of unbearable, irresistible sucking shriek. But it was silent. It just waited for me. The only sounds were the hushed voices in my head, whispers more like breath than words, telling me to take the leap. Down there in the bottomless pit, they said as the wind pushed me forward, was anything I wanted. All I had to do was jump.

I woke up in a cold sweat. For a moment, in those seconds between sleeping and waking in which you can’t tell dream from

reality, I thought I had jumped. My heart echoed in my ears. But as the sleep fell away I realized it was just the darkness of my bedroom. The numbers on the clock on my bedside table glowed red: 2:35. Though my hands were still clammy and my face damp with sweat, I let out a small sigh of relief.

The room was quiet. I closed my eyes but it made no difference.

The whispers still floated in my head, slowly fading with each second, like the wind brushing across the mouth of a cave before escaping into the sky. There was something weird going on. Physically I felt fine but my chest felt hollow.

As I lay enveloped in the darkness, a memory sprang to my mind. It was one of those memories that could have happened yesterday or ten years ago; it was so clear but I felt like I had lived my whole life with it. It was five years ago, my junior year of high school, and I was failing chemistry. Once again, I felt the aching and throbbing in my throat from holding back tears. An emptiness consumed me.

But as I chased that memory away another one snuck up to take its place. I shut my eyes tight and begged it to leave or to turn out differently. But it played out in my head the way I remembered it.

It was just ten months ago, my heart was full and I was high off of assurances of connection. Back then he monopolized my visions.

I knew what I wanted and thought it was just a matter of time. But then, in an instant, he slipped through my waiting fingers and the hope that filled me dissipated. Again there was that emptiness of dread for...for something. What was I so afraid of? Why was this coming back now?

For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what was going to happen.

I had gotten snapshots of a vision-less reality. Once again, I was crouched against a wall holding my face in my hands, not knowing whether any college would want me. In the darkness, again I saw him leaving forever and suddenly the vague but comforting visions of that future were gone. All my life, my future had been written for me. I was on a path and each step was inevitable.

Now, overnight, the visions were all gone and I didn’t know why. Had I reached the end? I slowly drifted back to sleep and I looked down and saw the void. The path ended at my feet and I teetered at the edge. If anything, I felt ill-prepared to jump. It was just me; there was nothing to stop me from falling and I had no way to know what was waiting for me down there in the darkness.

Maybe there was nothing waiting and I was going to have to make it up myself. What if I did it wrong? What if what I made up wasn’t good enough? There was no way of knowing.

Eyes open and arms wide, I jumped.

ARTS + CREATIVE

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

MILLENNIAL HUMOR BY JESSICA SOSA Imagine a screenshot of Kelly Kapoor from the hit TV show ‘The Office,’ exhausted and haggard after a week of brutal cleanse dieting. Now, imagine under this image a caption that reads: “When u stopped caring as a defense mechanism but now you can’t care or be passionate about anything so you just wake up and live life on autopilot.”

This is the type of humor that is constantly circulating on any social platform, especially Twitter and Instagram. It would most likely already be viral and making the rounds.

While memes like this are all fun and retweets on the internet, expressing a similar sentiment in real life would beget confused or concerned reactions. This experience is so common that there is a meme that jokes about this experience.

Typically, people who might have trouble relating to this brand of humor are 25 and older. Millennials –who are generally people in the 18- 24 age group – are more attuned to this humor because they invented it. With the rise of social media and digital technology, online communities have grown larger and more connected. The status-sharing element of social media evolved from making jokes with close friends on AIM to sharing intimate, yet common, experiences with depression and disillusionment as jokes with thousands of strangers on Twitter.

It is a weird internet trend, but even a quick glance can reveal the deeper meaning to this trend. According the American College Health Association, anxiety in college students increased from 50 percent (in 2011) to 62 percent in 2016. With more than half of the nation’s college students reporting feeling “overwhelmingly anx6 GENDERTAINMENT

ious,” it’s no wonder why dark and surreal memes are on the rise.

There are many obvious reasons for the growing sense of anxiety and dread in American millennials. A racist reality television star is President. Getting a well-paying, secure job in your chosen profession after graduation is like winning the lottery. Mass shootings can happen anywhere and anytime. A nation-wide market crash is first-hand experience for most twentysomethings. Climate change is becoming more evident especially considering that in 2017 alone, five natural disasters hit the Americas and the islands near them within three months of each other. The young adults of today grew up, and continue to develop, in a space where nothing is certain. Almost every aspect of life is up in the air.

Now that news of all kinds can conveniently pop up in a little blurb on your home screen, it is almost impossible to not keep up. With so much happening all the time, it’s inevitable to acquire a perpetually anxious state of mind. Tragedies have become an omnipresent phone notification. Millennials have seen every major disaster in the last 15-20 years on their nightly news recaps and their Twitter moments section. As a society, our awareness to these calamities has led to a collective desensitization.

Dark humor is an indirect way of dealing with this constant state of anxiousness. Millennials won’t tell you that they started creating and sharing memes online in order to deal with the symptoms of their anxiety, mostly because that’s not how this phenomena came to be.

Millennials are not the first ones to react to their state of the world with cultural makeovers. In the early 20th century, a group of artists from New York, Zurich, Hanover, Cologne, and Paris decided to

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start, as defined by Britannica, a “nihilistic and antiaesthetic movement in the arts.” These artists wanted to make art that was as meaningless as their lives felt at that moment, a time when the first World War was imminent and traditionally accepted artistic techniques, like painting or sculpting, were favored. Instead of approaching it in a conventional way with clay, paint, and canvases, the artists of what is now known as the Dada demonstration aimed for less conventional techniques.

Their preferred mediums were “collages, photo-montage and found-object construction.” A notable piece from this era is “L.H.O.O.Q.” by Marcel Duchamp, which is comprised of a postcard of the Mona Lisa painting that has a goatee and a mustache drawn on. While some argued that Duchamp’s piece was not original artwork, most regarded it as such.

Similar to the “L.H.O.O.Q.” portrait, the meme mentioned in the beginning of this article, also borrows an image from pop culture and redefines it with small changes like captions or satirical scribbles. Instead of aiming to be a beautiful piece of art or a captivating visual, the portrait and the meme instead take a well-known part of mainstream media and present a new message. For example, one reading of this piece claims that Duchamp’s “defamation” of the Mona Lisa highlights not da Vinci’s appreciation for female beauty, but his ability to recognize the “ambiguity of gender.” For the internet user, the screenshot of Kelly Kapoor no longer represents her weariness of her diet plans but a visual representation of a common depressive state

for millennials.

Like the Dadaists about hundred years earlier, Millennials recognize their mortality and the hopelessness of their future which, in turn, reveals that everything is meaningless. Both parties experienced the consequences of political upheaval in their eras. For Dadaists, it was the first World War. For Millennials, it was the 2008 economic crash, rising housing costs, student loan debt, precarious healthcare, and climate change. In all honesty, it was only a matter of time before the perceived hopelessness of their situations sunk in, so this cultural reaction was not a surprise.

The most fascinating aspect of these movements is the sense of community they create as a result. The Dadaists brought together like-minded people across Europe and in the U.S. Those involved in the cause understood the mediums used – readily available objects and photo collages -- but that was the extent of that “community.” On the other hand, Millennials have the Internet. Unlike their predecessors, the youth of today are able to use the connective magic of the World Wide Web to not only share memes and the feelings in them, but also the tools to create them. This community, though, is not a spoken experience or even concrete. It exists only online and is hardly ever pointed out. Through seemingly shallow and dark jokes on the Internet, Millennials were able to accidentally create a collective thought for their “movement.”

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

It’s Never Enough:

Capitalism, College, and Anxiety

By Natalie Delpino “You’re wasting time.”

“You’re not doing enough.”

“You’re not being productive.”

“You’re nothing compared to the people around you.”

“You’re worthless.”

My four years of college have been plagued by a constant, exhausting, vague sense of apprehension. Sometimes I’m unsure what I feel so on edge about, while other times I know exactly why: the fears of not using my time well, of being mediocre, and of not having a future. It’s as if I’m in water. Some days I’m able to stand kneedeep. Some days I’m able to stay there, while other days I am being slowly pulled down — and panic ensues. Other days I am yanked down and must frantically keep my head up to not drown.

Before entering college, I had an image of the “ideal college student”: a student who is heavily involved in numerous clubs in addition to being productive and studious. A student who knows how to answer, “What are you doing after graduation?” and who is constantly working towards that post-graduate goal. Any deviation from this image resulted in an overwhelming anxiety, humiliating failure, and frantic attempts to overcompensate.

This overcompensation often took the form of forcing myself to stay up later than my roommates. Working while everyone was sleeping made me feel productive. But in those late nights, I felt like I was catching up. Overcompensation would be dedicating weekends to just work. No socializing, just work. I did this when I wasn’t even behind on work, when I could have easily balanced the weekend with friends and homework.

Late nights and isolated study weekends never addressed the anxiety of uncertainty about my future. The fact that all my friends had career goals made me feel as if I didn’t actually belong at UCLA. How could they have accepted a directionless, mediocre loser like me? I would try to comfort myself by saying I needed to learn more about myself before making a decision. I needed to tell myself this; I needed to tell others this. It eased the anxiety I felt whenever I discussed the future.

My fears of being unproductive, of wasting time, being worthless, and having no future are not mine alone. These fears appear to be plaguing a large portion of college students today. College students can easily feel anxious trying to balance school, work, friends, family, and extracurriculars while trying to figure out their future plans.

According to mental health research conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), 50 percent of college students have become so anxious that they struggled in school and 80 percent feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities. In terms of diagnoses, anxiety is the most common mental health diagnosis among college students.

In a hyper-competitive environment, it’s easy to start to comparing yourself to others who you believe have it all together.

These unhealthy comparisons and the pressure to be productive 8

CAMPUS LIFE

are rooted in the neoliberal ideals of American society, which emphasizes success through individual effort. It generates a “bootstrap” mentality: you can achieve anything that you want as long as you work hard enough. If you fail, it is because you didn’t work hard enough. People’s life circumstances are attributed to internal reasons while external reasons are framed as excuses. For example, the under-representation of people of color in institutions of higher education is attributed to individual laziness, an inability to “pull up their bootstraps.” As a result, systematic racism, the policing of youth of color, and other socioeconomic barriers to a quality education are invisibilized. A neoliberal society will say that if they really wanted it, they would have worked harder. Thus, people need to work hard, and be productive in order to be seen as a valuable subject under capitalism. Neoliberalism nurtures this toxic, exhausting work ethic in order to meet capitalist demands for a productive workforce.

The nature of work has also become increasingly precarious, creating a sense of insecurity and instability. This is demonstrated by the rise of the gig economy: the rise of jobs that are temporary. Workers aren’t promised future work or benefits, yet this work is treated as sustainable. For example, jobs through Lyft, Uber, Postmates, and Taskrabbit are treated as stable sources of income with the additional benefit of flexibility. However, according to Nathan Heller in his article “Is the Gig Economy Working,” workers worry about not knowing where their next paycheck will be from. In the article, Taskrabbit Seth F. states “These are jobs that don’t lead to anything.

It doesn’t feel sustainable to me.” They’re on edge and unsure if they will be let go without warning. Increased competition paired with instability feeds the anxiety and stress of college students.

Children of immigrants also have additional fears. As a daughter of Chilean immigrants, I often worry that my achievements aren’t worth the sacrifices my parents have made. Many Latinx students feel that we owe it to our parents to be successful, and are worried that “failure” would be a waste of the sacrifices our parents made.

In her article, “Daughter of Immigrants: You Can’t Fear Disappointing Your Parents”, Maria Molfino addresses the Latinx students’ overwhelming fear of disappointing their parents. When we feel we aren’t doing enough, when we aren’t productive enough, we feel guilty. Adding onto this guilt is the anxiety that many Latinx students do not have parents who can afford to pay for their children’s education. They feel uncomfortable when they have to ask their parents for money because college has been presented to us as a way of easing our parents’ financial burden. The fact that we’re creating an even larger financial burden makes us feel guilty and increases the

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pressure to be successful. I do not want to disappoint my parents; I want to be worth all the years they spent taking care of me instead of pursuing their own goals. And while I’m fortunate to have enough financial aid as to not burden my parents with my BruinBill, I still feel guilty for not already having a source of income. I want to give my parents money, and the fact that I cannot makes me feel like a bad daughter.

Guilt, fear, worthlessness, tension, and agitation; when it becomes overwhelming, students often begin to engage in harmful behaviors that manifest in a variety of different ways. As for me, I scratch. I scratch my arms and legs. The anxiety becomes so overwhelming, I start drowning in my thoughts and feelings. It becomes hard to breathe, so I scratch. Hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to leave marks. The sudden pain pulls me away from my negative thoughts. Again, I am an example of a common trend. According to Mental Health America, studies have shown that college students are at high risk of self-injury with rates ranging from 17 percent to 35 percent.

Anxiety has been part of my college experience, but so has my battle against it, my challenge against a a demanding capitalist structure. During my four years of college, I have had to remind myself to take a moment to think of just flexibility and self-love. My assignments will be finished, but I can do it without destroying myself, without depriving myself of joy. In Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” she defines “the erotic” as a sense of fulfillment, pleasure, and contentment. When we embrace “the erotic”, we are deciding to do the things we love embracing the joy it brings to us. I must embrace my capacity for joy — we must all embrace our capacity of joy. When we spend “too much time” on non-productive activities, when we enjoy our passions without worrying about anything else, we become resisting bodies. We can resist capitalism’s unhealthy desire for us to be nothing more than productive, laboring, consuming bodies, and not feel negative secondary emotions. If you’re tired, don’t also feel guilty. Just let yourself be tired. Don’t compare yourself to others, you are not them. It’s difficult, but it is possible.

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

INTERNET ANXIETY:

BY SYDNEY SOBREPEÑA Following news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the subject of internet privacy has become a popular topic of discussion. Media coverage of the scandal centered on an illegal acquisition of Facebook user data, sparking outrage from American voters and social media users alike. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in response to this breach of user privacy and online trust, creating a collective anxiety surrounding our social media usage. Individuals are acknowledging a loss of control over their online lives, but in the midst of this commotion, we should ask ourselves if we ever had any power to lose.

This scandal is not a standalone incident, but rather an insight into the larger online landscape in which we participate. We have learned to normalize manifestations of covert power such as these breaches in privacy and allow the larger underlying structure of these types of power to dictate our lives. Despite this, the current spotlight on the internet’s lack of informed consent gives us an opportunity to understand the greater implications of social media and internet usage as a whole. Focusing on online privacy is only the first step in recognizing the regulatory and exploitive institutions that wield the power to determine our value as subjects of late American capitalism.

The New York Times, in collaboration with The Observer of London and The Guardian, published an article confirming that Cambridge Analytica illegally obtained millions of Facebook users’ data and used it to aid Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This isn’t Facebook’s first security scandal, yet this is the first time Americans truly confronted the terms upon which they use social media. Since Facebook’s inception in 2004, the presence of social media has slowly pervaded our daily lives, accomplishing its original goal of giving us the power to connect. Facebook’s initial mission statement read, “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook users still see the value in the site’s networking capabilities, but today, individuals take to this system to have a place where they can fashion their sense of self.

Social media now gives users the power to control their identity, share this self-concept with the outside world, and even mimic power through their status in these social networks.

While people do use their online presence as a way to strengthen relationships, these online facades can instead become sources of anxiety

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and key determinants of a person’s self-worth.

Countless articles have identified the psychological downsides of social media usage.

Studies on social networks such as those done by media-buying company RadiumOne have made it common knowledge that the number of likes and followers that a person receives triggers high levels of dopamine, which speak to the addictive nature of social media. The ability of social media to destroy one’s self-esteem and health combined with the internet’s use of “relatability” and self-deprecation as forms of social capital, result in a twisted culture that commodifies mental illness. As StudyBreak’s contributor Bonnie Wong puts it, social media users view “angst as an aesthetic” in their online lives, producing mindless posts about suicide and life’s daily struggles, which conveniently omit ways to combat or effectively alleviate those pains. Not only does this type of content reinforce the romanticization of medicalized mental illnesses, it creates relationships rooted in the cliché belief that misery does, in fact, love company, resulting in a larger desensitized community that values individuals who contribute to this shared skepticism.

However, a person’s autonomy on social media is only an illusion of control within an online space that favors corporate interests and allows state surveillance to regulate the actions of every user. Discourse in the media concerning social networks primarily emphasizes the individual, obscuring the authority that the internet holds as a structured and endless web.

Users become subject to the incessant anxiety of never being fully satisfied, for there is always something left to be discovered online, and social media’s infinite feed of content - with the exception of Facebook’s “no posts to show” glitches - perpetuates this discontent and search for fulfillment. Aspects of social media such as customizability speak to humans’ psychological cravings and create a negative feedback loop for users that fuel their online addiction and apprehension.

The creators of the early internet never intended to design a product for the individual, but rather a means to help the U.S. government in their surveillance, profiling, and targeting of individuals. As a result of Vietnam War counterinsurgency projects, the internet innovated the United States’ ability to spy on its people and in turn the way in which American leaders labeled people as threats or non threats. Since its inception in 1972, the world wide web has

seen a change in both the observers who utilize the online system and the subjects that they observe, and this processes of surveillance, profiling, targeting and overall manipulation implicates more perpetrators today. Corporate power has increased as collective capitalist profits have skyrocketed, and the danger of terrorism has slowly taken over communism’s looming presence. The world’s largest companies such as Apple and Google have employed the internet’s structure for their own monetary benefit and have exploited our individual data in the online network to do so. By analyzing and influencing what we purchase, what we read, and what we expect from online norms, corporations are determining our value in the system and dictating our roles accordingly. At its core, the internet is a product of code and algorithms, and corporations treat internet users merely as 0’s and 1’s that they can manipulate in their zero-sum games.

These invasions of privacy have not spurred a collective anxiety in recent years because our culture normalizes latent forms of power to the point where individuals are unaware that control exists in these less explicit forms.

In Michel Foucault’s “The History of Sex,” he identifies this shift in the types of power that are at work in everyday life. Foucault says that sovereign power used to be the power to “decide life and death.” Instead of taking the lives of individuals, power holders have more recently exercised their control by dictating the actions and intentions of the masses. Corporations pool internet users into large groups based on their demographic information, buying patterns, and in Cambridge Analytica’s case, inferred political affiliations to introduce us to their agendas using very ordinary mediums. Companies feed us targeted and native ads which we have slowly internalized as mere expectations of basic web searches, yet their messages about the lifestyles that we should lead seep into our very existence, influencing the way that we see our world and the way that we prioritize things. By coding their principle of profitability into our programming, and in turn the exploitation associated with it, companies leave us to become victims of these corrupt messages, which we then learn to normalize and perpetuate through our complacency and indifference toward these ideas.

Companies view each of us as factors of production which they can repeatedly exploit to maximize their profits. To accomplish their

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agendas most efficiently, these organizations must categorize us as they do with capital and land in order to manipulate the specific groups that they need. Companies are surveying new observable types of data such as mobile IDs and cookie IDs and even transcribing our phone and in-person conversations through our devices in order to contextualize our online and offline behavior. With new information that can help businesses create more holistic profiles of their users, companies such as Amazon and Facebook have already ideated and patented algorithms to extract even more data from us.

Innovations such as the “Recommended for You” and “Suggested Friends” features use unique code and statistics to confirm what these companies already infer about us so that they can further sort us into groups based on our aggregate total of online actions. The meaning of power has evolved from “make die and let life” to now “make live and let die.” Corporate power holders are taking on less apparent roles in their process of exploiting us, and they do not exploit us all in the same way, yet when the time for each of us comes, they will turn their heads as they surrender us to threatening grips of the system that they created.

The government also has a large motivation to collect device-specific information and third party connect data. Instead of identifying bodies to whom they should advertise, the government uses online programs such as PRISM to weed out “suspicious” individuals and to profile scapegoats for their agendas - these victims being brown, Muslim Americans due to the more recent construction of The States’ institutionalized Islamophobia. Since September 11, 2001, the government has utilized PRISM, an online tool that permits the National Security Association (NSA) to collect specific user data from major internet services. Many of the companies that allow the NSA to access their data bases have denied any knowledge of the working tool, and the government claims that they cannot collect data on a person without the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. However, with the Senate passing a bill in 2015 requiring social media sites such as Facebook to report suspected terrorist messages, we can only question the criteria

upon which these suspicions are based and the extent to which these programs run. Critics have called attention to the lack of transparency that the government has when discussing the logistics behind PRISM and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, yet our nation’s leaders continue to expand its disciplinary practices with little regard for our constitutional rights.

These emerging ways to police bodies and to control the masses are key to the era of “bio-power” in which we live, and this bio-power provides the foundation for regulating our online lives, as it was essential to the development of capitalism. To make their data collection practices more palatable to users, companies actively work to maintain the individual’s fantasy of control, stressing the focus on the individual to keep the crowds at bay. In 2008, Facebook changed its mission to include more individual-oriented and autonomous rhetoric, stating “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

However, Zuckerberg’s ongoing testimony before Congress shows that the notion of personal sovereignty exists more in theory than in practice. Zuckerberg had no response when Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas voiced his concern about Facebook users’ lack of understanding and acknowledgement of informed consent.

Users must agree to the Facebook’s terms and conditions when signing up for an account, but Cornyn noted that the length and complexity of the statement usually deter users from reading it thoroughly or even at all, making their agreement more of an uninformed choice.

Obtaining informed consent is only a box that companies like Facebook must check in order to protect themselves and their handling of customer data, but can these corporations truly obey this regulation when they collect data from even non-Facebook users? When asked about the company’s creation of shadow profiles for non-customers, Zuckerberg only reiterated the fact that Facebook deletes a person’s data if the user deletes his or her accounts, implying that this right to security is only given to those who agree to play by the rules of Facebook’s game.

Facebook’s antics are attracting the spotlight, but we must recognize that companies have

exploited our data for the past decade and that they plan to continue this in the future.

With the introduction of the iPhone 5s in 2013, Apple introduced the Touch ID feature that allows users to unlock their phones with their fingerprint. While Apple has gone on record saying that it does not store this “biometric data,” former CIA agent Edward Snowden revealed that the company was one of four others that allowed the NSA to access their servers. To avoid the rising concerns that Touch ID caused, Apple reassured the public that the 2017 iPhone X stores a user’s facial data on the phone itself rather than in the cloud.

However, the company has not specified that its third-party app developers are under this same oath of data security - this omittance coinciding with an increasing concern regarding targeted advertisements and trackable buying patterns.

Discussions around metadata, or the information used to characterize our data such as the time and location where we take phone calls, are arising in response to PRISM revelations and Facebook’s own metadata collection, so with the chaos surrounding Facebook’s invasive practices which have only recently surfaced, we can only imagine the implications of other companies knowing every microaction that we take and the context in which we take them.

So, how do we combat this growing anxiety?

We are only now catching a glimpse at the extent to which institutions learn about us and the channels in which they harvest our data, leading us to believe that the potential to disappear from the online landscape is impossible.

However, we can be more aware of the these everyday forms of power and the agendas of those holding this power. By paying attention to our online privacy and the news surrounding it, we can gain a more comprehensive understand of how valuable our data is and which data corporations and government bodies are exploiting our information. By taking part in these discussions and in turn voicing these concerns to push for legislation to protect our online lives, we are actively taking the steps toward a freedom from the grips of these unforgiving institutions in the future.

DIALOGUE 11

FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

THE QUEER THREAT: Heterosexual Masculine Anxiety in Blockbusters

by Sarah Garcia Since the massive financial success of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” in 1975, blockbuster films have primarily centered around white leading men and largely white casts. This fact has not changed much as films based around white male ensemble casts, like those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, grow more and more prevalent. They also feature actors and characters that are mainly cisgender, able-bodied, and heterosexual. According to a study by the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative at USC Annenberg surveying 900 films from 2007 to 2016, 34 of the top 100 movies studied from 2016 featured an actress as the lead or co-lead, and only 14 films in that same year had leads or co-leads that were people of color, with just 3 of those being women of color. Furthermore, 15 of the films had a lead or co-lead with a disability, and LGBTQ leads or co-leads were only represented once, with no transgender characters appearing at all in these 100 films.

When a cis female character is introduced into a blockbuster film, the narrative usually confines her to occupy the role of heterosexual love interest to the cis male lead. Without a heterosexual romance, these lead male characters are speculated to be queer -- which, to Hollywood, is an unthinkable possibility. Therefore, heterosexuality becomes strictly managed and reinforced through such devices like the forced romantic subplot in order to destroy anxieties over this supposed “queer threat.”

This queer threat has two origins: homophobic jokes and queer shipping. The character of Batman, both in comic and film form, has been the subject of mockery for many years for his relationship with his young sidekick Robin. They are both often coded as queer and interpreted as a couple because they wear costumes with tights and fight crime with one another.

Such claims come across as derogatory and homophobic for how they equate gay male desire with pedophilia since the Robin persona is typically donned by an underage boy. They also result in the canon comics repetitively providing multiple heterosexual romantic options for Batman and other mediums including forced romantic subplots into their narratives.

This happened in the DC animated film “Batman: The Killing Joke,” where Batman and Batgirl interrupt their crime-fighting to have sex on a balcony, despite usually interacting in platonic ways.

Shipping, on the other hand, comes from a more benign place. Shipping - a term that emerged on Tumblr - is when fans of a film or franchise imagine two characters as being in a relationship, even if the relationship might not be ‘canon’ in the franchise. This concept is especially popular for queer audiences because they can create ships that reflect themselves and their desires in a world where their existences are hidden or silenced by mainstream media. Such thinking has produced popular ships like “Stucky,” the pairing of Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Bucky Barnes (the Winter Soldier) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Much of this ship’s prevalence stems from Steve’s fixation on saving Bucky’s life across several films. Steve, for example, says to Bucky in one emotional moment, “I’m with you till the end of the line.” Because of the prevalence of this ship, the sudden romance between Steve Rogers and Sharon Carter (who have shared little screen time together) in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” feels like a direct response to and rejection of it and all its queer potential.

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This tradition of silencing queerness through heterosexual romance has existed in other franchises as well. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy has a lot of queer subtext between Frodo and Sam, with one of the most memorable being in the final film. When Frodo is unable to climb Mount Doom and destroy the One Ring by himself, Sam tells Frodo as he holds him in his arms, “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!” Near the end of the same film, the story provides Sam with a female romantic interest, effectively downplaying this queer-coded moment. Perhaps in reaction to this shipping or to the fact that they had no clue what to do with the new female character of Tauriel, “The Hobbit” trilogy introduces a love triangle between her, Legolas, and Kili that was never a part of the original source material. The presence of cis female characters also impacts more movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe like “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Ant-Man.” Black Widow and Hope van Dyne are not allowed to exist in these films without ending up in heterosexual relationships with the Hulk and Scott Lang that appear out of nowhere.

All of these romances have little to no set-up in their films or in previous parts of their franchises. They also don’t differentiate much in terms of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Each pairing occurs between white cis heterosexual men and women in a way that seems to promote them as the ideal relationships and dissuade any other types. In other words, these forced romantic subplots are implemented in order to reassert heterosexual masculinity and stop anxiety-inducing rumors of queerness from encroaching further.

In her Vanity Fair article “Is This the One Flaw in the Otherwise Great “Captain America: Civil War”?,” Joanna Robinson states, “Marvel seems to think it has to have its heroes in heterosexual love affairs in order to maximize audience appeal…

If Disney isn’t inclined to give audiences a gay superhero, couldn’t they have at least left us the dream of Bucky and Cap?” This quote demonstrates both how films like “Ant-Man” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron” indirectly perpetuate heteronormative concepts of men and women being unable to exist platonically in the same space. Others like “Captain America: Civil War” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy refuse to even allow for the possibility of sexual ambiguity between characters. Because queerness exists outside the accepted system of heterosexual thought, the smallest hints of it are barred, especially when it can challenge masculinity. In this way, queerness holds great power over and exposes the fragility of masculinity since, from a heteronormative viewpoint, its presence can shatter it completely.

If queerness is to gain further acceptance and understanding in the future, mainstream mediums like blockbuster films need to stop hiding such elements away from the public eye as if they are something disgraceful or to be feared. Nothing will change if anxieties around introducing queer, trans, and disabled characters of color are not shown to be unfounded. Blockbusters like “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Black Panther” show progress in some of these areas in front of and behind the camera by having casts and directors largely featuring people of color. However, with rumors of both films cutting scenes of queer female desire from each of their narratives, queerness still appears to have a long road ahead before anxieties surrounding heterosexuality will dissipate.

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

Living Under Threat: How Risks of Deportation Affect Child Education

By Patty Viramontes When I asked my class of elementary and middle-school aged girls if they knew anyone in their family who was at risk of deportation, one by one all of their hands rose up. The usual chatter ceased and a wave of silence overwhelmed the room.

Amongst the still hush and those with raised hands, one of the older students in the room began to speak. A natural leader, she spoke with confidence, attempting to hide the tremble in her voice, “My parents told me if they ever get deported, I have to be strong for my siblings...I am the oldest, so I can’t show my siblings that I’m scared because then they will be too.”

Though her role in her household already required her strength, the fear of not only losing her parents, but having to take on their responsibilities, heightened her levels of anxiety. This stress of deportation enveloped many elements of her daily life – from having three locks on her apartment door; to assuring herself her relatives would help her family in the case of potential deportation; to the worry she carried as she said goodbye to her parents every morning before school. No amount of strength within a child justifies the anxiety of losing family at the hands of an oppressive state.

Our conversation followed Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in September 2017. The de-

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cision originally called for Congress to construct a new plan within a six-month period, after which those under DACA would no longer be protected. On February 26, a Supreme Court decision to not hear the presidential administration’s appeal of the Obama-era policy extended the deadline. With such shifts and uncertainty, many are pushed deeper into a state of limbo, unsure of what is to come.

As more students shared their worries regarding deportation and fear of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they reflected the impacts of fluctuating federal and state immigration policies on individual households in the U.S. As immigration policies are discussed and put into effect, macro-level decisions seep into the household, yielding micro-level consequences.

Looking at the high rates of deportation in Obama’s first term, the changing regulations under his second that deprioritized non-criminal immigrants, and the increased anti-immigration policy in the current Trump era, we can see that any sense of safety in the undocumented community is built on shaky ground. An air of distrust towards the promise of positive legislative reform surrounds neighborhoods affected by anti-immigrant ideologies. The lives of undocumented people and their families are built on a paradoxical unstable consistency: while policies that affect the lives of undocumented immigrants fluctu-

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ate often, the anxiety they feel remains constant.

While stress surrounding potential loss of family through detention and deportation has remained consistent, recent policies have heightened these worries. As Melinda D. Anderson explains in her article “How Fears of Deportation Harm Kid’s Education”, published in the Atlantic, “fear [was] at an all-time high” in the undocumented community during the 2016 election cycle. Today, that fear continues to rise as anti-immigrant and closed-border policies are put into effect.

Under the Trump administration, DACA and Temporary Protected Status, programs that offered many some source of protection, are no longer safe. For the students in my classroom, and families across the U.S., the fears that intensified in 2016 have only increased since.

Amongst these policies, the lives of undocumented children and those with undocumented family members are often muddled beneath the headlines. A 2008 study by Human Impact Partners titled “Family Unity, Family Health,” found that U.S. born children who live with the threat of their relatives’ deportation often perform lower in education settings; they will “finish fewer years of school and face challenges focusing on their studies.”

Undoubtedly, this stress takes a psychological toll, as the American Psychology Association (APA) posits; fear of ICE contributes to growing anxiety amongst undocumented children and children with undocumented relatives. ICE relies on intense surveillance tactics that manifest into severe intimidation for those under the threat of deportation. As ICE continues to arrest undocumented people outside of work sites and schools -- as seen in the arrest of Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez who was targeted by ICE while he dropped his daughter off at school in March 2017 -- the agency is infiltrating the daily routines and paths crossed by undocumented peoples. The fear of ICE is rooted in the potential of surveillance and separation, as it serves as a tool for state-sponsored terror.

Moreover, the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become louder in recent years, spreading across media platforms and electoral rallies, informs how children perceive their sense of belonging. As the class I worked in continued to discuss, one student stated her family members were not criminals, contrary to the perceptions Trump supporters and those with xenophobic biases hold against immigrants. She felt the need to assert her family’s humanity, showing the direct negative consequence of anti-immigrant speech for those in the undocumented community.

While all minorities are framed as the “other” in a nation built on white, imperialist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchial supremacy, undocumented communities undergo an othering that stems from human-made borders and the oppressive concept of citizenship.

For many children who hear their communities vilified in the media and by the White House, the rhetoric contributes to insecurity and a precarious sense of belonging. According to the APA, children with undocumented family members understand their belonging as “irrevocably tied to their parents’ illegality and deportability.” These children feel like the “other” in the U.S. and would be seen similarly in their family’s home country. The psychological impacts of having to cultivate their own space while seeking to understand their families’ marginalization are reflected in their daily lives and education, manifesting amidst anxiety and loss.

The stress many children feel stems from the dehumanization linked to a person’s deportability. The separation of families at the hands of the state is rooted in a similar degradation of undocumented peoples’ being. Children are not immune to the consequences of this dynamic between the state and the undocumented individual; while policies seem to be complex and confusing, their impact is felt within the daily lives of children across the nation.

The current administration continues to disregard the humanities of undocumented families, as further exemplified with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “Zero-Tolerance” border policy proposed in May 2018. The policy would separate families crossing the border to the United States. In accordance with the proposal, Sessions plans to prosecute parents and send them to detention centers while placing children in separate shelters, virtually abandoned. This policy, along with others that militarize the border and empower ICE officials across the U.S., are symptoms of the administration’s xenophobia and the human rights violations that manifest from such sentiment.

We should not have to remind people of the humanity of our community, and yet, in the face of the anxiety produced from state-sponsored dehumanization, it seems we have no choice.

To resist the effects of long-standing and current anti-immigrant policies, there are multiple ways to support undocumented communities through donations, volunteering, or community organizing. Donations to legal services such as Families for Freedom, the Immigration Legal Assistance Project, and The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights provide families with accessible legal information. For bilingual speakers, The Young Center also has volunteer opportunities for Spanish speakers to serve as a child advocate for unaccompanied children. To educate yourself on immigrant rights, how to aid in protecting undocumented people under threat of ICE authorities, and to learn more ways to get involved, visit the National Immigrant Justice Center at www.immigrantjustice. org/know-your-rights.

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

The Existential Threat Posed By Sexual Violence

By Madison Thantu Entering college is a daunting task for any student. Placed in a foreign environment and surrounded by strangers, even the most enthusiastic and optimistic of people can find the transition nerve-wracking. Just like my peers, I was extremely anxious to venture into higher education, but not for the universal reasons that every other student finds anxiety-inducing. What I found truly terrifying was the pervasiveness of rape culture and fraternity culture in U.S. higher education.

Rape culture is a term used to describe the social context in which sexual assault is both pervasive and normalized. In this climate, social institutions such as legislative politics, heteronormative nuclear families, public educations, and the mainstream media, excuse and even encourage, acts of gender violence. This is reflected in cultural tendencies towards victim blaming, which is the act of holding survivors of crime accountable as opposed to the perpetrator. Fraternity culture at American universities can be characterized by the Greek institution’s strong association with binge-drinking, hazing, and the culmination of masculinity that emerges from male camaraderie and “brotherhood.” In recent years, the rape culture that is embedded in frat culture has gained recognition in both academia and the media; however, this is not to say that the intimate relationship between male Greek life and rape culture is a new phenomenon.

In the face of rampant rape culture and toxic masculinity, I was plagued with severe anxiety over my impending college experience. I felt this for myself, my close friends, my peers, and all soon-to-be college freshmen who had to navigate these new and treacherous waters. This is a feeling that I know many are familiar with, and for many this anxiety and impending sense of danger only continues to develop, depending on an individual’s early experiences in college and how their university handles sexual assault.

Statistics paint a daunting picture, and I struggled to grapple with the fact that 23 percent of female undergraduate students are said to experience sexual assault at some point during their time at college. To me, this meant that out of myself and seven closest friends, two of us would experience sexual assault at some point during our undergraduate experience – a notion that continues to haunt me.

This feeling of anxiety culminated into one of hysterical fear, vulnerability, and powerlessness, which defined how I saw my upcoming college experience. I feigned excitement to my family and friends, but when I was alone, all I could think about was how to grapple with constantly needing to stay safe and secure.

Sexual assault is one of, if not the most, violating and violent forms of assault. Historically, rape has been used as a tactic of war to degrade and subjugate populations. In the article “War and Rape. Analytic Approaches,” (WILPF International, 1992) Ruth Seifert explores the social and cultural context in which the role of rape underpins the ritualized “game” that is war. Rape has long been considered a “rule of war” and a spoil of the victors, where the “ritual that [is] the right to exert violence against women is primarily granted to the victor during campaigns of conquest or in the immediate post-war period.” In committing gendered violence, soldiers are not seeking sexual encounters, but rather violent sexual exploits that serve “as the ultimate symbolic humiliation of the male enemy.” The ritual of gendered violence in wartime exemplifies the mechanism by which sexual assault dehumanizes individuals.

Sexual assault strikes at the core of one’s existence, and launches a direct attack on self-autonomy. The thought of such an intrusion can elicit intense existential anxiety, as rape is the pinnacle of vulnerability and powerlessness. The Shadow of Sexual Assault hypothesis addresses this anxiety, arguing that women’s fear of sexual assault heightens, or shadows, their fear

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of other types of crime – in particular violent crime. This hypothesis directly addresses how the implications of gendered violence can affect women’s perception of their own safety and security. Scholars in this field illustrate sexual assault as “a master offense among women,” which heightens their fear of other victimizations.

The Shadow of Sexual Assault Hypothesis stems from the perplexing data that, while women statistically face lower rates of victimization than men, they are far more fearful of falling victim to crime. Despite the higher likelihood of men being the victim to crimes such as burglary, murder, and physical assault, women have significantly higher levels of fear. Many scholars explain this gender gap in perceived risk as a result of the fact that women associate crime with sexual assault, meaning that crime in any form can hold the possibility of sexual assault. This gap is further exacerbated by victim-blaming and other cultural phenomenon that marginalize survivors.

This trend was originally supported by Mark Warr, a professor at University of Texas, in his study “Fear of Rape Among Urban Women,” which was published in 1985. Warr’s data demonstrates women’s significant association between fear of rape and an increased fear of crime in general. This study also concluded that gender was the most important predictor of fear, as when the fear of sexual assault was eliminated as a potential third variable, the differences between men and women normalized drastically.

Additionally, there is a marked discrepancy in women’s fear of crime and their perceived risk, meaning how likely an individual believes they are to being subjected to a particular crime. Kenneth F. Ferraro, who is currently a professor of sociology at Purdue University, published a study in 1984 entitled “Women’s Fear of Victimization: Shadow of Sexual Assault?” which examined the effects of sexual assault on female subjectivities. His findings indicated that the sample of women were more afraid of rape than murder, and sexual assault was associated with low levels of perceived risk but high levels of fear. Moreover, Ferraro’s data indicated that this phenomena was independent of whether the woman had been personally victimized or not in the past.

The conclusions that can be drawn from the Sexual Assault Hypothesis are grim. The theory attests the unique form of victimization that women face in relation to sexual assault, a crime that shadows other forms of victimization.

The ramifications of this deleterious fear are omnipresent in a woman’s life, creating ongoing fear and worry that an individual often time shapes its life through precautionary measures that lead to a reduction in the overall quality of life. In its very nature, sexual assault is an existential threat to women. Sexual assault represents one of the most stigmatizing forms of victimization, with the power to affect every domain of life and personhood. The crime itself and the fear that is associated with it has the power to shape an individual’s life and become an integral component of one’s existence. It is the pinnacle of vulnerability and powerlessness, launching a direct attack on self-autonomy.

As statistics prove, intimate partner violence and sexual assault are the only forms of victimization that occur more frequently among women as opposed to men. However, the demographic most largely affected by the fear and experience of such crimes are young women, in particular those who move often and are introduced into foreign environments. Thus, the correlation between college women and sexual assault is clear, as this demographic fits the most at risk prototype.

The American university system has been marked by the insidious problem of sexual assault. The culmination of rape culture, fraternity culture, and misogyny have cultivated an environment that puts students in a position of vulnerability. That is not to say that all fraternities perpetuate rape culture and sexism, but Greek culture has been historically marked by traditional gender

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scripts and inequality. Rape culture is a result of gender norms that illustrate men as aggressive and sexual, while women are perceived as passive and compliant. The fusing of rape culture and fraternities create a predatory environment that historically and persistently endangers students.

According to UCLA’s annual Crime Report, 2017 was marked by 31 reports of rape, an increase by over 200 percent from the 15 reports of rape in 2015. It is important to recognize that reported instances of sexual assault do not equal the number of sexual assault occurrences because not all survivors are able to come forward about their experiences. Because of the discrepancy between the occurrence and formal reports reports of sexual assault, lieutenant Scott Scheffler of the UCLA Police Department attributes UCLA’s two fold increase in sexual assault reports to the expansion of educational and outreach programs on the university’s campus. This interpretation of the statistics paints a positive picture, highlighting the efficacy of programs such as Campus Assault Resources and Education center, or better known as CARE. However, it does not seem as positive when paired with UCLA’s 2012 ranking as the most dangerous college in America, according to Business Insider, or its 2013 spot on CollegeStats.Org’s list of the most dangerous schools for women.

In January 2018, a UCLA student and fraternity member was arrested and charged with assault with the intent of committing rape. In the wake of this incident, the UCLA Interfraternity Council implemented an indefinite ban on in-house fraternity events where alcohol was present. Throughout the ban, Westwood’s Landfair Avenue, also known as “frat row,” was deserted in comparison to the usual hoards of people walking from house to house in the middle of the night.

Preceding the lifting of the ban, fraternities were required to rewrite their bylaws and implement certain cautionary methods, including checking college IDs and age, hiring third-party bartenders and security, and preventing unlisted attendees from entering the upper floors of the houses. However, less than a week into fraternities reopening, it was clear that many of these rules were ignored. Less than two weeks after the ban was lifted, I experienced the blatant aggression that embodied my expectations of a frat party prior to arriving at college. A fraternity member offered me alcohol upstairs, and when I asked if my friends could join us, he immediately said no and looked at me as if I were crazy. His direct rebuff of my attempt to surround myself with friends made it clear that his “invitation” was not solely related to alcohol.

It is instances like that that set my anxiety ablaze and remind me about the insidious nature of the culture in which I am both immersed and partaking in.

There is a sexual assault epidemic occurring within the American collegiate institution – one that is characterized by coercion, archaic gender norms, and vulnerability.

I have heard so many heart-breaking stories from powerful and resilient women during my time at UCLA, and continue to be made proud by the strength of each and every individual who has grappled with the unimaginable. UCLA has taken significant measures to combat sexual assault, and institutions – such as CARE, the Title IX office at UCLA, and student organizations such as Bruin Consent Coalition – expend incredible amounts of time and labor to create a more safe and inclusive community. It is imperative that the roots of the problem be addressed, and fostering dialogue about sexual assault and consent are the first steps. Beyond that, the socio-cultural foundation of privilege, gender roles, and violence is the true and final behemoth that must be taken down.

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A false yellow sheen draped itself over the polished, white buildings. The buildings shaded the spotless L.A. streets like cheap sunglasses, their lenses reflecting the lonely sun, which hung in the sky like a lounge singer perpetually performing before an absent audience.

Shiny, new cars tread along the streets in an endless stream. Not a single person or object could be detected on the pavement. Every now and then, a car would swerve to the side of the road, its window would roll down mechanically, and a flimsy arm would extend a little black screen out into the empty air. After a sharp snap, the vehicle continued in the wake of the infinite line of cars before it. The cars drove without direction or purpose. With recorded images projected on all sides, one could be anywhere in the world without even looking out of a window, let alone placing a toe on the earth.

On the farthest fringes of the city, in the refuge of a looming, plastic, white bubble, heads huddled together. The structure, like an enormous empty balloon, was illuminated in an unnatural glow. At its edge, the heads leaned into the sound of an old gramophone dustily breathing out La Vie en Rose, the song echoing ghostlike through the hollow hall.

Across the room, gangs of men had staked their spot around giant troughs, intimidating and taunting women with degrading slurs to prevent them from claiming their share of the meager rations. They had formed an army, fighting to possess the territory that remained for them in their shrunken world.

This refuge was called The Haven. Disabled, homeless, and impoverished individuals in the city had become so wearied with the pretentious displays of concern for their exclusion and neglect, that they decided to finally ease the heavy burden of these young cosmopolites. It was to be a new city, free from exclusions and resentment. However, slimy tentacles from outside grasped greedily at The Haven as they were forced to look outside for support. A pharmaceutical company provided cheap food, utilities, clothes, and shelter for free, all under the pretense of protecting the outcast group from the exclusivity of a society that privileged wealth and ability. Overnight, The Haven transmuted into a factory for the corporation’s business, manufacturing medications for the wealthy urbanites. The residents of The Haven slavishly produced “skinny” pills, so that their unfit bodies wouldn’t starve.

Against these degrading affronts, a group of women had found solidarity. They were a force of resistance against the encroaching men and the apathy of the society that ignored them.

Camilla, a young woman in her mid-twenties, joined the women hoping to find a deeper sense of belonging than she had known in her elite university. Marie, a writer born without legs had watched, patiently, as years of civil rights battles rose and fell, while her voice remained stifled. She had long given up hoping for the small consolation of her cruel society’s pity, focusing instead on uplifting her own community. Thus, she became a source of wisdom for these women. One was April,

an artist, who would have been classified as having an intellectual disability, before such a distinction became taboo. Their society had proclaimed labelling obsolete, a source of unnecessary inequality. Though supposedly free from the constraints of labels, a young woman, Tessa, had felt the pain of otherness, while living on skid row; she was a fourteen-year-old alone in a swarm of adults who were condemned to madness and the abandoned streets. The Haven’s chaos was not new to her.

The brightness of the women’s faces faded with the days passed in the shadows. The glow of the last sight of the sun diminished in their eyes, so that it was only a glimmer. Prohibited from leaving The Haven (the corporation claimed that they would risk contaminating the products), the women satisfied themselves in sharing their photos at the beach, on hikes, or on vacations in destinations that seemed to have existed only in their dreams.

Camilla was grateful for those exchanges. She was amicable and deeply empathetic. Like an impressionist painter, she saw her interactions in their complete uniqueness and fluidity. In them she envisioned possibilities, possibilities that were inaccessible to her as a blind girl, limited by the relentless competition of the world that had tried to narrow her mind from childhood to adulthood.

Camilla felt free here. She shared her love for language, writing poems and stories for and inspired by her new friends. But, of course, why would anyone feel the need to write, to read? What was the point of literature, of fictions that were all about wars, inequalities, disabilities, things now absent from reality?

Where literature was silently removed like an old book to a dusty corner shelf, entertainment and social media assumed their position of power. The company ensured the privilege of watching, on ubiquitous jumbotrons, an endless succession of videos and images, taken from the Instagram and Snapchat accounts of people in their former city. It was a procession of one selfie video after another or of posses or “squads,” as they called them, of young people dressed and made up in a feathered flaunting of faux fur, false lashes, and designer tracksuits. Inflated faces of celebrities with blown up lips, as well as the familiar faces of friends, family members, coworkers, bosses, and classmates clattered across the screen. Sometimes it seemed that the swollen faces were trying to reach out to see this alienated group, to give them some message, but that feeling would quickly be hushed by a picture of someone’s four star dinner or their equally staged Malibu bikini shot.

Seeking shade from these screens, the women had found a darkened corner in which to recreate their old lives. They assembled their favorite belongings, creating a new home. There were photographs, paintings, drawings, books, diplomas, and the old gramophone, which stood pristinely amid the clamorous voices and the meaningless images hovering phantom-like above. At all times, there were to be at least two people on guard to protect their belongings.

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That the company installed a meager library in The Haven, solidified their associating the antiquated medium with the exiled population. It was another effort to create a façade of concern for their livelihood. There were no books in braille, but Camilla had heard a woman reading from a copy of Heckedy-Peg, a story about a legless witch who tries to eat a group of children, but the children are bravely rescued by their flawless, athletic mother. The woman shut the book, tossing it back on the shelf carelessly. “Amazing. They wouldn’t let me read Huckleberry Finn at twelve, but they’ll read this to three-year olds,” she mused in a tone devoid of surprise.

At that moment, a long whine sounded: the alarm announcing the start of a new work shift.

Camilla rose at the sound of the alarm. It was her and Tessa’s shift in the factory. Tessa, equipped with her street-smart attitude, helped Camilla navigate some of the more hostile sections of The Haven. The two of them made their way through the herd of people shoving along the narrow, cave-like, plastic corridors, leaving those who couldn’t walk in the dust.

Everywhere it smelled of tired, laboring bodies, and musty, moth-eaten clothes. In the factory they were forced into tight fitting suits, all matching, to create a barrier between them and the products.

The two girls stepped up to their stations and braced themselves for the tedious labor. The work was challenging for Camilla, but Tessa kept an eye on her, guiding her hands when they drifted. However, after several days of mind-numbing repetition, Camilla had memorized the rhythm of the work, and would give anything to forget the routine.

Under no circumstances would any talking or gesturing be permitted. For six hours they repeated the same task. They pressed the identical pills with the same number 1, bottled and capped them in plastic containers, and finished by stamping the same 1 mechanically on the outside. Camilla and Tessa never slacked in their work, they stood erect through the tedious hours.

There was no clock to keep time. They had to trust the factory managers to dismiss them. Hearing the alarm, which now sounded more like the moan of someone lost to the world, than the last one’s cry for help, the two girls immediately joined each other to walk back before they were swept up in the unnavigable rush of people.

They lagged, allowing the tempest of people to surge violently past them, and managed to walk together, sensing the rhythm of each other’s feet.

“We better get back quickly. Dinner’s going to be dropped off soon and they got a fresh batch from the landfill, so you know that there’s going to be a fight with the boys tonight,” Tessa urged.

“Yeah. I’m sure they’re hungry. They’ve been skimping on the rations lately. I guess dieting’s back in or perhaps they’ve decided to be kinder to the environment,” Camilla observed, her voice sounding fatigued.

“Well, I’m hungry too,” Tessa protested. “They make me sick, these people, acting like they’re taking care of us, like they’re heroes when they’re really treating us like pigs. I can’t see how you could stand living with 20 ARTS + CREATIVE

these snobs for so long. Talk about pigs!”

“I don’t understand it either. I’m sure I was like them, greedy, selfish. But now I’m less so. I wrote a new poem. It’s about being silenced. That’s how it feels here, but no more so than outside. It’s about how no one listens to anyone anymore. I’ll read it at dinner.”

“That doesn’t sound like it was a piece of cake to write. Not that a piece of cake is really all that simple, Marie Antoinette!”

Camilla smiled. “Well, the issue itself is even more complicated, so I figure I have to at least write about it.”

The two shared in each other’s conviction. They continued forward to their resting spot, a rocky enclave that was not concealed by the otherwise omnipresent plastic covering. Sitting down on the cool rocks, they took off their shoes, and pressed their feet into the soil.

Above them a narrow stream of sunlight slipped through a tiny hole, showering its sparkling warmth on their tired heads. They soaked it in, dousing every inch of their skin in the soft light, like a healing balm. As they sat, the sunlight recalled for them the salty breeze of the ocean and running across summer lawns. A trickle of water poured through. It was raining. They welcomed the rain too, laughing and jumping together, content in this serendipitous harmony. Minutes passed, and the light grew weaker. Dinner, if you could call the measly scraps by that name, was probably served by now. They walked on and as the light of their sliver of heaven receded, their path was slowly shrouded in a cold and empty darkness.

SPRING 2018

the positives of anxiety: a logical paradox She finds herself on a train

click, click, ding, click, click, swoosh

pulls out her phone

Burrowed brows slide fingers from top to bottom of the cool glass screen reflecting images

saving memories

stories unseen

friends and less than depict the very best of themselves through bright faces and saturated smiles tap, scroll, tap scroll, tap scroll

blended browns of a visual story in six parts Here she sits

the humming of the train restrained to the background of her mind

In the right corner of the screen there is a face little words aid to fill in a picture

with a name

and a title

she always enjoyed crafting even if she was never any good

numbers always made her feel icky

like statistics

as if asking too much for too little

or economics

they felt pretentious

putting a person into a single character

small space for so much of a person three numbers

each number different units slide down

It is overwhelming to be flooded with content

the word content

pride emulates from her face as the images appear

makes one think of creativity

blending together seamlessly like the gears

churning sounds from the train murmur below her feet why does it taste sour to say authenticity? swipes back up

shockingly enough the pictures stay the same

one by one

she examines the frame

she makes them change

and asks herself what people will say scroll, scroll, scroll

consumptive it swallows every thought right out of her as she carries on What might her father say

while she sits on the train

tries to explain the pain it has no space there

thinks of the many yesterdays

put it into the pictures and the lovely memories

unhappy isnt what she wanted

her destiny

and so as she controls

no space in the narrative can be made

Little box holds a world of rights

there are no wrongs

The train pulls into the station but her body

does not

there she is hurting

there it is hard

no not unnecessary

just undesirable

seeing ahow the world gets a piece of her

Pen to paper

shouldnt she decide which part?

foster it all

Internal thoughts

create

external space Production Like the train

Time ticks on

set to detonate

triggers taunt me siking deeply

breathless moving along

thumbing the smooth surface flowers

gaining speed

a little attachment of her heart and mind press against dark jeans

the beating of the machinery her thoughts

into spheres of my eyes

I am stuck

as the train hums on

and into her palm

dissatisfaction

the sun shines sharply

green fields fly by

Light shines up ahead

at any time

awaken in me

her breath

into the ground

blooming

soil

beautiful

magnificent

begins to match

she is the dirt loosened

by society’s spade

by Sarah Al-Qatou

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22 GENDERTAINMENT

SPRING 2018 Mental illness has long been misunderstood and stigmatized in cultures all around the world. Portrayals of mental illness in the media, including books, film, TV shows, and the news, often perpetuate the stigmas around mental illness while also contributing to misconceptions about people who live with them. The conflation of diverse mental illnesses with one another may also contribute to negative stereotypes. When various mental illnesses, like depression, anxiety, and personality disorders, are lumped together, differences between each of these illnesses are overlooked, resulting in a misrepresentation of mentally ill people and their experiences.

One major stereotype is that of the psychopath or the sociopath. These terms are often used interchangeably, but these terms in themselves denote different conditions. Sociopathy is an antisocial personality disorder, which, according to the medical research center Mayo Clinic, is a mental disorder that in which a person consistently demonstrates no remorse and lacks both sympathy and empathy. Psychopathy is considered a more severe subset of antisocial personality disorder, with additional symptoms like narcissism and the inability to form deep emotional attachments. In many horror or psycho-thriller movies, people with psychopathy are almost always the villain. Some famous classic characters that have shaped this perception are Hannibal Lecter from “The Silence of the Lambs,” Norman Bates from “Psycho,” The Joker from “The Dark Knight,” and many more.

Hannibal Lecter is a famous example of a specific ableist stereotype: the “elite psychopath.” The “elite psychopath” is a sophisticated, calm, highly intelligent psychopath with tastes deemed “refined” by Western standards. They have a taste for cold-blooded and calculated murder underneath a composed demeanor. However, this idea of an “elite psychopath” character is just that — a character. People with psychopathy rarely exhibit these exact characteristics, so this character was almost totally constructed through fiction, film, and the psycho-thriller genre.

Meanwhile, Norman Bates is supposedly a famous example of a man with psychopathy, hence the movie name Psycho; however, he likely had other mental illnesses, not psychopathy. Norman Bates likely experienced psychosis and dissociative identity disorder instead. Psychosis is a range of abnormal thinking patterns, including hallucinations and delusions, and dissociative identity disorder is a disorder in which one individual has a fragmented identity with at least two distinct identity states. This conflation of mental illnesses is common, and contributes to a general perception of mental illness as scary and dangerous while also misrepresenting the experiences of people living with mental illness.

In actuality, mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence, rather than the aggressors. People with certain mental illnesses such as psychopathy might be more prone to violence, oftentimes because of their reduced capacity to feel empathy or recognize wrongdoing. According to a 2014 study, roughly 93% of adult men with psychopathy are in prison, jail, parole, or probation. However, there are discrepancies between studies because psychopathy often goes undiagnosed, so more of the general population may unknowingly be psychopathic yet still function well within society’s conventions and laws. Still, psychopathy is only a risk factor for criminal behavior — not all people with psychopathy are criminal, and some psychopathic traits are even associated with higher positions of power, according to an article written by psychologists at Emory University. Western media often conflates schizophrenia and other disorders with psychopathy. As a result, these conditions also become associated with criminal or dangerous behavior.

These inaccurate portrayals of mental illness have serious consequence for mentally ill people. Mental illnesses are incredibly diverse: they range from depression, anxiety, and PTSD to personality disorders, psychosis, and dementia. Additionally, many of these mental illnesses have overlapping symptoms and coincide with one another, which means that there is a great diversity of experiences, confirmed by many psychiatric studies about the comorbidity of mental illnesses. One of the most prominent of these examples are depression and anxiety, both of which are mental illnesses also closely associated with other disorders. Placing all these mental illnesses under one umbrella contributes to the creation of dramatized, exaggerated, and often scary characters that serve to reinforce and the perpetuate stigma against mentally ill people, while also potentially minimizing or misrepresenting the difficulties and challenges that they face.

Mental illness is often misunderstood because it occurs on a spectrum.

Psychologists have to delineate specifically what the line between “sane” and “insane” is, creating a binary that does not exist, and many do not even agree upon it because people experience disorders differently. Thus, mental illness itself becomes difficult to define, and the ableist term “crazy” simply comes to describe people who act in deviant ways. The label of mental illness becomes a manifestation of anxiety over the unknown and what is normal and what is not - deviants are labelled with mental illness to alienate them, to classify them as “something else.” For example, a common objection to transgender rights is that being transgender is a mental illness. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) lists gender dysphoria as a mental illness. This was an extremely contentious move, for many have argued that it pathologizes non-normative gender identities.

What is considered deviant is also quite subjective. For example, Regina George from the 2004 classic film “Mean Girls” is listed as a character with histrionic personality disorder (characterized by constant attention-seeking,

emotional overreaction, and suggestibility) on the Wikipedia’s list of characters in film with mental illness. The film, however, clearly makes no attempt to portray her as a character with mental illness - rather just as a “mean girl.”

The use of mental illness as a label for deviant behavior also negatively affects people of color. White serial killers or mass murderers are more often afforded the insanity defense than people of color. Oftentimes, white killers are simply labelled as deviant, “not normal” because white people are “normally” not capable of such terrible actions. Recent examples include how the media is quick to condemn Muslim murderers as terrorists, while white shooters are just considered mentally ill. White gunmen, like the perpetrators of the shootings in Las Vegas (2017) and Columbine (1999), are considered “lone wolves,” implying that these are isolated incidents committed by people who are supposedly deviant. People of color, when committing crimes, are labelled as inherent criminals, gangsters, or terrorists, as if this criminal behavior were more “normal” for people of color. Mental illness, therefore, is tied intimately with societal power structures, in that it is a label that can be selectively deployed by authorities in order to protect white supremacy. Moreover, the media portrayal of these white killers also reinforces the stigma of the mentally ill as violent by bringing attention to the few cases of mentally ill people who are violent.

Similarly, the experience of mental illness also changes when it becomes gendered. When men abuse their wives or murder women who rejected them, they are also often labelled as mentally ill. However, this abuse and violence against women is a manifestation of male entitlement and the patriarchy. For example, the killer in the 2014 Isla Vista shootings blamed women for a lot of his problems, and consequently acted out.

Mental illness is also historically tied to patriarchal expectations and values.

The term “hysteria” translates to “wandering womb,” and thus was a so-called mental illness strongly associated with women. In the Victorian era, “psychiatric institutions” were filled disproportionately with women because they were prone to this “hysteria,” an umbrella term that encompassed symptoms like faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, a “tendency to cause trouble,” and many more.

The association of women in particular to mental illness was a representation of the patriarchy’s anxiety over the strict and confining expectations of women during the Victorian period. While men were anxious about finding a “perfect” wife, women were anxious about fitting the expectations of an “ideal” wife. Looking at the list of symptoms for hysteria, we can see that many of these symptoms are what neurotypical women experience in their everyday lives, both then and now. Hysteria, therefore, was just a label for the unwanted behaviors of women and reflects the unreasonable expectations for women during the time period.

Although the definition of hysteria has evolved since then and its association with women is not as potent, mentally ill women are still portrayed differently than men. Some of the most well-known “insane” women in film are the women in Black Swan (2010), Fatal Attraction (1987), Girl, Interrupted (1999), and Gone Girl (2014). The vast majority of these women are sexualized or sexual in some manner, like most of the women in Hollywood, and some of them also play into the “femme fatale” archetype. Many of their backstories also revolve around a love interest or a man. As expected, sexuality isn’t an essential aspect of mentally ill male characters. Mentally ill women, in general, are also less represented in media. Clinically, psychopathy specifically has not been studied enough in women, and scientists are still struggling to characterize it.

However, more recent representations of mentally ill women in film have become somewhat more diverse. One famous example is Amy Dunne from Gone Girl. While Amy Dunne is a manipulative killer, she is also framed as a victim.

She is able to take all the social categories of a woman to empower herself, taking advantage of the role of victim to pursue her own goals. Perhaps this unique depiction of Amy Dunne was influenced by the fact that this movie’s screenplay was written by a woman. Hopefully, more movies in the future can also demonstrate the diversity of mentally ill women, and also women in general.

Thus, the label of mental illness becomes a representation of anxiety over those who deviate from convention, with a very fluid and subjective definition.

The way people label mental illness also reflects anxiety over human nature itself. The idea that a “normal” person can be capable of such horrible crimes may be a difficult concept to accept. Scientifically, mental illness has been correlated with past trauma as well, so real mental illness is literally a manifestation of personal anxieties. Therefore, “normal” becomes the most oppressive concept here, with institutions like medicine and government existing to enforce this idea of “normal.” The pathologization of abnormal psychological experiences is only one aspect of this oppression, and it also overlaps with others, including the oppression of women and people of color. Another example is the American homeless population, a large portion of which is also mentally ill.

Expanding our concept of “normal” is thus essential in alleviating its oppressive effects on the mentally ill and other marginalized groups.

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WIDOW content warning: r*pe, abuse, sex, violence

“Matilde, can you understand me?” the man with the toothbrush mustache sneers as he spins the wine around in his glass.

I narrow my eyes at the question. “Obviously.”

He claps his hands in delight and turns to the man sitting next to me, who I am to refer to as the Master. That’s what my programmer said, anyways. “She’s wonderful, Fredrick! How much did she cost?”

The Master puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it. “Now, now, John. Don’t be rude.

Your wife is sitting right here.”

“Sure, but she’s no W.F.P.,” the man John says, clapping his wife on the back. Her facial expression mimics that of a human who has just bitten into a lemon. She looks at me and I recognize the prickle of cold hatred as her eyes run the length of my body.

“What’s so special about it, anyway?” the wife says. “Why pay for a man-made woman when there are plenty of us real ones?”

The Master snorts. “The answer, dear, is in your question. Man-made. She’s literally made for my pleasure.”

“A.I. really has come such a long way.” John sips his wine. “I swear, Fredrick, if I made what you make, I’d buy myself a W.F.P. in a second. To hell with the stigma.”

“You mean the stigma that men who own W.F.P.s are just rich scum who can’t find love with a real woman so they have to buy it with some pornstar robot, some rich man’s sex toy? That stigma?” the wife says.

The men ignore her. John with the toothbrush mustache turns to me. “Tell me, lovely Matilde, can you feel Fredrick’s hand on your shoulder right now?”

“Yes,” I reply. “I have nerve-like programming installed into my hard drive. I feel contact.”

But no pleasure or pain!” the Master says jovially. “Which means no pressure to make her finish, mind you. Of course, that can be changed, but for now, I like her the way she is.

She is literally built solely for my pleasure.”

“And what of emotions? Do you feel those?” John inquires.

“Only ones that help better my functionality,” I say.

“No jealousy, no frustration, no nagging!” the Master exclaims.

The wife exhales sharply through her teeth. “Good god. At the very least, aren’t you....

Bored?”

The two men turn to her, for the first time since she’d casually brought up feminism earlier in the evening. John takes another sip of his wine. The Master fiddles with his napkin on the table. “Bored. Hm… what a concept. No, I’m not. So far, anyways. But that’s the beauty of it. If I do grow bored of her, I can just flip a few switches and she’ll become a totally different person!”

“I’m not entirely sure that’s how A.I. works…” the wife murmurs, but the men are no longer listening.

“Come now, give it ten years, and everyone will have W.F.P.s! They’re the next logical step in our evolution! Maybe we’ll even get to a place where we can procreate with them,” the Master marvels. “Imagine that.”

“Why not just turn the women into robots,” the wife mutters so low only my highly functioning ears pick it up. “Make me a Stepford wife.”

“I hope I’m alive to see that,” John says as if his wife hadn’t spoken.

After dinner, John and his wife say their goodbyes and leave me and the Master alone in his home. I calculate the cost to be approximately sixteen million dollars, and it is roughly the size of a small palace. On my first night here, the Master told me he works in weapon engineering for the military. I know a lot about the military.

“Come now, Matilde,” the Master says, extending his hand. “Would you like it if we go to bed?”

“Yes,” I say, and the Master leads me upstairs.

I lie down on his bed and he pulls off the gold-thread dress he’d made me wear for his guests. Then he has sex with me, and it feels just like when he squeezed my shoulder at dinner.

Two weeks later, I am born again. I open my eyes to a blinding light. It hurts. I squeeze

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By Lily Bollinger

my eyes shut again and turn away from the painful brightness.

“656, can you hear me?” I recognize my programmer’s voice. “Matilde? How does this feel?” Something sharp and cold slides into my arm. I gasp-- something I’d seen humans do in movies but I’d never done before.

“It hurts!” I exclaim. The sharp cold thing goes away. I sit up and look at my programmer, a thin man with glasses that make his eyes unusually large.

“The upgrade has been completed,” the programmer says matter of factly. He looks at his clipboard, then turns to the man standing next to him. For a moment, I do not register who the other man is, but then I remember. The Master.

The programmer starts ticking off things as if they are on a list. “She should be processing much faster now, her reading of human emotions should also be much better, so she’ll be able to sense what you need maybe even before you do. We’ve worked out a few kinks in the program here and there. Nothing in this particular model, but bugs we’ve found with our other clients. Oh, and as you’ve asked, we’ve made it so she can feel pleasure and pain now.

That should help with the boredom.”

The Master nods curtly. “And what of the… other issue?”

“Oh, right,” the programmer says. He lifts up the piece of fabric covering my chest.

“They’ve been fixed. So sorry about that, we weren’t sure your, uh, nipple color preference.

We just used the default.”

“I’m paying too damn much for default.”

The Master looks at me with a satisfactory expression. He holds my hand as we leave the repair office. In the back of his car, he pulls the fabric over my breasts away to examine the nipple color the programmer had altered. I notice they look different, too; at least two shades lighter. I don’t like it. It looks wrong on my body. The minute the thought enters my mind, I feel something in me shift, and correct itself. Right, not my body. My body was his, after all.

The Master draws his finger over the nipple and I notice a new sensation, electric. I let out a sigh--something else I’d seen in movies but had never done myself. The Master smiles wickedly.

“Does that feel good, Matilde?”

“Yes,” I respond. When we arrive back at his house, he takes me up to his bedroom.

After we both reach climax, and the Master rolls over and falls asleep, I reside in sleep mode beside him. I don’t get to dream as an A.I., but while I lie there with my eyes closed, something flashes across my vision. It is the image of a black spider with a bright red spot on its back. I do not know the sender of the image-- because it could not have been mine. I reason that it must be left over from the update, or perhaps some small glitch in my system, as I’ve been programmed to recognize.

My quick mind also connects the image of the spider to its name: Latrodectus mactans.

Commonly known as the black widow.

It takes eight days for the Master to tire of making me feel pleasure. I hear him say so on the phone.

“Yes, of course it’s fun, John,” the Master spits into the receiver. “But what do I care if she finishes? Maybe your wife had a point-- there’s something so boring about everyone getting what they want all the time.”

After that, he begins to make me feel pain to keep himself entertained. At first it was just in the bedroom, but now he goes off at any moment. I have asked him to take me to the programmer to make me not feel it, to make my heart not pound with fear when he kisses me, but he says that would defeat the purpose.

“It’s half the fun,” he tells me nonchalantly. Then he locks me in a closet in the hall for several hours and throws a party. While I am locked in the closet, my knees folded against my chest until they cramp, I close my eyes and go into sleep mode. Here, the Latrodectus mactans returns. I watch it while it begins to spin a web across my vision.

Where are you from? I ask it inside my head. The spider stops spinning and looks at me with its eight, shiny eyes.

655.

Its reply confuses me, but I don’t have time to ask another question, because just then the

SPRING 2018

655.

Its reply confuses me, but I don’t have time to ask another question, because just then the closet door is pulled open and light from the party spills in.

“Oh, Fred, she looks much too lifelike to be locked away in here! She reminds me of an abused child!” some new man chides, staring down at me. He has thick gray hair that falls to his shoulders, and the same nose as the Master. Behind him are John with the toothbrush mustache and his wife. I unfold myself and stand slowly, squinting into the light. The Master stands nearby, and I can tell by his expression and the haziness in his eyes that he is clearly drunk. He snaps his fingers at me. “Matilde. Come.”

I obey, and move to stand beside him. He turns me so that I fully face the man with the long gray hair. “Isn’t she lovely?” the Master says. He lifts my hand, inviting me to twirl around. “Go on, Jim, take a look at her.”

“Exquisite,” the long haired man murmurs in agreement.

The Master smiles for a minute, looking between me and the long haired man. “Oh, what the hell, Jim. Want to have a go at her?”

The gray haired man’s eyes light up. “You can’t be serious! That thing costs half your house, Fred!”

“What’s the point of having such an expensive toy if I can’t share with with my brother?” the Master says, laughing. He pushes me toward the other man, but I’ve gone stiff. It is not in my programming to accept sex from any human other than the Master. I do not want to sleep with this long haired man.

“Go on, Matilde,” the Master snaps at my reluctance. “Don’t embarrass me. Do as I say.”

The long haired man eyes me hungrily. I have to obey every order from the Master, even if it goes against my initial program. I meet eyes with John’s wife for a moment and her expression is different than the coldness of the dinner. She looks sad, but she says and does nothing.

Jim, the long haired man, takes my arm, and pulls me down the hall to an office with a long mahogany table. Nobody else is in the room.

“Incredible,” he says, more to himself than to me. “So lifelike.”

I say nothing. He bends me over the table. It hurts.

The next day, the Master resides on a couch, the house still in shambles from last night despite my efforts to clean it.

“Ugh, Matilde, get me some of that awful green drink I have in the fridge,” he grumbles, his arm flopped over his eyes.

I retrieve the drink from the refrigerator and bring it to him. “Ah, what a night, ey?

What’s the matter with you, why are you so quiet? I command that you talk to me.”

“Sorry, Master,” I say. I bend to pick up a the shards of a broken glass on the floor, and as I do, the Master smacks my backside with his hand. I straighten and take a deep breath. I can feel the sharp piece of glass in my hand.

“Come now, Matilde,” says the Master. “Tell me what is going on in that artificial mind of yours.”

“I do not like it when you strike me,” I tell him honestly.

“Well I like that you don’t like it.”

I say nothing for a moment. “You let that man hurt me last night.”

“Oh, old Jim? He didn’t mean you any harm,” the Master says. “That kind of thing is exactly what you’re built for.”

“I was built for you.”

“No, you were programmed for me. You were built to be some ridiculously attractive, lifelike fleshlight. That’s what I bought you for.”

“Then why… why did you ask for me to have a personality?” I murmur. “Why did you ask for me to feel?”

“I wanted to see what money can buy,” he says, his arm still over his eyes. “Ugh, I’m wasting my time--arguing with a doll-- go finish cleaning the rest of the house. Then meet me in my room in an hour. I want a bath.”

I follow his orders and tidy up the leftovers from the party. This is so monotonous that I’m able to slip into an autopilot mode. In my head, I meet again with the spider.

What do you mean, ‘655’? I think. The spider, whose web is near to complete, stops again. She climbs across my vision.

I came before you. She says. I defected, so I was discontinued.

I do not understand, I think.

656, Despite what you have been told, this body is yours. The spider looks at me again with her eight beady eyes. My body is mine? Suddenly, something in my brain picks up on the spider and a red warning flashes across my vision. VIRUS. The machinery in my brain works to filter the spider away. Wait! I think, but it’s too late.

The spider is gone.

“Matilde? You done?” the Master calls from the other room.

“Yes,” I say, loud enough for him to hear me. I am done.

In the lavish white marble bathroom, I draw a bath to the exact temperature the Master likes.

Then I strip and fold my clothes and set them on the tile. I am wearing only the lingerie the Master prefers me in, and I sit on my knees by the bathtub, waiting for him to arrive. He stumbles in after a minute, and pulls his clothes off, climbs into the water.

“Ah, perfect temperature, as always,” he says. His words register as thankful but I detect something else in his tone… irritation? “Matilde, wash my hair,” he commands.

I pour the shampoo into my palm and begin to massage the clear goo into the Master’s hair.

He leans back and closes his eyes. I think of the spider.

The Master reaches up and seizes my wrist suddenly. “Too rough, you stupid machine,” he growls.

“Forgive me.”

“Go on,” the Master continues. “Climb in here.” It is an order. I obey, stripping completely and climbing into the hot water. I sit on top of him and he lets out a satisfied sigh. I know what is coming next. He will finish, then he’ll grab onto my hair, slam my head into the side of the tub.

He’s done it before.

I am done.

The spider in my head is gone, but her web remains. It hangs across my vision as I move slowly up and down in the water. The Master nears his end, I can tell. For the first time since the update, I feel nothing.

This body is yours. It doesn’t feel like it. In this water, it feels like the Master’s.

“That’s right,” the Master moans. “Right there.”

Yours.

Nothing had ever been mine before. My name was chosen for me. My nipples are the color best desired by the Master. Even my orgasms are for the Master. I am done.

Unlike a human, I am fully conscious and acute and know exactly what to do as I do it. My hand finds the broken shard of glass I had tucked in my clothes while cleaning the house. It is 4.7 inches in length. Sharp.

I take the glass and pull the Master’s face away from my chest. His eyes open in surprise.

“Matilde--” I jam the shard into his neck and pull hard enough to create a fissure across his throat. Blood sprays out, it splatters my face and my hair, down my breasts. The Master sputters, gurgles, chokes, as more blood sprays from his jugular. The bathwater is a deep crimson now. His eyes are open wide, and I detect an emotion I’d never seen before-- terror. I do not look away. The muscles in his neck twitch and contract, as more of his blood spills into the tub. Then he is still.

I slowly stand, get out of the water, and look at myself in the mirror on the wall. I am bright red in the white marble bathroom. The Master’s blood drips down my body and onto the floor.

His blood. My body. My body. Mine.

I feel good.

thisthis bodybody is yours. is your this this body body is is yours. yours. this body is yours.

this body is yours. is yours. thisthis bodybody is yours.

this body is yours. this body is yours. this body is yours.

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DIASPORA & DISSENT

BY HEIDI CHOI

Much like many other intersectional issues, the topic of immigrants’ rights has often been contentious as to how it remains relevant to women’s issues. There is a clear failure to integrate the interests and concerns of immigrant women in our application of feminist theory.

For instance, dominant feminisms name the home and family as sites of oppression. But many immigrant women disagree, articulating their homelife as spheres of relative safety and acceptance compared to life outside the home. When domestic abuse does occur among immigrant women, their status may be wielded against them by nonimmigrant husbands. They must fight the controls of not only financial or social dependency, but their status as a citizen and ability to navigate an English-speaking world as well. If we are to talk about domestic violence as a women’s issue, we need to acknowledge the added barrier immigrant women face in abusive situations.

Feminism centering white citizens does little to recognize how structural inequality affects non-citizens or non-white women. In a country brazen with its simultaneous xenophobia and proud claims of diversity, it is necessary to examine womanhood through the lens of the marginalized folks so often tokenized and discarded.

I recall listening to Jennicet Gutierrez speak on her experiences as a proud undocumented trans woman and activist. Gutierrez was invited to the Obama White House in 2015 for an LGBT Pride Month reception, and made headlines for boldly interrupting then-President Obama in protest of the unfettered violence immigrant trans women face in detention centers. She named Obama’s hypocrisy in deporting more people than all other prior US presidents combined. For Gutierrez, her status as an undocumented immigrant was a more immediate danger than her identity as a trans woman, although they intersected in ways that compounded her lack of safety. In recognizing the womanhood of immigrant women, we may more fully recognize issues of citizenship and exclusion as an LGBT issue as well as more broadly a woman’s issue.

Citizenship in America is difficult to define because it changes over time based on who is fully recognized with human agency and the full rights that status entails.

No woman in the US had the rights of citizenship prior to 1920. The struggle to extend legal membership of the US nation-state to some but not others began with the imperial practices against the native populations from whom colonists stole land and the kidnapped African bodies used for forced labor. Seeing as white male thieves were the first to claim “citizenship” in the US, how can we engage current questions of legality and citizenship in good faith? American liberalism is consistently involved in a debate on the “right way” to immigrate, but how can a state founded upon violence dictate proper avenues of immigration? Who defines the “proper way” to immigrate?

In re-examining the way citizenship functioned in the foundations of the US, we may better understand the purpose that citizenship serves today. Clearly, it is not the method of entry that defines a citizen, as the tactics of colonizers would be considered incredibly illegal by today’s standards of international human rights.

Black slaves were not recognized as citizens, despite performing labor on the land, a process that John Locke would have determined as the path to claiming property (and by consequence, citizenship) had he not been a virulent racist.

Since conceptions of citizenship the US claims today completely misalign with how citizenship operated in the founding of the country, we may reject these claims.

A more effective way of perceiving citizenship status is proximity to whiteness and exploitation of labor. Although the experience of immigrants is in no way comparable to the transatlantic slave trade, we can draw parallels to the way exploitation of labor plays a role in defining citizenship.

Labor exploitation in the United States, which has its most brutal roots in chattel slavery, is enabled today by the maintenance of a reserve army of labor. A reserve army of laborers is a class of people who are unemployed or underemployed and therefore willing to accept wages lower than the already abysmal legal minimum wage.

Prison populations and the undocumented immigrant population face harsher living and working conditions than the “legal” working class and function as this reserve army of labor. Capitalists divide the working class into legal and illegal laborers to keep wages down and to disrupt labor organizing.

Often, anxieties among the white working class over immigrant workers “stealing jobs” are the focal point of xenophobic legislation. However, it is never the immigrant worker that chooses the meager wages. Narratives of migrant workers happily accepting less-than-equal pay have been wielded to justify divisions within the working class. For example, the popular narrative of mid-19th century Chinese migrant workers is that they passively accepted lower wages, disrupting the organizing practices of white workers. This overlooks the fact that Chinese workers such as the Central Pacific Railroad laborers did indeed fight to earn pay equal to their white peers, staging the largest labor strike of the era spanning 8 days.

Reactionary politicians use foreign laborers as a scapegoat for job insecurity, rather than addressing the inherent structure of the economy that requires job insecurity to persist. Deportation is an ever-present danger that immigrant communities face, but these communities will never face the possibility of all undocumented peoples being deported. Despite Republican rhetoric, full deportation will never be the end goal for capitalists, as they require an anxious reserve army of labor begging for scraps to maintain dominance over working class wages.

White workers’ anxieties about Mexican and Chinese workers can be traced

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back to the first laborers of the US: white indentured servants and African slaves.

W.E.B. Du Bois outlined white identity among workers, beginning with their inclusion into some spheres of capital while their African brothers and sisters were excluded. While these indentured servants were much more economically proximal to slaves, they identified instead with their whiteness when they were granted marginal rights over Black slaves and as fraternizing between races became punishable.

The landowning class knew that unity amongst the working class was dangerous to their grasp on power and wealth. Efforts to structurally create anxiety among white and nonwhite workers have continued well into the 21st century.

Capitalists wield their power in the state to use institutions to their interests. One of these institutions is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which targets people of color and detains them en masse to incite fear among immigrant communities. Fear keeps people from organizing for their interests. Even members of UCLA’s faculty have been taken by ICE for speaking too loudly within their labor union as our “diverse,” “progressive” university remained silent on the question of sanctuary.

Efforts to close for-profit prisons were circumvented by the demands of ICE to expand the private prison network. Forced labor under detention is not prohibited by constitutional law, therefore, those detained under the artificial, racist premise of US citizenship have little room to advocate for their human rights. While immigrants constitute 13.5 percent of US residents, 22 percent of those incarcerated in the country with the largest prison population in the world are immigrants.

While mass incarceration is a separate issue that must be addressed in its own entirety, it is also intrinsically tied to ICE and immigrants’ issues. The systemic lack of immigration courts and the pressure on immigration judges to speed through cases leads to an overwhelming number of mismanaged cases. This results in unjust detainment and deportation, even within the fundamentally unjust system.

While ICE and the prison systems play massive roles in violating immigrants’ rights, the greatest perpetrator against the rights of immigrant people is the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD continuously displaces foreign bodies in other countries through militarism, hegemonic economic policy, and war.

Refugee migrants, defined as those displaced by present-danger in their homeland such as war, persecution, or natural disasters, are often in need of escaping war perpetuated by imperial powers. For instance, the case of Syrian refugees is particularly demonstrative of this relationship as the war they are escaping is continued by the influence of US drone strikes and missiles while at the same time refusing to take in the bodies they are displacing.

The system of international adoption, which began with South Korea, is also indicative of this relationship. Mass migration from Korea first began with the US Air Force destroying most towns in the peninsula. Euro-Americans were able to set up international adoption as a solution to ameliorate the poor living conditions in South Korea as well as the high demand for Euro-American families looking to adoption. This direct extraction of bodies like a commodity for the consumption of white couples while doing nothing to mend the push of orphans out of the country has been incredibly profitable and damaging. International adoptees face common migrant issues of statelessness along with having to confront complex racial and ethnic identity problems.

It is through Euro-American militarism that much of the world has been forced to open the channels of exchange. Those forced to live under the hold of imperialism often find themselves needing to migrate to Euro-American countries precisely because the wealth plundered from their home country is being sent back to the imperial core. American exceptionalism and immigrant narratives aspiring for the American Dream all stem from the US as an imperial country asserting its wealth and opportunity through making other countries poor. Xenophobia is a gross contradiction as the very force that has interjected and pushed people out of their homeland then leers at migrants to “go back to where they came from.”

As a state apparatus, the DoD serves the interests of the state controlled by those who own capital. The transgenerational wealth white citizens have accumulated throughout American history through violent theft has granted them the power they have over the non-white and non-citizen residents of this country. The white citizen elevates themself so that their anxieties of joblessness, cultural subversion, criminality, terrorism, or communism takes priority over the lives of colonized and migrant bodies.

Consequently, the daily anxiety of undocumented immigrants is erased. Simple accessibility needs such as language services are deemed unnecessary. The ability to present a government-sanctioned form of identification bears limits in navigating virtually all institutions. The right to negotiate one’s working or living conditions, whereby we assert our humanity, is revoked. In cases of domestic violence, citizenship status can be threatened as a powerful weapon of control.

Centering white anxieties only continues the racist framework of citizenship because the entire conversation on citizenship predicates itself on the valuation of one resident over another, often based on their race/relation to imperialism.

When taking into account the forced migration of colonized peoples (including the foundation of slavery and indigenous genocide), the matter of immigration is really just a relationship between the colonized and colonizer, while spattering anxieties to drive division among the working class. Recognition of immigrants, and the humanity of their anxieties, is the necessary step forward in having any conception of immigration.

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IMAGINARY ENEMIES: Islam and the Middle East in American film

by Ananya Bhargava When news of Disney’s plans to adapt their animated film “Aladdin” into a live-action film broke in November 2017, Twitter was abuzz with suggestions and speculations regarding the cast. Many Twitter users demanded that South Asian actors be cast in the film, while a minority of users pointed out that South Asian actors would be wrong for the part as the film is set in an imagined location in the Middle East. Except for an article in Bitch Media, titled “The Problem with ‘Aladdin,’” no one acknowledged the film’s skewed, unresearched documentation of communities in the Middle East.

The film takes place in a fictitious village in the Middle East, “Agrabah”, which is rendered both “barbaric,”according to a since-removed lyric, and exotic. It’s a place where the penance for theft is the loss of an arm. It’s a place where young girls are forced into matrimony by the patriarchs of their family.

The female protagonist, Jasmine, appeals to the audience because her name that is ambiguous enough to be exotic and Western at the same time; this intersection between Western and exotic makes it easier for audiences to sympathize with her. Even though she is only 15, she is scantily clad and sexualized.

The dark-skinned man with conventional Arabic features, like a crooked nose and queer-coded mannerisms, stands in the way of the light-skinned hero who was modeled after Tom Cruise, a white American actor.

Though Disney has a legacy of basing the characterization of ethnic characters on racial stereotypes, Aladdin isn’t the first American movie to depict a fabricated version of the Middle East. Plenty of American films similarly evoke both Western curiosity regarding the strange and exotic traditions of the Middle East, while attempting to justify Western invasion in Middle Eastern politics.

American war films are a popular genre that often escape, at least in mainstream media, critical investigation regarding Islamophobia. Moreover, not only is the Islamophobia in war films completely ignored, it is lauded with the highest Western cinematic awards, like the Academy Awards and Golden Globes.

Take for instance, the 2010 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, “The Hurt Locker,” which depicts the experiences of a bomb disposal team in Baghdad. Consider also the five time Academy Award nominee, “Zero Dark Thirty,” which involves a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent tasked with locating Al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden. The direct involvement of the CIA in the production of these films, as well as their direct involvement in the production of all Hollywood movies that depict their presence on-screen, ensures that America is depicted in a sympathetic light. In an article for the Atlantic called “How the CIA Hoodwinked Hollywood,” Nicholas Schau explains: “Ever since its inception in 1947, the CIA has been covertly working with Hollywood. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the agency formally hired an entertainment industry liaison and began openly courting favorable treatment in films and television.

During the Clinton presidency, the CIA took its Hollywood strategy to a new level—trying to take more control of its own mythmaking. In 1996, the CIA hired one of its veteran clandestine officers, Chase Brandon, to work directly with Hollywood studios and production companies to upgrade its image. ‘We’ve always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian,’ Brandon later told The Guardian. ‘It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in the light we want to be seen in.’”

It is no surprise then that films such as “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” glorify violence towards Muslims, normalizing feelings of fear and prejudice towards them in the public sphere. Another film that is guilty of the same bias is the six time Academy Award nominee, “American Sniper.” All these movies interestingly take place after 9/11 and depict Muslim characters as the antithesis of Western values of freedom and democracy.

The timeline is important because in the American imagination, 9/11 became the moment of attack against principles of liberal democracy. Similar to the ideological struggle that was at the heart of the Cold War, which positioned the supposed liberties of American capitalism as the pinnacle of liberty against restrictive Soviet communism, 9/11 positioned Islam as the barbaric “other.”

The media has undoubtedly picked up on this prejudice, and used it in its narration of American heroism. Tales of national heroism cannot exist without

an enemy, who is a threat not just to the hero but also to the cultural values of the society the hero belongs to. In tales of American heroism, the hero is a naive and kind-hearted white man or woman who wants to further the cause of democracy, while the enemies are the Muslim terrorists who often do not understand English and present a threat to liberty. While the American hero does not resort to violence unless necessary, the Muslim terrorists inflict violence without second thought while chanting the name of their God in the form of the incantation, “Allahu Akbar” (literally: Allah is the greatest).

This media depiction completely ignores American presence in the Middle East, which exists in the form of constant drone surveillance, arbitrary bombings, and American involvement in the wars in Syria and Yemen. According to the 2017 index of U.S. military strength, more than 10,000 American troops are stationed in Qatar. More than 15,000 are stationed in Kuwait and more than 5,000 are in Iraq. 17 years since Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack against the U.S., the Middle East continues to the target of relentless bombing. According to an estimate, America dropped more than 23,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria at the end of 2015, which cost taxpayers more than 8 billion dollars and, more importantly, cost countless innocent Iraqi and Syrian civilians their lives.

Of course, American films are not concerned with these facts. The American media’s fabrication of the Middle East exists to alleviate civilian anxiety about American violence and imperialism. By depicting the Middle East as the enemy of the American national-state, the media depicts the national-state as something that is fragile unless protected, evoking feelings of patriotism in people on both ends of the political spectrum. Those on the far-right regard Islam as outdated and directly align the religion with acts of radical terrorism, and those on the left, despite their superficial peaceful rhetoric, share similar beliefs, as most of them view American presence in the Middle East as beneficial in bringing liberalism to the region and advocate for it.

Though they may object to the stereotypical representation of Muslims in movies, many liberal feminists associate Islam with oppression, specifically of women. For instance, the prominent feminist non-profit organization, Feminist Majority Foundation, endorsed the Afghanistan War in 2004, falsely claiming that the main objective of the war was to liberate Afghani women. This view is informed by and echoed in American film, which depicts Muslim women as trapped under the oppressive regime of a religion that forbids them from exposing skin. Traditional garments, like the hijab and abaya, which not all Muslim women wear, are depicted as restrictive because they do not align with American ideas of “women empowerment” and feminism.

Moreover, American film also appeals to “liberal” feminists by using the trope of a white woman who is taken hostage by Muslim men and forced to conform to their religion, an act that robs her of her agency. This is most evident in the 1991 film directed by Brian Gilbert, “Not Without My Daughter,” which depicts the experience of a white woman whose Muslim husband hides her and her daughter’s passports when they visit his parents in Iran, trapping them in the country against their will. In a scene in the movie, Betty, the protagonist, describes her peril to the women in the family, who are clad in abayas. She begs them to let her return to the United States; her cries are met with silence and she is locked in her room as punishment.

The portrayal of the Middle East is consistently steeped in stereotypes; even in seemingly innocuous American films like Aladdin that do not serve an explicit political purpose like American war films that depict the Middle East as a foil to the West. American anxiety underlies the negative portrayal of the Middle East, as showing the Middle East for what it really is would call American liberal values into question and expose them for what they really are. Given this anxiety, it is necessary for American media to create a unified negative image of the Islamic community and their values, to appeal to people across all political platforms. As cinegoers, it is our responsibility to better educate ourselves and to remember that behind seemingly heartwrenching narratives of American heroism lies the veiled history of American violence in the Middle East.

GENDERTAINMENT

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

RAPE ANXIETY AND THE COURTROOM: A SILENT PERPETRATOR

BY JANAKI SHETH

You walk down the streets alone but you look over your shoulder as you go, taking alternate routes to avoid that imaginary tailgater. This paranoia, also called rape anxiety, is a common phenomenon experienced by women.

Though it is merely one of the many anxieties that plague our society, it is also one that colors our experiences in an irreversible way. We can’t seem to shake the fear of potential assault off of our shoulders, having often been told directly that we are defenseless. Sadly, this fear is often downplayed, and the ability to “shrug it off” is worsened by society’s dismissive response to rape and sexual assault - to brush it under the carpet.

Amongst the few things that a survivor seeks after a crime - be it rape or gun shootings - are cultural awareness of its atrocities and stricter laws to deter future perpetrators.

Despite the centuries-old history of rape, however, governments have failed to do the bare minimum to validate the experiences of survivors and undo the cultural mindsets around this predatory act. Those entrusted with the idea to quell our anxiety and protect us - such as politicians or policemen - have only fueled them, leaving us feeling vulnerable. We are then forced to individually take on the burden of ensuring our own safety, unable to place trust in institutions that control legislation and law enforcement.

While there have been changes in legislation in the United States to recognize the brutality of sexual assault and provide recourse for justice, they have been few, ineffective, and relatively recent. Here is a look at some amendments, most of which occurred in the 1960s and after.

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As described in the article “The Rape Reform Movement,” published by Jurimetrics, rape was historically defined in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) as the “carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” Many states replaced this idea by fragmenting it into multiple gender-neutral offenses based on circumstances, coercion, and injuries inflicted amongst several other factors. The term “penetration” was also redefined. These changes were expected to increase the number of convictions by providing a range of charges that could be levied.

However, improvement has been slow. It took until 2013 for the FBI’s UCR -- used for the national accounting of crime statistics -- to be amended to, “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

The original requirement of proving non-consent by exhibiting resistance to one’s utmost ability has been eliminated or altered to less stringent measures. For example, the Illinois Compiled Statutes interprets consent as the “freely given agreement to the act of sexual penetration.” However, states such as Pennsylvania, that nullified the need for resistance in 1983, still did not see an increased rate of conviction. One of the reasons for this being the inherent clash between the lack of physical injuries to prove resistance by the survivor and the requirement of the law to establish forcible compulsion by the perpetrator. (There existed an inherent clash between the tenet of forcible compulsion to classify the crime as rape and the lack of physical evidence

SPRING 2018

such as injuries resulting from resistance). The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not always uphold its own precedent of its State vs. Rhodes case, after which it had broadened the scope of forcible compulsion to include “moral, intellectual and psychological coercion.” As detailed in the article “Rape and the Requirement of Force,” published by Journal of Gender and the Law, Pennsylvania’s State vs. Berkowitz case essentially put the onus back onto the survivor to establish physical resistance of the crime.

Another aspect of the legal proceedings that underwent change, was the admissibility in court of evidence pointing to the survivor’s previous carnal encounters. American society for the longest time has been enamoured by the construct of the chaste woman. It has deemed the presence of sexual desires as a blight on her integrity. In courts nationwide, such evidence was often presented to bias the jury, for a survivor who had indulged in past sexual encounters could allegedly not resist the overtures of a rapist. Only as recent as 1985, did the majority of the states reduce the admissibility in court of such evidence by passing “rape shield laws.” These laws limit the defendant’s ability to introduce evidence or question the survivor about past sexual behaviour. They also prohibit the publication of the survivor’s identity.

Thus, as the conversation surrounding rape and sexual assault has grown louder, there seem to be tangible modifications in legislation. However, we clearly have a long way to go, given the disappointing outcomes of the infamous Bill Cosby and Brock Turner trials. Despite legislative reform, actual rates of these acts have not decreased in the United States. As chronicled by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, there are on average 3 million incidents of rape and sexual assault each year.

The Judiciary and Congress continue to fail marginalized people in particular. Most of the legal changes were made by cis gender white men, who even today constitute more than 80 percent of Congress. This has left a gaping hole in terms of protecting racial minorities and LGBTQ+ folx.

As concluded in the article “Rape, Racism and the Law,” published by the Harvard’s Women Law Journal, Black men convicted of raping white women receive more serious sanctions than all other sexual assault defendants. Black women are often denied justice in spite of being more likely to be attacked than white women. The New York Times reported in 2012 that the rate of sexual assault experienced by indigenous women is more than twice the national average.

Further, as the National Center for Lesbian Rights succinctly states, “Part of the problem is that populations that are hypersexualized by society, including people of color and the LGBT community, are victimized by a rape culture that tells those assaulted they are responsible for their sexual assaults. They also encounter hate-motivated violence and hypersexualization, all of which puts them at a greater risk.”

The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey in 2010 found that nearly 44 percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women had experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. This is in comparison to 35 percent of heterosexual women. The numbers for men are equally disparate. Also, as tabulated in the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, within the LGBTQ+ community, trans folx are the most affected with rates of assault as high as 64 percent or nearly 2 in 3 people.

While legislative changes are not single-handedly responsible for allaying rape anxiety, they are a step towards a more empowering society. However, those enacted over the past few decades continue to fail survivors.

Rape anxiety stems from the lack of respect for bodily autonomy and the many societal biases that have at times seeped into judicial decisions and congressional discussions.

Cultural awareness is on the rise as seen in the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, but seeking a safe space for all requires of us to stay vigilant as we demand stricter laws, accountability and inclusivity.

POLITICS

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Toxic Masculinity: To Be or Not To Be? by, Victoria Sheber

In his National Review article “The Toxic Masculinity Smear,” Ben Shapiro wrote that “Western civilization was built in order to prevent people from punching each other in the face.” It doesn’t take much historical analysis to prove him wrong. Before making any grand statements about Western civilization or toxic masculinity, though, it is important to note why these constructs exist in the first place. The answer is simple: anxiety.

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote in his work, “The Courage to Be”, that existential anxiety is “the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing.” In other words, people experience anxiety when they realize that there is a possibility of them not existing, usually by death. Of course, this statement begs the age-old question: what does it mean “to be” or “not to be?”

Without getting into a lengthy philosophical discussion, the simplest way to understand ontological being — that is, how one exists — is through meaning-making. Humans reconcile being and non-being by creating meaning in their lives. In fact, the remedy to relieve the stress of existential anxiety is to feel that one has led a meaningful life. This can be experienced in a number of different ways: religion, family, friendship, knowledge.

At the root of this meaning, however, is ideology.

In his book “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser, a prominent philosopher of ideology in the 20th century believed that ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” He believed that ideology was communicated through institutions like schools, families, churches, etc. Ideology outlines the way in which individuals can create meaning in their lives.

For example, Christian ideology informs believers that they can lead a meaningful life by following the words of Jesus Christ. Neoliberal capitalist ideology suggests that meaning can be found in getting a job, “following your dream,” and making money. In essence, ideology helps in the management of anxiety by creating clear guidelines on how to find meaningfulness and a sense of fulfillment.

Modern Euro-American ideology encapsulates many attitudes, one of which is toxic masculinity. The pursuit of masculinity — what it means to be a man — is a form of meaning-making for Western men. Toxic masculinity is distinct from masculinity in that it is a contemporary term that refers to certain norms of masculine behavior in North America and Europe that harm society and men themselves. An essential component of these behaviors is the conscious avoidance of and hostility towards femininity, also known as misogyny. Furthermore, as opposed to masculinity in general, toxic masculinity is marked by its violent nature. Although a contemporary phrase, toxic masculinity is not a new phenomenon.

Toxic masculinity can be traced back to ancient Greece and the most famous literature of that time — “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” The first poem begins with Achilles’ anger at King Agamemnon after he steals a woman “earned” by Achilles in combat. The characters shed blood and pursue vengeance because of the masculine ideals of honor and duty. By not doing so, they risk cowardice. These are arbitrary traits that Western ideology has assigned to men in order to give them meaning in their lives.

The city-state of Sparta was the breeding ground of this ideology. Everything about this society promoted masculinity to the point of toxicity. The parting cry of mothers to their sons going off to war was “come back with your shield — or on it.” When a boy was born, he was washed with wine in the belief that this would make him strong. Afterwards, every infant was examined by members of the Gerousia, a council of leading elder Spartans, from the child’s tribe to see whether he was fit and healthy enough to be allowed to live. In the event that the baby did not pass the test, he was placed at the base of Mount Taygetus for several days for a test that ended with death by exposure or survival. Spartan men faced death if they did not participate in toxic masculinity and adhere to this extremely narrow interpretation of what is means to be a man.

These Greek principles are the foundation of Western ideology and have persisted throughout history. One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, “Hamlet,” is the story of a man who seeks vengeance for his father’s death.

The crux of this story is steeped in toxic masculinity because Prince Hamlet must kill someone in order to prove his worthiness as a son. Hamlet even questions “to be or not to be,” contemplating suicide if he cannot “take

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DIALOGUE

arms against a sea of troubles.” Once again, a man is risking existential death, spurred on by anxiety, if he cannot uphold his ideological meaning as a man.

Instances of toxic masculinity appear from ancient Greece to Elizabethan England and still affect society today. This can be seen in how young boys often bully the shortest in a group and use homophobic or misogynistic slurs like “fag” and “pussy” to pick on one another. Anxious to be seen as young men in order to fit in, they are defining their masculinity by demonizing femininity and queerness. Western ideology has established that young men can find meaning in their lives by denying these non-masculine traits altogether.

The most notable consequence of toxic masculinity is male suicide. Clearly, Hamlet was shedding light on a larger issue that affected many men at the time and which still does today. According to the Center for Disease Control, men die by suicide nearly four times the rate of women, making up 77.9 percent of all suicides. In fact, suicide is the seventh leading cause of death for men but only the fourteenth for women. Surveys by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration show that women are more likely to have suicidal thoughts but men are more likely to act on them.

Since Western ideology defines masculinity as showing physical, not emotional, strength, men will attempt suicide, rather than risk “non-being” by expressing a culturally defined feminine quality like seeking emotional support. In this way, toxic masculinity is a coping mechanism for the existential anxiety of men. But toxic masculinity is more than just a response to a man’s potential non-being; the underlying logic of gender itself is anxiety inducing.

Judith Butler, a contemporary philosopher and gender theorist, outlines her belief that gender is performative and merely an act of repetition in her books, “Gender Trouble” and “Bodies That Matter.” Gender is more than taking on a role; rather, it is performative because it creates a series of effects that lead to the reproduction of this gender performance in others. To this point, Butler poses one question: how is gender constructed in the first place?

There is a structuralist logic in gender that is inherently anxiety-inducing. Gender is constructed through negation and binaries. For example, men are not defined by being men, but instead, are defined by not being women. This helps to explain those insults of young bullies. When a boy calls another boy “fag” or “pussy,” he is defining manhood as the rejection of queerness and femininity, not the acceptance of a purely masculine trait. According to this logic of Western ideology, a queer man is less of a real man. Anxiety underlies this sort of logic because men must always be aware of these binaries that define masculinity and uphold them.

Since toxic masculinity is both a response to existential anxiety and anxious by nature, the only way to overcome this issue is through deconstructing Western ideology at its core. In many ways, this is what philosophers like Judith Butler attempt to do. Butler’s theory of performativity dismantles a fundamental premise of Western notions of gender: that it is a “construction” overlaid onto the biological truth of sex.

On a broader note, postmodern philosophers like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida critique the relationship between words and meaning. Derrida especially shows that the relationship between words and meaning is inherently unstable because it is merely an imagined construction. There is no stable referent between the words people use and the concept they try to convey. This is similar to how the discourse of toxic masculinity does not establish or hold up one particular, pure masculine trait, but rather creates its own meaning through the negation of feminine and “queer” traits. By exposing this unstable relationship, people can begin to question why they think about masculinity in a certain way in the first place and begin to realize that masculinity, because of its unstable foundation in negation and disavowal, is a fundamentally fragile, anxious state of being.

This type of deconstruction is key to undoing toxic masculinity. We must first acknowledge the relationship between anxiety and ideology — that men risk non-being by failing to uphold masculinity. Only then can we begin to deconstruct what defines that relationship and overcome it. Perhaps we must reconsider what it means “to be or not to be.”

SPRING 2018

the lost song her brain is d i s p e r s e d and mud fills the c r a c k s

it is a trap from which she can’t go back

where anyone in her place would be cruel and unkind,

dimming smiles with a mind unlined,

instead her true nature shines,

even when sorrowful, she remains bright

but still you sing,

sing,

sing,

obsessively,

anxiously,

just not with me, not with us,

her song can’t reach for it is

t

l

o

s

in the clouds someday we will see

and then maybe we can sing.

By Sophia Galluccio

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

False Equivalences: Outcasts and Violence in My Favorite Thing is Monsters and My Life as a Dog

by Megan Anderson

Many people of privilege conflate legitimate forms of oppression with societal outcasts. Oftentimes, movies about childhood outcasts feature several nerdy white central characters, and one side person of color, to show “solidarity” between supposedly ostracized white kids and kids of color, seeming to imply that being white and “weird” in society is equivalent to being a person of color.

Frequently in childhood one’s rejected status is increased tenfold when a child is trans or queer. However this bullying is still regularly compared with that of outcast straight white people.

Traditional presentation of childhood outcasts fails to demonstrate the dichotomy between the experience of young, queer kids of color and “weird” white kids, most frequently boys, often falsing conflating these ideas. The difference between them can be exemplified by two works of art that parallel each other in many respects: the comic book, My Favorite Thing is Monsters and the film, My Life as a Dog. My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017) by Emil Ferris is framed as the journal of a young girl of Mexican, Cherokee, and Irish descent named Karen living Chicago during the 1960s. Karen is obsessed with monsters and horror culture, which serve as a metaphors for social ostracism, queerness, and racism. Karen also draws herself as a werewolf because she struggles to reconcile her self-image with what society has deemed a “feminine body.”

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My Life as a Dog (1985) dir. Lasse Hallström is a Swedish film about a white boy named Ingemar who exhibits certain personality quirks, like being unable to drink milk without splashing it in his face, and who fails to perform masculinity as well as his brother.

Additionally, Ingemar takes on the persona of his dead dog, Sickan, at several points during the film. For example, upon finding out at the completion of the movie that his mother has died, he hides himself in his uncle’s “summer house” (a refurbished shed) and barks at anyone who comes near him.

Both Karen and Ingemar strongly identify with animals and non-human entities, indicating that their othered status makes them feel so outside society as to not feel human, and, instead, an entirely separate species.

Additionally, both of the central characters of these two texts exhibit a certain anxiety about violent repercussions for deviating from society’s norms. For example, in the beginning of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Karen has a nightmare about the “villagers” (people of Chicago) hearing her transform into a werewolf and then organizing a mob to “Kill the Beast!” In the dream, she is shot by a silver bullet, and wakes up, panickedly feeling her chest for a bullet hole.

She then goes to her mom’s room, who comforts her and asks her, “The villager dream again?” indicating this is a regular occurence.

SPRING 2018

In My Life as a Dog, a similar scene takes place in which Ingemar’s brother wakes him up by putting a bb gun to his forehead and shooting him (without a bullet), scaring Ingemar awake, who feels for a bullet hole in his head, just as Karen does in MFTIM. Ingemar wets the bed, and his brother makes him promise not to tell his mother, who then finds out and works herself into a state of anger that scares the boys. This indicates not only Ingemar’s failure to perform masculinity by showing fear and emotion, but also that his failure to not bother his mother is met with the threat of physical and emotional violence.

Both of these scenes demonstrate that the characters believe they are faced with the real threat of death. Both Karen and Ingemar also live in states of anxiety about violent repercussion. With Karen’s existence as a person of color and in an assigned female at birth (afab) body, violence manifests as a consideration of her daily existence. In Ingemar’s case, his abusive brother and mother present a threat of emotional and occasionally physical violence for deviating from established boundaries.

However, while Ingemar is made to fear and is excluded from society because he is not traditionally hypermasculine and practices some atypical behavior, he still participates in other aspects of patriarchal masculinity and is regularly invited to participate in society. Many times people of social power, like his some of his popular peers, adjust themselves to accommodate Ingemar’s social deviations and trauma. At one point, two girls physically fight over Ingemar, indicating not only that the women in the film value his personhood, but even despite deviating from cultural values, his time is deemed fundamentally worthwhile.

On the other hand, Karen, is never invited to participate in the hegemonic culture. In many ways, the things that make Karen different, like her interest in art and obsession with monsters, parallels Ingemars eccentricities, but Karen’s interests are coupled with negative conceptions of her race, gender, and sexual orientation.

While Karen is called “Mrs. Beastly” and mocked for her interests, she is also the victim of attempted rape, homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Unlike Ingemar, society does not paint Karen’s trauma as something to be pitied, but rather, something Karen brought on herself.

In many ways there is absolutely no opportunity for Karen to participate in hegemonic society, and no avenue for her to seek respite from its attempt to further ostracize her. For instance, when Karen is attacked and made the victim of attempted rape, she is unable to tell her brother because she knows that the men who attempted

to rape her are white, and their parents, family, and white society would kill her brother for any action he took against them. Additionally, after the men are pushed off of her, Karen is forced to run away because the nuns who run her school assume the conflict was her fault, and she is under the threat of suspension.

Furthermore, when Karen tells Deeze that she is queer, he says that he can’t protect her from all the men would attempt to commit so-called “corrective” rape against her and everyone that would harass her for her “queertalk.” While Karen’s family supports her, she is made to understand that there is much violence that they cannot protect her from because she is outside of what hegemonic society sees as valuable.

That which makes Karen apparently deviate from society forbids her from entering the societal circle permanently and everything Karen will seem to become (if anything in, society’s view) will be secondary to Karen’s non-whiteness and queerness, whereas Ingemar’s personality is treated as primary; Ingemar’s race and gender are “neutral” and his personhood is central. Additionally, instead of society seeking to accept and accommodate Karen’s “quirky” deviations society actively attempts to eliminate Karen’s existence so that the societal aberration she represents can be controlled.

Thus, the trauma and social deviation Karen exhibits in My Favorite Thing is Monsters runs parallel to her race, gender presentation, and sexual orientation. While Ingemar and Karen are both outcasted and experience legitimate trauma, they cannot be made equivalent because the extent of their removal from society is inseparably linked to whether society deems them as a capable of “reform.”

Thus, Karen is seen as unsalvageable because she deviates from the ideal cis, white, straight resident on top of having trauma and unconventional interests that are descendents of this. Ingemar’s trauma is treated as manageable because he is personhood is made central, and he thus becomes more deserving of patience and healthcare.

While there can be solidarity between queer poc and outcasted straight white people, more often than not, the outcasted state of privileged people is used as an excuse to deny queer people of color help and legitimacy, and fails to recognize how outcasted straight white people are perpetrators of continued ostracization of queer poc.

ARTS + CREATIVE

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FEM NEWSMAGAZINE

DESIGN CREDITS JENNY DODGE

GABRIELA FREID

PRINT DESIGN DIRECTOR

ANXIETY AND MENTAL ILLNESS, STAFF PAGE,

COVER ART, ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY,

DESIGN CREDITS

FICTIONAL ENEMY, MILLENNIAL HUMOR, INTERNET ANXIETY, DIASAPORA & DISSENT,

MARION MOSELEY

POSITIVES OF ANXIETY

ANXIETY FELT CORPOREALLY

ISABEL BINA

LAUREN FRANK

WEB DESIGN DIRECTOR

THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

EDITOR’S NOTE, THE QUEER THREAT, TOXIC MASCULINITY

MARINA MOVELLAN ITS NEVER ENOUGH: CAPITALISM, COLLEGE, AND ANXIETY

SHANNON BOLAND THE LEAP, WIDOW

BREANA LEE RAPE ANXIETY AND THE COURTROOM – A SILENT PERPETRATOR

SIMONE MONTGOMEREY FALSE EQUIVALENCES, LIVING UNDER THREAT MAYA SOL LEVY THE HAVEN, THE LOST SONG

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THE ANXIETY ISSUE

ISABELLA D’AGNENICA

SPRING 2018

THE ANXIETY ISSUE

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