FEM PRESENTS THE POSSESSIONISSUE FALL 2020
Staff List Editor-in-Chief: Alana Francis-Crow Managing Editor: Concepción Esparza SectionPolitics Editor: Maribella Cantú Content Editors: Kimia Faroughi, Emma Jacobs Copy Editor: Sophia Obregon Staff Writers: Tessa Fier, Navya Nagubadi, Mar Escusa, Vanessa Diep Dialogue and Opinion Section Editor: Eva Szilardi-Tierney Content Editors: Shannon Kasinger, Angela Patel Copy Editors: Alexandra Baran, Emma Leh man Staff Writers: Eva Speiser, Ovsanna Avet siyan, Sophia Pulido, Anouska Saraf, Joey Sigala Campus Life Section Editor: Devika Shenoy Content Editors: Madison Thantu, Maya Petrick Copy Editor: Ashley Leung Staff writers: Chloë Vigil, Bella Nadler SectionEntertainmentEditor: Shanahan Europa Content Editors: Kelsey Chan, Eva Szilar di-Tierney Copy Editors: Maya Lu, Olivia Serrano, Natalya Hill Staff Writers: Isabel Armitage, Maribella Cantú, Grace Fang, Ifueko Osarogiagbon, Chloe Xtina, Jessica Thomas, Makayla Williams Arts and Creative Section Head: Taryn Slattery Editors: Axel Tirado, Charlie Stuip Staff Writers: Jane Wang, Amanda Mak, Jasmine Kaur, Savannah Spatafora, Pilar Shen-Berro DesignDesign Co-Heads: Shannon Boland, Grace Ciacciarelli, Lauren Cramer Designers: Ming Chen, Collette Lee, Maizah Ali, Emma Lehman, Hailey Lynaugh, Haiqi Zhou, Karina Remer, Katelynn Perez, Lilah Sniderman, Neha Dhiman, Shreya Dodbal lapur, Maya Lu Social Media Social Media Manager: Jackie Vanzura Social Media Staff: Lexie Bell, Emily House, Mary McGlinchey
VideoVideo Co-Heads: Shannon Boland & Natalya Hill Video Producers: Lilah Sniderman, Mary McGlinchey, Cindy Quach, Daniella Hagopian, Ifueko Osarogiagbon Video Interns: Anna Ziser, Cassidy Kohlen berger, Jerylee Perez, Rania Ali
SectionPlanningHead:
RadioRadio Manager: Julia Schreib Radio Staff: Anjali Singhal, Deirdre Mitchell, Delilah Williams, Diana Castro, Emma Lehman, Jamie Jiang, Lavanya Pandey, Naomi Humphrey
SectionFinance
Heads: Rachel Chau & Mayfair Ruck er Finance Staff: Ananya Iyer, Devanshi Agarw al, Isabel Enriquez, Izzie, Ru-Faan Chen Intern: Abby Giardina
Social Cindy Quach Social Planning Staff: Anna Mook, Lakshmi Burugupalli, Katelin Murray, Sarahi Lopez, Uwaila Omokaro, Lyndsey Garrett
FEM @femnewsmag https://femmagazine.com/ 2 3
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Editor’s Note
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Editor-in-ChiefAlanalove,Francis-Crow
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I’ll come out and say it: the Possession issue was almost entirely inspired by “Jennifer ’s Body.” For you who haven’t seen it, the film is about a demonically possessed girl named Jennifer (Megan Fox) who and eats boys as revenge against patriarchal violence — and because she’s sick of attention friend/crush Needy (Amanda Seyfried) gives the boys. Last summer, as I watched Jennifer transform into a succubus (through my fingers, as I watch all horror movies), I started thinking about what it means to be pos Atsessed.first,I was thinking about possession from a purely supernatural standpoint. We do deal with the paranormal aspect of possession in this issue, and dive into a feminist analysis of “Jennifer ’s Body” not once, but twice. But as I kept reflecting, I realized that possession actually lies at the core of many feminist issues. The notion that one can possess nature and other human beings drives capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. Many conser vative Christians claim that queer and trans people are possessed by Satan. White supremacist heteropatri archy wraps its greedy hands around the throats of marginalized people, attempting to own and control every aspect of their lives. When FEM staff met to discuss the theme, we were guided by a deceptively simple question: Who possesses what, and why? As always, I was floored by the breadth and depth of insight that FEM writers brought to the issue. They held the theme up to the light and uncovered many of its facets like control, commodification, prop erty, and Possessionreclamation.isnotassimple as ownership. When something possesses you, it becomes a part of you. In this issue, we uncover the ways oppressive forces haunt our daily lives. Capitalism forces poor people to lose control of their own life stories on platforms like GoFundMe; white people co-opt movements started by people of color like Black Lives Matter and environmentalism; the male gaze takes root within our psyches and shapes how we see ourselves, even in private. The antidote to possession is reclamation. Since possession is felt on an individual, embodied level, reclama tion often begins with confronting the ways possession affects our interpersonal relationships and learning how to repossess our own lives. In response to trauma, our only choice for survival is to crawl back into our bodies and assert that we own ourselves. Possession is also felt on a global scale, so reclamation movements like the redistribution of land to Indigenous people must involve every person on Earth. It brings me immense joy and satisfaction to work alongside the incredible people in FEM as we prepare our quarterly issues. This quarter, we had nothing less than a global pan demic to grapple with. While writing and editing feel unusu ally difficult right now, they’re also sources of much-needed catharsis, comfort, and reflection for me. I know other FEM members feel the same way. I hope our Possession issue will make you think, make you feel, and make you laugh.
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28 Shannon Kasinger ~ Back in My Body 31 Isabel Armitage ~ Who Owns Environmentalism?35 Charlie Stuip ~ SEMI38 Alana Francis-Crow ~ Reclaiming Lesbian Stories 44 Jasmine Kaur ~ carved46 Navya Nagubadi ~ Owning Our Stories 50 FEM Radio Team ~ Possession Playlist Maya6 Lu ~ The Revolution Will Not Be Aestheticized10 Eva Slizardi-Tierney ~ SheWas His Queen 13 Shannon Boland ~ Why Don’t You Grow Up and Get Possessed Already? 18 Devika Shenoy ~ COVID-19 and Computers: The Invasion of Zoom 22 Eva Speiser ~ Perseverance Porn and the Ownership of Struggle 24 Hailey Lynaugh ~ My Landlord’s the Devil! 25 Chloe Xtina ~ Bug Bite
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The AestheticizedWillRevolutionNotBe Maya DesignLu;by Lauren Cramer #BlackLivesMatter. #MeToo. #MarchForOurLives. #WomensMarch. #ArabSpring. #UmbrellaRevolution. #EndSARS. In the past decade of technological advancement, activists from North America to Asia to Africa have cho sen the social Internet as a new battleground. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, online activism has been elevated to new heights through an inescapable shift from physical space to virtual space. This past summer has revealed the possibilities of online mass mobilization through a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked, facilitated, and spread by online user-generated content. Following the deaths of two Black men, Ahmaud Ar bery and George Floyd, netizens took to the Internet in protest, reinvigorating Black Lives Matter into one of the largest mass movements in US history. As ra cial injustice against the Black community captured the online conscience, there was a new urge to join in the dialogue whether you had 75, 7500, or even 75 million followers. This summer marked a turning point in which previ ously politically unengaged social media users – from supermodels to corporate brands to college students – realized that the social cost of not saying anything about the moment outweighed the cost of speaking up and saying something wrong. The solution to this posting ambivalence resulted in an outpouring of social media posts that diluted the movement for racial justice into bite-sized, Instagram friendly squares, many of which could be categorized as performative activism. Colloquially known as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” this new form of political gesture can be defined as action rooted in managing how others perceive you. Often, this “activism” is action rooted in the maintenance and preservation of status, capital, belonging, and image.
Commodificationmovement. and memeification of Black death were further seen in the response to the death of Bre onna Taylor, an unarmed 26-year old medical worker who was fatally shot by police officers in her home of Louisville, Kentucky. What began as an outcry against mainstream media’s failure to report on her story trans formed into a competition among users to insert her name into every corner of the Internet possible. There were Instagram posts, Tweets, and face masks remind ing you to “wash your hands, wear your mask, and ar
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10 Steps to Non-Optical Allyship. Why is racism such a big deal? Virtual Protesting 101. How to be actively anti-racist. What is a microaggression? So you want to talk about white privilege. For a few weeks beginning in June, my Instagram feed became saturated with an unending carousel of text and color. Scattered screenshots of donation receipts. GoFundMe links. Petitions. A previously politically un engaged classmate confessing in a long-form post about challenging an old perspective. Most of all, I was overwhelmed by posts posing seemingly impossible questions of race and injustice that were wrapped in an approachable visual language of whimsical color, bub bly fonts, and unsettling corporate familiarity. Scrolling through my social media apps felt like trudging through a virtual Times Square of flashing billboards and adver tisements, with each new post trying new ways to grab my attention. Many of these infographics were created on Canva, an online graphic design platform targeted at users with minimal design knowledge. Canva has heavily enabled the mass creation of sleek, web-friendly graphics in the past few years. On a daily basis, you are proba bly scrolling past multiple graphics created on Canva. And here exists the tricky parallel - while Canva makes infographic design accessible and digestible, these graphics can then be created about anything, by any one, with any range of experiences. In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, no matter who you were, you could create an explainer about anything with little accountability and hide behind its eye-catch ing, polished veneer. To explain the viral phenomenon of Instagram info graphics, we need to take a look at the evolution of Instagram’s user interface in the past few years. In mid-2018, Instagram rolled out a notable update which allowed users to repost other users’ public posts to their own stories, mirroring a “re-share” or “retweet” button found on other social media platforms. At this point in time, an influx of advertisements and sponsored posts had already been slowly slipping into the app. How ever, this new story-reposting feature was the spark for the collapse of Instagram as simply collections of self-contained visual diaries. It marked the true begin ning of the app’s transformation into a full-blown mar keting app, with the replacement of linear chronology with algorithmic “relevance” following right after. The novel ability to share posts to your own story enabled content on Instagram to go viral - a phenomenon that was once reserved for platforms more conducive to content-resharing such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and the like.
The new allure of Instagram virality watered down some of the creative and marketing work I saw on the platform into more simplistic, shareable eye-candy that would be more attractive and trend-following upon a first glance. Instagram’s favoring of color and imagery over text is expected. After all, the platform was not built for text in the first place, but for photo and video sharing. Any attempts at written communication and explanation on Instagram is already stifled on the visu al platform, relegated to a brief caption space. Therefore, I was not surprised by the brief #Black OutTuesday phenomenon, which surfaced among the infographics during the first week of protests. What ini tially began as a call for a “pause” within the music industry exploded into a viral trend. Within the span of 24 hours on June 2nd, millions of users posted plain black squares with no captions or simply the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter or #BlackOutTuesday, clogging calls to action, donation pleads, and other vital re sources that existed within those hashtags. Its virality was a stark example of Instagram’s favoring of symbol ism and visual minimalism over the messiness of tra ditional activism and signal-boosting. The hashtag was a fitting introduction to the virtue signaling that would be present for the rest of the online Black Lives Matter
Black death cannot be reduced to a caption, a meme, a trend, or a hashtag.
While many of the social media posts made during the Black Lives Matter movement were not made with ill intent, there is real harm in subduing and re-marketing radical movements in attempts to make them digest ible and palatable to the Instagram algorithm, whether that be in the form of a meme or a simple, eye-catching graphic. There is a serious danger in condensing gen erations of Black-led resistance, grassroots organiz ing, and critical race theory into bite-sized, sickly sweet and saturated squares.
She was everywhere. A caption stapled onto a beach picture. Etched into the shoes of an animated Pixar character for a meme. Used and used and used. The calls to action against injustice quickly had devolved into a punchline, an insult to the late Breonna Taylor’s memory. Breonna Taylor did not die to become a con textless hashtag. Breonna Taylor did not die to become an indication of social consciousness. And yet, the trend-obsessed social Internet repossessed and hol lowed out the full, real life of this young Black woman and began to use her as a catchphrase, often without grappling with what her death truly meant.
Amid a global pandemic when the Internet may at times be our only battleground, we must become more critical of the ways we engage with politics online, especially when these conversations are mediated by corporations like Instagram. Most recently, in the be ginning of November 2020, the app rolled out a controversial update that replaced the classic “create” button with a new “shopping” tab. Such a major shift in the interface design mirrors the major shift in the company’s motives, from stripped back photo-sharing app to glossy marketing app that increasingly treats Insta gram users as commodity, rather than human. While our online experiences may have increasingly become possessed by capital, market, and algorithmic desires, we must learn to question the systems of dig ital creation and sharing that we exist within. Creative minds have never shied away from politics, and often have been keen to disrupt traditional and corporate im agery with designing a new visual language for political revolution. Let us challenge the very aesthetics that we help shape and uphold. Let us share with care. Let us reimagine the very modes of expression we use to voice our de mands. Let us reclaim the narrative from these algo rithms and find our way into the radical futures of our dreams, together.
rest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” On TikTok, the video app fueled by a marketplace of catchy au dios and their accompanying trends, a monotone rasp over an electronic beat reminded users to “Arrest...the killers...of Breonna...Taylor.” after a clickbait introduc tion. An online jewelry store rolled out a $240 neck lace called “The Breonna”. Riverdale star Lili Reinhart posted a photo of her posing topless on Instagram with the caption, “Now that my sideboob has gotten your attention, Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been arrested. Demand justice.”
Philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan pro posed in a 1964 text that “the medium is the message”. He understood that in order to fully understand a mes sage, we must also consider the modes of expression that it is presented to us in. So, what message is being communicated when a conversation about Black death is packaged in the same pastel hues and visual lan guage used to sell makeup products and athleisure to Millennial women online? Sweetened down Black Lives Matter posts: Hello Kitty for ACAB, defunding the police explainer from popular liberal infographic account @soyouwanttotalkabout, “aesthetic” Black Lives Matter wallpaper
Cultural critic and writer Jia Tolentino remarks that as a medium, the Internet is “defined by a built-in perfor mance incentive.” In my opinion, to exist on the Inter net in any capacity is to perform, to curate. Glimpses of true authenticity on the Internet are rare, perhaps even impossible. So to some extent, almost every gesture of activism on the Internet is simply that - performa tive. It is performative if you do not open the readings, or engage with the resources on the infographic you just reposted. It is performative if you share thought lessly without changing the way you treat Black people in your proximity, without fully addressing with the an ti-Blackness that lives within yourself and within your Thecommunities.revolution cannot be an infographic. Sharing, lik ing, and raising awareness about racial injustice is not a means in itself of correcting the injustice. An aesthet ically pleasing slideshow of color and text cannot re place restorative social work, organizational change, and structural reparation. Non-Black POC and white people who create these graphics must also interro gate the ego’s desire to be validated in the conversa tion for Black lives, and how much space they take up in it. Many of these social media posts serve only to be commentary about privilege and power without ever having to sacrifice either. And this creation and consumption of beautiful but empty sentiments often de-centers the real lives and needs of the Black com munity. If anyone can make a palatable, colorful Canva infographic, what does it mean to be a non Black person making these shareable graphics? What non-Instagram mable lived experiences are not brought to the table in these eye-candy explainer posts? What work of scholars and activists go uncredited?
noticing that many of these streaks of change still ex ist under the glare of an Instagram filter, with #FOMO (fear of missing out) coming before the outrage. I fear that no truly long-lasting change can arise from sac charine posts created to hop onto a bandwagon.
Of course, it is unfair to completely dismiss these so cial media infographics and their genuine impact on bringing the Black Lives Matter movement into the mainstream Internet, especially amid a global pandem ic. The palatability of these graphics was able to spark conversation and a new awareness among even the most politically unengaged. However, my fear lies in
Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem and song, “The Revolu tion Will Not Be Televised,” delivered a sharp critique of the relationship between the media and political up rising that still rings true half a century later. We cannot simply curate and consume the idea of revolution from our bedrooms. We must preserve our energy so that it translates off screen and into our day-to-day lives, again and again, long past the summer’s end and after Black Lives Matter is no longer a trending topic.
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“What are you doing here? LilJog gers, if my mom sees you here —” but in a second the tall boy is in front of you, silencing your mouth with a passionate kiss. “Please, call me Dean.” You can’t help but gasp when he utters his name. LilJoggers has al ways jealously guarded his true identity, in an effort to keep the hat ers from controlling his life. He winds his fingers around yours and grins down at you. “Let’s ride.”
“I like natural things,” you say, making yourself hold your ground against the beckoning of his deep green Heorbs.smirks. “Good girl.” In an instant he manifests next to you. His veiny hand which is monstrous in its size plucks the cigarette from between your girlish, petite fingers and throws it away violently. Your heart beats as he grasps your face with his “Becausefingers.I like to own them,” he whispers. And then he’s gone, sauntering away in the gray sweatpants that gave him his name, the golden boy of lip synced synchronized hand movements once more.
“So check it. Big TikTok meetup in the city today. I know how much you love LilJoggers’s videos. You and me, we say dumpsville to these classes and go bask in the light of the stars.” You stop walking and run your hand through your ra ven black hair with blue streaks. This could be your chance to take in some real culture. One ride in Lozzy’s Four Loko-scented Ford Fiesta later, and you’re in the city. You find yourself smoking a cigarette amongst the trash cans in the back of the Jumbo Emporium where the TikTok event is being held. Lozzy is long gone, lost in a sea of Gucci slides, des tined to feast her eyes on those who create content. You took one look at that crowd and threw up in your mouth. Fake fans, to say the least. Your good friend, tobacco, is all you have now.
www Dean’s G-wagon urges up Blind man’s Peak, purring like a tensed tiger. You sit in the passenger seat, fiddling with your lip ring. Every time you glance over at Dean, hunched over the wheel like a classically hand some gorilla, your heart skips a beat. You wipe your palms sweatily on the Mercedes’s leather interior. Not that Dean seems to notice. As soon as you left your house and began winding towards the mountains surrounding Littleville, Dean retreated into his own lit tle world. He’s silent except for grunts of “paparazzi… and the fucking fans” and “just try and control my life, see what happens.” Anytime another car appears in his rearview mirror, Dean’s forest green globes cloud over and he pounds the accelerator with his big, strong foot. You try to ask if he’s okay, but as soon as you open your mouth he silences you with his powerful squint.
A tall, chiseled young man with eyes the color of a Christmas tree saunters out. His muscles ripple as he reaches into his gray sweatpants and pulls out a pyr amid-shaped vape. With a gasp you realize it’s LilJog gers himself. You eye him wistfully. He rests his plump lips on his vape and starts blowing the fattest clouds you’ve ever seen. You must have murmured some sound of approval, be cause LilJoggers turns and faces you in surprise. He smiles mischievously. Like a leopard would. “Impressive, eh?” You forgot he’s Canadian. You blush deeply. “I see you’re still repping acoustic.” He nods at your paper cigarette.
www Hours later, you wake in a cold sweat, frantically paw ing at your face as you remember the feeling of Lil Jogger’s soft, stick-like fingers on your skin. They were comforting, yet exhilarating; physical, yet emotional; tough, but fair. You throw back the blankets and arise to stand in the moonlight streaming through your window. You shiv er as you remember the intensity in those camo green spheres. You’d never felt so… so owned before. The smell of lychee ice vape clouds suddenly fills the air. Who could be vaping at this hour? And blowing such huge clouds? Your heart freezes to death. It can only be one person: LilJoggers is outside your house. “I knew I’d see you again,” LilJog gers grins his panther grin as he watches you tiptoe out of the house in your pleather pajamas.
Suddenly, the Emporium’s back door is thrown open.
She Was His Queen Eva TheDesignSzilardi-TierneybyHaileyLynaughcrispautumnairlightlynipsatyourpalecheeks as you stride through the doors of Littleville High. Your tight leather pants slap menacingly against your thighs as you saunter knowingly up to your locker. The other kids foolishly stare — par for the course in this bum town, you think, sneeringly. You caught enough shit for your skull-shaped nose ring, so it’s no surprise that your new eyebrow piercing is attracting some scowls. But what can you do — these hicks are so devoid of cultural knowledge that just your thick black eyeliner gets you called Adam Lambert. Not that Lambert’s your most common nickname. Met al Face Melinda, Leather Lou, and Etch a Sketch (on account of your many scrawling stick and poke tattoos) feature heavily amongst your peers. And to the teach ers, you’re Loser, No Direction, Butthead In My Second ToPeriod.those in the know, you’re Bluejay. You don’t take shit from anyone. You remember the first time you read about blue birds in your middle school’s encyclopedia: “Territorial… not afraid to attack… have been known to decapitate other birds.” That’s me, you thought. You shed the old, sweet Y/N, and a powerful, widely feared Bluejay rose from her ashes. You slam your locker extra hard and get started on towards Phoney Phurgiss’s class. You smirk wildly at the crude crepe paper student art installations on the walls. What you wouldn’t give to get out of this two shack hacksville and see some real art. On the ceiling above your bed you tacked up a Banksy print featuring a young woman cradling a TV screen like it’s a book, the message “Think for yourself!!” scrawled above it. Most of the time it satisfies your deep, uniquely personal artistic cravings. But sometimes, the yearning to break out of Bumblescutt Central and live in Real Life is so strong it chokes you. Your brooding abruptly ends as someone slams into your side. The crepe paper installations papercut your face as your neck snaps backwards against the wall.“What’s up, fuckhead.” It’s just Lozzy, short for Lozenge, your best friend and the only other person with artistic drive in this three frog house corral.
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REGAN/DEMON Keep away! The sow is mine! She pulls up her dress and mimes masturbation.
REGAN/DEMON Fuck me! Fuck Me! Fuck me!
He lets out a howl of frustration and violently punch es the windshield. You scream as the glass shatters around you. There’s silence and the sound of Dean panting. He turns to face you for the first time since you kissed. “That’s why I had to find you after we met, Y/N. I knew you were different. I could see it in your blue, blue eyes. You don’t fit in here. You’re meant to be with someone who knows how it feels to be put down. And me, I’m meant to show you how to break free. You and me, we were made to be together.” His blazing emerald pools fill your vision and paralyze you. He’s leaning forward, big hand gripping your wrist so tight it hurts. The only thing you can think to say is, “H-How do you know my name?” He chuckles again and releases you. “Come on now, I knew it from the minute I saw you.”
Shannon Boland Design by Shannon Boland “Possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject - and perversely ap pealing.” - Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine Supernatural possession is a familiar trope that has withstood decades as a staple of the film industry. The symbolism of female possession and the significance attached to it allows us to understand possession as a feminine coming of age ritual. When “The Exorcist” (Friedkin, 1973) premiered, audiences lined up around the block for the chance to see a young girl get pos sessed by the Devil. Some scenes were so disturbing moviegoers reportedly fainted and threw up. “The Ex orcist” screenwriter and producer William Peter Blat ty (who wrote the novel of the same name the film is based on) allegedly based the events on a real exor cism that took place in 1949. The film centers around Regan (Linda Blair), a twelve-year-old girl whose aberrant behavior (swearing, vomiting, masturbating with a crucifix, pushing a man out a window) is undiagnos able. Her divorced actress mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) seeks out Father Damien (Jason Miller), a priest suffering a crisis of faith, to perform an exorcism.
He starts the car again, brushing the broken glass to the floor and punching out the remaining shards with his elbow. He slowly winds over to the edge of the Peak, the road below so steep it’s almost a sheer cliff. He shuts his eyes. “What are you doing?” you ask. He revs the engine. “Take the wheel. I wanna close my eyes and trust you.” Before you can say anything, he lets go and plunges down the cliff. Your hands fly to the wheel, but there’s no controlling the Mercedes as it races down the pebbly ridge. The cold night air tears through the gaping windshield. The car jumps a foot in the air with every bump, crashing back down barely on its wheels. You can’t reach the brakes over Dean’s body pressed up against the seat. Over your own screaming you just make out Dean laughing, “I’m fucking FREE! YEAH BOYYY!!” You can’t stop the car’s crazed descent, and suddenly, you don’t want to. Here, in Dean’s G-wagon, the smell of lychee ice still roiling off of Dean’s warm skin, you’re finally alive. You close your eyes. You let yourself forget about Lit tleville and live only in the world of LilJoggers. In that moment, you are his queen.
Why Don’t You Grow Up and Get Already?Possessed
“You know Y/N, I’m so fucking sick of everyone think ing they know exactly who I am.” He stares down into Littleville, down at the neon Hog Hawker sign. He grips his vape with white knuckles. “They all think they own me, you know? Those little dweebs in the comments, they think they know exactly what art is. They think they can tell me not to make POV kidnapping TikToks because they’re ‘creepy’ and ‘not what this platform is for.’” He makes sarcastic air quotes, fingers stabbing the air. He takes another drag of “Andlychee.then they think they can follow me to the House, with me and my boys, and demand I explain myself to them? Like, listen! Just because I choose to share my life content with you doesn’t mean you get to decide what’s right for me. For fuck’s sake, I can’t even vape in front of them!”
Crucially, “The Exorcist” diverges from the story it was based on by changing the gender of the possessed subject from a young boy to a young girl. The commer cial success of “The Exorcist” and the nature of film cy cles gave rise to a new popular horror sub-genre about possession. These movies ranged from cult classics in their own right to see-it-once forgettable B-movie flicks. Since its release, the subjects of possession in hor ror movies, particularly possession by the Devil, are almost always young girls or young women. Notably, in films like “The Omen” (Donner, 1976) that center on a male demonic child, the boy is a direct incarnate of the Devil, rather than a possessed body. This differ ence suggests a broad cultural perception that young, prepubescent girls are innately pure and can only be corrupted, not the driving force of corruption. This is not to say that women are never portrayed as evil in horror movies, but that embodiment of evil requires female characters to grow up. Only once she has passed the threshold of adolescence does she take on a decep tive quality of outer beauty concealing inner evil. By positioning girlhood as the innate antithesis to demonic evil within horror fiction, this trope reinforces false gen dered ideas that purity is an essential part of being a Viewinggirl.
At last you reach the Peak. Your bum town looks es pecially sad from this high up in the mountains. It’s the usual spot to party and park out for Littleville teens, but it’s oddly empty tonight. You wonder how Big City LilJoggers knew about it at all. Dean turns off the car, reaches for his vape, and un leashes a hurricane-sized cloud. This seems to calm him. He chuckles darkly.
“The Exorcist” presents an inverted portrait of feminine villainy. Prior to her transformation, Regan is a shy, well-behaved girl who clings to her mother’s side in the perfect picture of feminine innocence. Regan/ Demon is outwardly monstrous and screams perverse, explicitly sexual threats at the adults around her while the innocent Regan is inward and unseen. The result of this duality enforces the idea of the pure feminine body that can only exist as a vessel for possession. The legacy of “The Exorcist” survives today through the continuation of demonic possession movies, which when executed without critical reflection, reinforce these notions of femininity.
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JENNIFER No. I’m killing boys. “Jennifer’s Body” is a horror comedy for girls. For start ers, the movie is an obvious homage to “Ginger Snaps” (Fawcett, 2000), a horror movie about two death-obsessed sisters whose relationship is strained when one transforms into a werewolf. Like “Jennifer’s Body,” the movie darkly satirizes teen life and draws a metaphor between monstrous transformation and female adoles cence. Even the famous hallway scene in “Jennifer’s Body” is lovingly appropriated from “Ginger Snaps.” Classic slashers such as “Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)” and “Halloween,” (Carpenter, 1978)” emphasize vio lence on the female body. Often the female victims are killed while in the nude or in a state of undress, which adds an exploitative sexual element to every kill. (Not to mention the phallic meaning found in stabbing someone according to psychoanalytic readings.) “Jennifer’s Body” changes the gender-driven narrative with Jenni fer, a flesh-eating succubus happy to murder her male classmates. The film even ends with Needy killing the emo-dude-bro-band that gleefully sacrificed her friend in order to be the next Fall Out Boy. All these elements clearly point to “Jennifer’s Body” as a horror comedy aimed at young women that comments on well known horror classics. The plot revolves around Jennifer taking her revenge on the male gaze that got her killed by consuming the boys at her school in gory fashion. Rather than be subjected to her possession, she turns its power on its head to suit her ambitions. Compared to “The Exorcist,” “Jennifer’s Body” presents a pos sessed young woman fully aware and unashamed of her “Jennifer’sdesires.Body” makes a point of explicitly showing that Jennifer and Needy are not virgins. The trappings of the Final Girl trope, coined by Carol Clover, are sub sequently erased. This trope, identified in late 70s and 80s slasher movies, demands a girl must be a virgin in order to make it to the end of the film alive. Following meta deviations of the trope in movies like “Scream (Craven, 1996),” “Jennifer’s Body” subverts the narra tive by making Jennifer’s lack of virginity the reason why she survives demonic sacrifice. Furthermore, Needy, who ultimately survives the film and inherits Jennifer’s demonic powers, is sexually active with her boyfriend Chip and clearly not a virgin. This decision to disregard virginity in the horror movie survival equation effectively divorces the construction of virginity with feminine purity and moral superiority.
JENNIFER I think the singer wants me. NEEDY Only because he thinks you’re a virgin. I heard them talking. JENNIFER Yeah, right! I’m not even a backdoor-virgin anymore. While the potential for feminist critique was welcomed for “Ginger Snaps”, the mishandling of the marketing of “Jennifer’s Body” presented a very different film to crit ics and audiences. The subsequent exhibition created a dissonance between the film that was marketed and the reality of the film itself. Film reviewer Claudia Puig wrote “It aspires to be sexy, by casting Megan Fox as Jennifer, a flesh-eating femme fatale” but “Jennifer’s Body is not as hot as you hope it would be.” Roger Egbert lauded “Jennifer’s Body,” calling it “Twilight for boys,” a statement that is half-right for the wrong reasons. The movie was the last film distributed by Fox Atomic, a genre-focused distribution label under 20th Century Fox, before the subdivision shuttered for good. Fox Atomic was halfway through scaling back its operation by the time it came to market “Jennifer’s Body” to the general public. The promotion of the film was entirely centered around Megan Fox and how to sell her sex appeal to young men. Rather than read the film’s deliberate title and casting choices for its irony, the marketing team interpreted “Jennifer’s Body” as the exploitative slashers Cody was trying to subvert. Both the distribution company and the majority of critics failed in assuming that the automatic audience for Jennifer’s Body was male and straight. Queen’s Uni versity fellow and film theorist Dan Vena has explored how “Jennifer’s Body” “invites female viewers to partic ipate more closely in the horror genre through self-ref erential performances of gender.” Although slasher franchises have historically been aimed towards young men, the recent surge in female filmmakers working in horror shows just how well the genre lends itself towards addressing female subjectivity, anger, grief, and transformation from a feminist lens. While not appreci ated in its time, “Jennifer’s Body” is finally gaining the recognition it deserves.
She breaks off, staring with horror at something de scending the stairs. It’s Regan on all fours. She’s glid ing, spiderlike, noiselessly and swiftly, down the stair Incase.the
nearly fifty years since its release, the applica tion of feminist film theory to “The Exorcist” has incited new ways to read the American horror classic. Barbara Creed, film theorist and author of “The Monstrous-Fem inine”, has commented on the emphasis on the sus ceptibility and graphic destruction of the female body in “The Exorcist.” In her chapter “Woman as Possessed Monster” she argues that the Devil possessing Regan is not a male-Devil, but a female-Devil. Her argument is driven home by the fact that the face of the Devil was played by Eileen Dietz and the Devil’s bone-chill ing voice was performed by experienced voice-actress Mercedes McCambridge. But what difference does it make if the Devil who possesses Regan happens to be female? According to some readings of the film, Regan’s possession is presented as a symptom of a society in moral decline. The state of the country is so fragile, so tumultuous in comparison to the romanticized America of the past, that the Devil can easily enter a corrupt household and possess a young girl. Regan’s mother Chris is acting in a film about student protests, Regan’s parents are sep arated, her mother curses at her father openly, and Fa ther Damien is rejecting his faith. These elements could suggest a widespread moral failing in society, but only in one that upholds married heterosexual households, well-behaved women, and unquestioning obedience to the Church. Regan is symbolic of the susceptibility of America, which lies open and vulnerable to the manip ulation of evil forces. When read from a different angle, however, all of these events that culminate in Regan’s possession suggest a changing society that traditional, conservative America is ill-equipped to understand. In Creed’s writings, the trickster female-Devil pushes Re gan towards perverse desire, and possession subse quently becomes “the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour.” “The Exorcist” was and still is provocative. Then and now, the act of pos session can be read as a refusal to obey conventional symbolic order.
www “Not since Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” has a horror mov ie so effectively exploited the genre as a metaphor for adolescent angst, female sexuality and the strange, sometimes corrosive bonds between girls who claim to be best friends.” - Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald
CHRIS Not a psychiatrist! She needs a priest! She’s already seen every fucking psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you, now you’re gonna send me back to them! Jesus Christ, won’t somebody help her?
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“Jennifer’s Body” (Kusama, 2009) is a dark horror com edy that centers around “sandbox love” best friends Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox). After an angsty indie band (featuring Adam Brody) per forms a failed virgin sacrifice to the Devil in exchange for fame, Jennifer becomes permanently possessed and uses her newfound powers to kill the boys at her school. During the theatrical run of “Jennifer’s Body,” it was dubbed a critical disappointment destined for the B-movie shelf at Blockbuster. Reviews were mixed at best, with some admiring its darkly comedic com ing-of-age allegory and others lamenting its lack of scares and sex appeal. The film currently holds a 47 on MetaCritic and a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, over ten years later, Blockbuster is in the ground while “Jennifer’s Body” is alive and NEEDYkicking. You’re killing people?
“Atlantics” is a film produced, co-written, directed, shot, edited, and scored by women. Female friendships ground the film and give “Atlantics” a realistic dimen sion that is profoundly lacking in most romantic dramas. This female driven story is reflected in the introspective portrayal of Ada, a young woman numb in the wake of her lost love and burdened by her family’s expectations (at one point she has her virginity examined by a doctor to prove herself to her Omar’s parents). She awakens after the incident at her wedding and begins to navigate her own life. It is Ada’s narrative –– her love story –– when the film comes to a close. While “The Exorcist” and “Jennifer’s Body” are exercises in hor ror, “Atlantics” is on a field of its own that slips seam lessly between genres and unfolds with care thanks to Diop. The movie evolves from a drama into something stranger. The form of possession in Atlantics is initially mysterious and potentially dangerous. It is shown not in the act itself but in the aftermath as girls wake up with bruised and bloody feet and no explanation. Yet as the story presses forward the picture becomes more clear. The act of possession, at first misunderstood as something malignant, is an act of reclamation. The possession in “Atlantics” is haunting, not out of terror, but out of a profound and resonant sense of grief for all those lives and loves lost.
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The unfinished tower the boys were building looms over the skyline of Dakar like a spectre. Importantly, the ghostly possession in “Atlantics” isn’t arbitrary or the result of misunderstood magic. It is the result of in justice –– boys driven to the sea by capitalist exploita tion –– which makes possession a form of reclamation in “Atlantics”.
“With soft camerawork and pointed dialogue, Diop casts a shadow over the sea and all its possibilities.”Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic Although far from a horror movie, “Atlantics” (Diop, 2019) grapples with ghostly supernatural possession as a mechanism for retribution. Set in a coastal sub urb of Dakar, “Atlantics” is a supernatural romance that weaves a chilling story of grief, class struggle, exploita tion, and migration. The luring presence of the Atlan tic Ocean and the wealth divide in Senegal serve as backdrops for Mati Diop’s powerful directorial debut. A co-production between France, Belgium, and Sen egal, the movie mixes Wolof and French and utilizes cinematographer Claire Mathon’s documentary back ground to evoke the soul of Dakar. “Atlantics” opens with young construction workers de manding their wages. Among them is Souleiman (Ibra hima Traoré), whose lover Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) is engaged to a wealthy man named Omar. In an attempt to migrate across the Atlantic to Spain, Souleiman and the other workers go missing at sea. From here the film begins to shift. On the night of her loveless wedding, Ada’s marital bed is mysteriously set on fire, leading some to suspect Souleiman has returned. At night, Ada’s friends start sleepwalking. Without going into too many spoilers, superstition and a series of un explainable events lead those around Ada to suspect possession is at play. Yet the real magic of Mati Diop’s filmmaking is her ability to express complicated and competing emotions.
DIOR Ada, the boys have gone.
“The Exorcist,” “Jennifer’s Body,” and “Atlantics” each utilize possession to illustrate the terrible yet captivating allure of womanhood. “The Exorcist” presents female possession as the ultimate abject, a deadly combina tion of transgressive extremes halting Regan’s growth into a “normal girl.” In many ways, “Jennifer’s Body” re jects the notions of female fragility hiding under a pos sessed monster. Jennifer is equally as intimidating as a sharp tongued cheerleader and as a boy-killing succu bus. Both her and Needy accept their demonic powers as a part of themselves rather than a frightening im position that needs to be expelled. Interestingly, each film explores the female coming of age experience without focusing on menstruation as the be-all-end-all metaphor. Although “The Exorcist” arguably deals with a menstruation-adjacent metaphor by centering on a young girl on the cusp of puberty, “Jennifer’s Body” and “Atlantics” refreshingly move away from limited definitions of what it means to come of age for women. Jennifer’s transformation arises from weaponizing the male gaze which led to her death, and Ada’s growth comes from learning to refuse any desires but her own and navigating her life independent of her husband or her family. Both of these female characters come of age and come into themselves thanks to the act of su pernatural possession. By portraying possession as a vehicle for transformation, these films present some thing far scarier than ghosts or demons: a young wom an in Author’scontrol.note:Special thanks to UCLA Professor Bryan Wuest and Ph.D Candidate Ariel Stevenson for a wonderful summer class which founded the basis for this article
What?ADADIOR Out to sea. The Atlantic Ocean is a force of longing and comfort, past and future, anxiety and violence. Ada and the other characters are haunted by it in both a literal and sym bolic sense through Diop’s use of fantastical realism. In an interview for Cannes, Diop said “I felt that a very ghostly atmosphere reigned in Dakar and it became impossible for me to contemplate the ocean without thinking of all these young people who had drowned.”
N’DIAYE Let me go. You have the money. THERESE You’re not going nowhere. It’s your fault we’re dead. NeverI’mN’DIAYEforget.sorry.
THERESE (mimicking)“I’msorry.” All the girls laugh.
7. Literally everything…
4. I think the biggest hit Zoom threw was at majors such as dance, music, architecture, and others that have a component that requires in person review.
6. Nearly every aspect of my life has been translated to zoom, from social events to academic events to every thing in between. Only the mandatory in-person neces sities, i.e., grocery shopping and other means have not been over zoom, obviously.
If you got to design your own curriculum for an online class, how would you structure it?
Will Zoom continue to possess our lives after the pan demic ends?
1. Classes, social hangouts, clubs, exercising.
1. I don’t know honestly, which is why it’s hard to criti cize the current models teachers are following. I would post my lectures online and require some sort of week ly assignment to make sure students are keeping up, but other than that, I don’t know the most ideal way.
6. I would split lectures in half between asynchronous and synchronous, have weekly assignments, and timed exams without monitoring!
1. Beneficial 2. Fatigue 3. Neutral 4. Complicated 5. Bittersweet 6. Strained 7. Unpleasant 8. Complicated 9. 10.BoringComplicated Ten words — ten
Answer #1 highlights an interesting point: it is difficult to criticize the changes that the pandemic brought to education when virtual alternatives seem to be the saf est option. Nevertheless, a common theme from the above responses: less face time on Zoom. Whether it be using an alternate platform such as Canvas, or in troducing more asynchronous components to a course, the current structure does not seem to be appealing to Givenstudents.that
ZoomTheComputers:andInvasionof
8. Readings would be done out of class; class would start with breakout room discussions and then would open up for a discussion with the whole class.
UCLA students, who consist of over 40,000 under graduate and 6,000 graduate students, have had to make changes in not just their academic learning, but also their extracurricular and social lives. Curious to learn more about the perspectives of UCLA students, I decided to reach out and interview a few students on their relationship with technology, and more specif ically, Zoom. UCLA students are a diverse group, not only because of the size of our student body, but also given the various roles that we play in our communi ties. Students have continued to engage with research, essential jobs on campus, tutoring, and running orga nizations, all while taking classes on Zoom. On top of this, students have to worry about the health of their families, specifically those who are immunocompro mised or elderly. Given the all-consuming nature of us ing Zoom, I expected the results to be antagonistic, at the very least. If you could describe your relationship with Zoom in one word, what would that word be? words that exemplify the wide range of experiences that students are living through — can be a lot to unpack. Some students seem to appreci ate the “beneficial” aspects of learning from the con venience of one’s space, and others find staring at a screen all day “boring” and “unpleasant.” Yet, the most common answer may not come as a surprise to most: it’s complicated. E-learning may come with both bene fits and drawbacks, both of which are experienced by the students I interviewed. While being on Zoom is exhausting, it may not be the easiest for us to come up with alternatives. Many have reported exhaustion with a dependence on technology, but brainstorming alternatives may not yield too many other options, especially given the public health risk posed by COVID-19. To test this hypothesis, I asked students how they would design their ideal online course.
5. Clubs, extracurriculars, work, academics.
8. Everything. Can you imagine grocery shopping over Zoom? Thanks to each community’s essential workers, we are still able to acquire our day-to-day necessities. The stu dents’ responses more or less confirmed my expecta tion: everything, “literally everything,” has been remod eled to function on Zoom. The final section of the survey/interview asked about students’ post-pandemic expectations.
1. I think so. Maybe not to the extent it is now, but I think now that people have realized how much is pos sible to do virtually, some may stick to it. I just know, if I get a Zoom link anytime after life resumes normalcy, I am reporting this individual to the FBI.
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2. I think it might since we’ve had to significantly adjust many aspects of our lives for an extended period of time. I believe this may become a preferred method of communication for some things even after the pan demic.
2. I hangout with friends over zoom. I attend class via zoom. I speak to my family with zoom. Everything be sides cooking and eating for the most part are done over Zoom for me.
Zoom has infiltrated more than just our ac ademics, I questioned students on what other aspects of their lives shifted to virtual means: What aspects of your life have been translated to Zoom? What has not?
3. I would make sure to enforce methods of teaching that enable students to meet their peers so that the connections can still be made. Zoom deters the ability to form meaningful relationships with faculty and other peers, and I would ensure that my curriculum enabled students to have a virtual substitute for this.
4. It would be an asynchronous class — through Can vas and not through Zoom for sure!
3. Academics have been pretty good but I really am lacking everyday life’s experiences and connections that can only be made face-to-face.
Devika Shenoy; Design by Katelynn Perez As the end of the year creeps up on us, we continue to stay bound to the platform that has kept us captive since the beginning of the pandemic: Zoom. With al most all aspects of life becoming virtual, the way we work, learn, shop, study, and participate in our com munities is actively changing around us. The bound ary between reality and virtual reality has faded with COVID-19 forcing students of all ages — from kinder garten to medical school — to adapt to the digital trans formation of education. All around the world, students have begun reporting cases of “Zoom fatigue,” or the extreme exhaustion that comes with staring blankly at a computer screen for hours on end. Academic stress, when combined with the inevitable feeling of uneasiness that comes with living through a pandemic, can cause extreme burnout. During a “normal” school year, students can relieve stress through alternate means — hanging out with friends, going for a movie, working out at the gym — which are no longer as feasible with a pandemic that has taken over one million lives globally.
5. I would give midterms, no final, and allow everyone in class to work with whoever they want to. I would also have a couple of mini-assignments here and there as freebies and easy points for the students.
7. All discussion-based, short, and effective!
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Nevertheless, students are all experiencing the pan demic differently. Some have lost immediate family members; some are happy to be able to stay home and spend time with family; some have been thrown into unprecedented financial strain; some are using the extra time they have to practice self care. The people who are able to “enjoy” the pandemic are privileged. Financial insecurity, an inability to afford healthcare or insurance, and a lack of access to reliable technology makes an already difficult situation more devastating.
2. I would do fewer class readings, and more classbased discussions.
In addition to the aforementioned concerns, I was surprised to see a level of complacency with the role that Zoom is now playing in our lives. Earlier this year, Zoom had faced backlash from the public after peo ple discovered privacy issues — the company did not protect students’ personal information, which made them vulnerable to being targeted by ads. According to Forbes, the Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had confirmed that only paid users would receive end-to-end encryption, leaving unpaid accounts vulnerable to Zoom bombers, among other privacy issues. And yet, we continue to engage with Zoom twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, sponsored by our own universities. Maybe we are all just too exhausted (or scared) to pay attention to the concerns with Zoom? Whether or not students were informed about Zoom’s security nightmare is be yond my understanding, but we must continue to be wary of the dangers of large technology companies taking advantage of our vulnerabilities in a pandemic.
3. feel as though “possess” is rather a strong word. I do believe that Zoom will still be more applicable than skype or facetime or other media platforms even after the pandemic ends just because of how accessible it is, but there will most definitely be a higher and stron ger shift to in person meetings and events.
The voice of the majority seems to be complicated at best — and fatigued at worst — when it comes to de scribing Zoom. One point seems to be for sure: Zoom is here to stay.
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4. Possess is a strong word but I think that zoom has also opened the idea that a lot of classes can be taught online with some degree for changes. I think online education will be more available in the future as the pan demic has shown us that we can still learn.
5. 100%! Is Zoom really possessing us? Back to the first re sponse — it’s complicated. Some students seem to fa vor the convenience of virtual education, while others fear that Zoom is taking away from their ability to form meaningful relationships with peers and professors.
While an online education can be fatiguing when add ed to the other aspects of life that have been forced to accommodate virtual platforms, some have said that its accessibility could shed light on a wider range of possibilities for bringing people around the world to gether. In fact, several disability rights activists have pointed out that Zoom nullifies policies of mandatory attendance that tend to be ableist in nature. Af ter all, universities would not be engaging with Zoom to the extent that they are if they believed it was not possible to get a meaningful online educa tion. Especially at UCLA, even with accessibili ty vans, relocating from dorms/apartments to campus lecture halls can be strenuous, given the uneven ground and dis tance between the two. As people realize “how much [it] is possible to do virtually,” Zoom and oth er technology platforms may become a pervasive part of life, even beyond the pandemic. Nonetheless, in order to be able to reap the ben efits of Zoom, one must have consistent access to it. I was surprised to read that students did not mention access to reliable Internet and a quiet learning space as other factors that may in fluence their experience with e-learning. In an Economics report con ducted by Emma García and Elaine Weiss, online learning was found to be effective only in cases where “students have reliable access to the Internet and computers, and teachers have received targeted training and support for online instruction.” Do students have this ability to access the Internet and a computer?
A survey conducted by Pew Research Center found that roughly 20% of parents reported that their depen dents will have a difficult time completing schoolwork because they lack access to a computer at home. Students who lack a reliable Internet connection are forced to find alternates, such as using public WiFi and cell phones to conduct work, potentially putting them at a disadvantage in the classroom. These effects can be compounded by other factors, such as income status. The same Pew Research study found that around 33% of parents with lower in comes reported it likely that their students are unable to complete schoolwork because they lack access to a computer. On top of everything, not all professors and teachers have been accommodating. Images of professors telling students to drop classes or accept lower scores have gone viral, showcasing the lack of empathy on behalf of several educators. As education expands into the virtual world, policymakers must ex pand access to essential technology to ensure that the digital divide does not continue to put students from low-income households at a disadvantage.
The term “Perseverance Porn” refers to these stories that reinforce the idea that systemic barriers to success –– such as being born into poverty or facing discrim ination –– are personal obstacles to overcome. Many of our immigrant parents or grandparents came to the U.S. with the idea that as long as you work hard enough, you can move up in society. These stories reinforce the idea of bootstrapping, or the idea that anyone can “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and achieve financial success regardless of their background. As we know, bootstrapping is largely a myth. Capi talism ensures that the poor are continually exploit ed while the rich get richer. Since the beginning of the pandemic, America’s 643 billionaires have gotten $845,000,000,000 richer, while 55,000,000 Americans have filed for unemployment. For these Americans, losing their source of income and health insurance means many cannot afford treatment for the corona virus. The combination of our weak social safety net and unreasonably expensive medical care has forced people to crowdfund. GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms are framed as mutual aid, while they are actually corpo rations. Mutual aid is often anonymous, and involves helping other members of your community without needing a tragic story. Crowdfunding involves a dif ferent power dynamic of “victim” and “savior.” Crowd funding platforms flaunt success stories to promote the company, but the reality is that most funds do not reach their goal. A 2017 study revealed that less than 10 per cent of GoFundMe campaigns reach their goal. There are currently 15,979 results for “covid treatment” and 327,824 results for “covid” on GoFundMe. While they have been an effective tool in helping some peo ple raise money, we cannot wait on GoFundMes to help every working class person pay off their medical debt. Systemic change is required, and these individual mir acles are not a sustainable fix for the vast majority of us. Despite these issues, media outlets pick up these stories and frame them as the norm for how to handle financial adversity.
There is further distinction to be made between stories that describe people beating the odds themselves by doing things like saving money, versus stories about people receiving large, usually monetary gifts from oth ers. While the former contributes to the bootstrapping myth, the latter often involves white saviorism, or a white person helping a person of color in a self serving way. When articles are set up as a poor person of color being “uplifted” by a rich white person, they focus on the incredible character of the white person and how they saved someone else from their own situation. The person of color is reduced to a prop in the white per son’s philanthropic journey, losing even more owner ship of their story. This format also sets up a “trickle down economy” model for kind acts. If you are at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, and you work hard enough, you can expect someone from the top to pay off all your debt. Unfortunately, the world does not work that way. It is incredibly difficult to escape poverty, and debt tends to self perpetuate, making it difficult to achieve financial gain. We are stuck in a never ending cycle of capitalism. Our economic system is failing many Americans, and rather than focus on the few exceptional cases, we must acknowledge the problem: consumer capitalism. Crowdfunding platforms can help people raise money, but the power dynamic is different from mutual aid. The idea of a poor, hardworking but pitiful person being rescued from their financial plight or doing an amaz ing task makes for a great headline. Unfortunately, it is an unrealistic fantasy for most. In a consumerist world, every act we do can be taken from us and turned into content. To survive, even our struggle must be made profitable.
Perserverance porn make it seem like in order to be a “good poor person” and deserve financial help, you must go above and beyond to convince an audience of how hard you are working. These stories are not only harmful because they blame systemic issues on individual character, but there is also a voyeuristic el ement. The poor experience in America is constantly being commodified. Poverty is exploited in every me dium (news, TV, movies, photography, etc.) and turned into content. It is so common that we barely notice how carelessly we consume other people’s suffering Who is the intended consumer of perseverance porn articles? They are partially for the working class to con sume to inspire them to work harder. Capitalism forces people to have an “every man for himself” attitude, so if the reader of these articles sees someone like them doing something exceptional, they think that they must do it too in order to compete. This keeps the working class competing with one another instead of examining why they are forced to compete in the first place. These articles also exist to reassure the upper class that the world is a fair place, and that they are deserv ing of their wealth. People enjoy reading these stories in which some kind of justice is served because while
StruggleOwnershipPornPerserveranceandtheof
tragedy exists, it is being taken care of by someone else. They do not need to get involved. People view these stories and think of these characters as both piti ful and courageous, somehow convincing themselves that these “victims of society” are deserving of both whatever miracle they have been afforded, and also of the harsh conditions that got them there in the first place. The nature of GoFundMe forces people to compete against each other for donation money. The person with the saddest, most extreme story would seem most deserving of whatever crumbs are being given to these funds. Therefore, people in need of money are forced to dramatize their struggles. This can have psycholog ical consequences. It can be emotionally straining to broadcast your hardships to the world, and being seen as a victim is often demeaning. Few people want to freely broadcast their trauma hop ing someone will take pity on them, but mass media has made this practice a highly flawed but alluring way to raise money. It is an unfortunate trade off. All emo tions have to be boiled down to digestible content for a chance at public recognition and financial help. Media coverage can also further remove the subjects’ agen cy. On GoFundMe, the person asking for money can write their own description, but they are often set up by strangers. In news articles, the subject may have little choice at all about how their story is told. Acts of desperation, hopelessness, and miraculously getting out of bad financial situations (see above: capitalism) are commodified into feel-good headlines. Companies can own our labor, and now mass media can profit off of both our hardships and successes, framing us as whatever fits the story best.
Eva Speiser; Design by Grace Ciacciarelli
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Inspirational stories of perseverance are a fundamental part of the American news cycle. These stories give us a break from the tragedies and celebrities to hear about someone “like us” who accomplished something incredible despite their circumstances. You’ve heard them over and over. A woman had to walk 20 miles every day to get to work, so all of her fellow minimum wage employees pitched in to buy her a car. A man had thousands of dollars of medical debt until a group of strangers paid it off via GoFundMe. These beautiful clickbait-esque stories are all over the Internet. There is nothing inherently wrong with stories about people who “beat the odds”; what they lack is critical analysis of why people are in these extreme conditions in the first place and how the state is responsible for their economic hardships.
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My Landlord’s the Devil! Illustration
At first, I try a mirror selfie. But the tick is so tiny and the further and further I zoom in, he contorts himself into my armpit. He digs his head in. Forcing himself through the surface of my skin. It is like he is drowning. It is like a wormhole to another dimension. It is like my mushy gushy flesh is muddy ugly quicksand. He makes clear my white heads. My rash burns. I can’t post this. I leave this yucky supermarket bathroom. I go shop ping. I go aisle through aisle. The tick occupies my shoulder. He is sinking into my muscles. Infesting the bone. I am by the butter and the milk and the yogurt and I become poisonous. I am becoming this tick. For a second, I think I should fight it. But then I am taken over by the dairy aisle, listening to the rhythm of the tick curdling inside me. I get so distracted I forget to buy anything. And then at home, I am hungry. Everything in the kitch en is some kind of stale bread or cracker. My stomach is a little monster –– alone and unoccupied by my tick. At home, there are mosquitoes and swamp monsters and fireflies. I lie by the barn and the tick moves to my chest –– through skeleton, through tissue. He is in the lungs. My breath sloshes and clogs. Maybe he is drowning me now. Maybe he is pressing my insides into a deep ocean of my own mucus and likes watching me flounder on the shore. He likes to be the one to give me CPR.The barn echoes and I watch it slurp up the clouds around its roof. There is the smell of grass and pigs and yucky. Everything on this farm melts together. So simple and familiar. And then this tick makes his way to the top of my stomach. My little beast of a stom ach growls at him. The tick chomps him up. No more stomach for me. No more bananas there. No more pork chops. No more gallons of ice cream. My stomach is ripped away from me and I give it to this tick. Still, there is no one I want to tell. Except for my little followers. My phone is bright and for a second, through the camera lens, the sky burns orange. Cows stare at me inside the phone — red and on fire — begging me to peel myself open. But I blink my eyes and it is normal. Cows graze. Clouds return. I am remembering how many people have told me I am brave. People I don’t know, through the phone, and people I do, right next to my nose sometimes. I’ve sat in rooms and watched people get sick. I’ve turned on by Hailey Lynaugh
Where we live on this farm, I get swallowed in ticks. By the supermarket, I found one in my armpit. Chomp ing the bumps of my fresh shave. Licking me up in front of the watermelons. I don’t let anyone burn him off. I tell no one but turn on my phone and broadcast it to every follower I’ve collected from school and having mutual friends and looking nice. I don’t have many. I lift up my armpit and show them all.
Despite moratoriums on eviction in many states because of COVID-19, weasly landlords continue to use tricks, traps, and intimidation to effectively make tenants’ lives a living hell. Even pre-COVID, parasitic landlords suck money from people who have nowhere else to go, and at the end of it, tenants walk away with nothing besides maybe a new pet cockroach. Let’s get some rent strikes going!
Bug Bite Chloe DesignXtina;byKarina Remer; Video by Anna Ziser
I think about the way that people will call my life tragic with this tick dead inside me. I imagine doctors pushing him out — oozing him through my body gush. And fail ing. I imagine blubbering on an ugly couch, speaking to a newscaster about my unusual love for this tick. Our bond. And how over time, my body will shut down without the tick there to control my organs from inside out. They’ll bury me in the forest, near the lake. I open my eyes and find myself dripping wet. I don’t remember swimming or showering but my dampness seeps into the earth. A wet body of my own now. The sky becomes so red and the farm is devoured by drought. Even in this dry heat, with dust in the back of the throat — an opening to my tick, I feel underwater. I soak into something volcanic. The world is morphing into lava and the barn feels smaller. I feel bigger. And smaller. And smaller again. It’s hard to imagine myself without imagining the tick knowing me. It’s impossible to move my arm, to open up my leg and hip, to scratch my skin — without know ing the tick is there. Existing with me. Becoming me. The tick makes his way back up. He settles halfway between my ribs. I think he’s going to sleep. I only have my hands. They reach for my phone. Every thing on this farm looks underwater. Everything looks like blur. I feel this tick watch me. Outside and inside of me now. I forget I am alone. Somewhere out there — on the grass, by the barn — is my full body. Whole and ripe. I have yet to make it there.
the TV, played the piano, washed a few dishes. And to do this all with a sick person near me, with the weight of grief somewhere off waiting to find me — I have received the title of brave. I can be brave just by being absent of mourning. This is a thought I am trying to hold on to as the tick slurps its way up my breasts and back down to my hips. This is the closest I’ve been to sex in so long. I want to be brave for this tick. I really really want this tick to think I’m brave. I want this tick to long for what’s inside of me. To fantasize about having me. If I concentrate really hard, I can feel his pulse. I know the way he bites. I know the way he gurgles his spit when he takes a deep breath. I think about the life this tick and I can have. Him resting in my body. Him chewing me up and loving the way he swallows me. The barn creaks. I feel something warm and alive bite my knees. Trying to gnaw, trying to savor. In another world, this could be just what I need. Just a little gift of taste. But this mosquito does not know the new love it’s interrupting.I wonder how much of my flesh can be come bug food. I wonder how much braver I can get. How much I can let bugs become my muscle. I imagine conquering the world –– independently –– my insides made up of antennas and a million legs and bug brains. I imagine this tick watching me conquer the world and having a little crush on me for conquering it. It’s starting to get late. I can’t reach my phone but somehow the sky above me starts to expand and dye itself orange all on its own. Birds above me are blurry. Their route becomes kindred to a ringing inside my ear. The barn feels smaller. I feel bigger. And smaller. And smaller again. The tick is going to my navel. He’s finishing up his dirty work there before pushing against the mosquito bites from inside the flesh on my knees. I am imagining him through rivers of my blood. And what if he gets stuck there? What if my blood is like some hot current that rushes over him and he’s gone forever? What if he’s dead?
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CW: Death from Cancer, Grief, Depression, Medical Procedures
Back In My Body
Shannon Kasinger; design by Haiqi Zhou
I was taught the importance of bodily autonomy from a young age. My mom constantly reminded me that I am the sole arbiter of my body and self, that no one gets to have control over me but me. She couldn’t have possibly known that my big gest obstacle to a full me would be a lack of her. I’ve always known I got really lucky getting my mom as a mom. She was my everything — the most loving, the most accepting of my identities both old and emerging. Have you ever met some one so instantly loved by the people around them that you can’t help but just stare and wonder what makes them, them? Well I did, all the time. I never truly got to a perfect answer, mostly be cause I didn’t get enough time to study her. Yet, probably because I knew her better than anyone, I knew she had demons that she would never let out for fear of hurting us. I think she tried to run so far and so hard for everyone else so her hurt wouldn’t catch up to her. But that fighting didn’t help her grow, it just harmed her time and time I’veagain.noticed that we collectively characterize social hardships as necessary for our personal growth, despite them being systemic issues we shouldn’t have to suffer through at all. But the system fucking you up and you struggling against it shouldn’t be inspiring, because it’s absolutely Fordevastating.mostofmy mom’s adult life, she didn’t have medical insurance. She made sure we were taken care of first and foremost, all while being a divorced woman raising two children alone. Since she always ensured we got the medical care we needed, it became ordinary that only two-thirds of our family felt at peace in our bodies. On a 3rd grade field trip of mine, she broke her ankle. She brushed it off and was forced to endure the pain of a non-set break. This was normal for my mom. How could that possibly be normal? When you grow up with hardships that you know aren’t right but have no power to change them, you become really angry with the way things are. My mom accepted physical pain as a normal aspect of life, as if it was just another body part. She was al ways kept from ever fully possessing herself, the world always claiming a piece of her. Maybe that was why she wanted us to own ourselves so badly.
Ignoring agony is a special skill, especially when you don’t let it show. My mom was in pain from her cancer for months before she was forced to seek help. By the time she did, it was too late — stage four metastatic colon cancer. It was everywhere. Even she didn’t know how much of her body the cancer owned. The monster creeped up quietly, until she could no longer ignore its roar. Two years prior to her diagnosis (not long after finally getting some health insurance), she had had a colonoscopy that was supposedly completely clean of cancer. Why would she have thought something was wrong when she was told she had nothing to worry about? There are days I curse out the doctor that doomed her to this fate, to suffering in a body that she didn’t even know was attacking her, to keeping her from years of life. The healthcare system failed her again and again and again. And it suffers nothing, while she suffered everything. Imagine waking up one day, everything normal, and at the end of it you realize that your entire life is changed irreparably. I was 17, taking my final exams in my senior year, when I realized that my mom wasn’t the immortal being I thought she was. In my appreciation for her being the anchor of our family, I forgot that moms shouldn’t have to suffer by nature. We expect mothers to bear the weight of every hardship, just assuming them to be able to handle it. My mom shouldn’t have had to handle any of the hurt of her past (multitudes of traumas that aren’t mine to tell), nor should she have had to be the victim of a system that saw her as another statistic. Yet she did. My mom’s body killed her from the inside out, stealing life from her with every day she suffered. She wouldn’t have gotten treatment if it weren’t for me and my sister. She was exhausted from fighting a body that held her captive from living the life she deserved. She didn’t fight beautifully, there is nothing beautiful about dying. There’s just pain. She died a year and two months after her diagnosis. She was never given a chance to free herself from the dead weight that submerged her in pain, never got to overcome her traumas. For all that she heralded control of our bodies as a principle of her parenting, that right was never afforded to her. I get to keep owning my body, but she never got to retain hers? I get to grow and change but she doesn’t? The rattle in her chest pronounced her body no longer hers. The moment she left her body, I left mine. Grief is a physical blow to the heart, to the lungs, to the throat. I had never known pain like it. With every breath I took, her absence settled harder in my soul. I knew that lying in bed for days on end wasn’t healthy, but what was the use of my body anymore? To exist without her? She used her body to create mine but the leech on her life gets to prevail? What kind of justice is that? Giving up on my body was my natural inclination to the world giving up on hers. Fatigue plagued my life; accompanying it was intense nausea. I was nauseated by my circumstances, but my body was reacting to the mental space I was in, attempt ing to purge the pain from my body. I remember one day I threw up 15 times in one morning. I would’ve thought I was pregnant if it wasn’t the loneliest time in my life. Depression manifests itself physically in us in mean ways, and my endless exhaustion wreaked havoc on my ability to keep my body healthy. I didn’t want to replen ish my body when my stomach and throat were afflicted with physical trauma every single day for months. I lost a lot of weight way too quickly, but
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Madison Grant, a zoologist and founder of the movement dedicated to the preservation of bison and redwoods in California, worked with Roosevelt during the conservationist era in the late 1800s. In addition to his work with environmen talism, Grant wrote a book titled “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Bias of European History,” a manifesto for white supremacy. Not only did Hitler call this book his “Bible,” but the manifesto was highly praised by conservation ists for its analysis of the purity of nature and for the reprimanding of Indigenous folks for burning forests for fire prevention. In John Muir’s essay collection called “Our National Parks” in 1901, he wrote: “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.” Clearly, the dispossession of land of Indige nous folks, the violent rhetoric of erasure, and harmful legislation has always played a role in Euro-American environmentalism. When your environmentalism is centered around animals but treats other humans, particularly those who have always lived on this land, as garbage, who is your environmentalism for? Environmental justice and environmental rac ism were brought to the forefront of mainstream media by the Black community. In Warren Coun
I honestly wasn’t paying enough attention until it went too far. Convincing myself to get help took a lot of coax ing, and telling myself I needed it, even if I didn’t feel like I deserved it. Though mentally I wanted to reject my body, and my flesh seemed to agree, I knew I couldn’t accidentally let myself waste away. I knew my mom would hate it if I threw myself away after she spent my whole life culti vating me. She always saved me when she was here, and she saved me again even when she was gone. I saw a doctor, and got help for the esophageal condition I was suffering from. I couldn’t help but think, how privileged am I to be able to get the care I needed before it got past the point of care? I am my mother’s daughter through and through, but I was given more than her because she put me first. Most days I really wish she hadn’t. I could have given a little of myself for more of her. She always took her role as a mother to mean putting herself after us no matter what. I will always be grateful for her sacrifices, but I wish we didn’t live in a world where we have to choose who lives and dies when there are an abundance of resources to help us all. There is no lesson to learn from the challenges our medi cal systems force us to confront under capitalism, and so many bodies bear injuries that are entirely preventable. Rage against that institution is a constant buzz under my skin, now a part of my physical constitution.
I started to see a therapist, fighting against every instinct I had to reject the process, reject facing the life I now live. But as I started to confront re ality, I had to accept the world I now had to live in without her, whether I liked it or not. I used to be really afraid of reality, always making up a better scenario in my head. Losing my mom made me into the ultimate realist. I thought it was a bad thing at first, not having as much hope, but I’ve realized its necessity in protecting my heart from potentially devastating situations. I’ve ceased fearing the truths in my life, because coming back to myself meant accepting exactly the place I was at. I wanted to possess myself unadulteratedly, thorns and all. I do feel like something was stolen from me that I’ll never get back, and my fight against that rage waxes and wanes day to day. I was forced to grow up too much and too fast, but I’m still here, even with all my scars. I am living proof that my mother lived, that she fought every day to carve out a future. I am reminded of a Mumford and Sons lyric that I played on repeat in hopes of absorbing its lesson: “Death will steal your inno cence, but it will not steal your substance.” Who I am is not defined by the body I was given, but my body is physical proof of my existence still having value. I own me, and I exist for that sole ownership of self every day. I decided to fight to preserve both my character and my material composition, and I’m still fighting that fight every day. I’m doing it for my mom, but also for me, and the individual she raised me to be. I got really lucky in getting my mom as a mom, but I’d like to think my body was meant to receive life from hers, to now exist as the next installment of her love and everlasting character.
Who Environmentalism?Owns Isabel designArmitage;byMaizah Ali
The connotations behind environmentalism and environmental justice are vastly different in terms of radicalism and progressiveness. In getting to the root of why and when these two movements become separate, we must ask ourselves: What are the forces separating them? Who owns en vironmentalism and who is given the privilege to shape it? In the United States, we are taught that envi ronmentalism began with John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and the “preservation” of National Parks in the United States. Muir is acclaimed as one of the greatest nature conservationists of all time and called the “Father of American Environmentalism.” The inception of National Parks is a prime example of environmental racism, as these were “built” by white settlers on the homes of Native folks who had lived harmoniously with the land. Native folks were stripped of their land and blamed for any environmental degradation of the area, such as Bison hunting, and their land was turned into wilderness conservation that we still visit as National Parks. The reason we reference these men as the founders of environmentalism is rooted in racism, specifically in acts of Indigenous land disposses sion and anti-Blackness. These roots are why “environmentalism” has come to mean something different than environmental justice, as the movement has traditionally excluded everyone but wealthy white folks. It has simply evolved from John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to white wealthy influencers preaching “eco-friendly” ma terials, but the core of the issue has remained the same. This mainstream way of viewing environ mentalism is harmful to BIPoC, and often ends up causing ronmentalenvidestruction itself due to the forces behind capitalism and over-consumption.
While this idea may be foreign to white settlers, Estes describes it as the idea that the past and future of Indigenous people lay within the land, and that humans are connected and part of the construct that settlers call “nature.” The water, the soil, and the trees all carry the stories and remains of ancestors and of life, and thus the separation of people from nature is inherently playing into ecofascism and climate racism. Eco fascism manifests in many different ways, but essentially consists of neo-Nazi principles that blame the sheer existence of people for environmental degradation. The blame of climate change is placed on overpopulation, which is attributed to lower income communities and communities of color who statistically have more children per household. Ecofascism has been prevalent lately throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as folks online have been circulating the claim that “people are the virus,” and that when people leave and are forced to quarantine, “nature” can thrive. This thought process stems from environmentalism’s racist roots in that it focuses on preserving wilderness as it is without human touch, disassociating us from other animals and the cycle of life and nature we are a part of. This narrative is violent to folks who have lived harmoniously with the land and require its resources to survive, like local communities and Indigenous folks. Going back to the Euro-American roots of environmentalism, Theodore Roosevelt felt that overpopulation of humans is the cause of environmental degra dation, which fuels the idea that places with the largest populations (often lower-income areas), are contributing more to climate change. We know this mentality is violent. Countless studies have shown that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population produces “almost as much greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90 percent combined.” The style of living that the wealthy Euro-American white folks exhib it is far from promoting climate justice. Most of the people who mainstream media identifies as “envi ronmentalists” who are featured on apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube preach a form of white veganism and consumerism that is more detrimental to climate justice than helpful. The wealthy celebrities who have a chef that can buy food at any price can of course afford to buy Beyond Meat, but this is unfortunately not the same luxury that lower-income folks have. Folks who live in mansions with air conditioning and heating, take plane flights constantly, and actively partici pate in consumerism dominate public perceptions of environmentalism. In shaming individual actions like using a plas tic straw, and instead encouraging buying metal straws, influencers promote consumerism and overconsumption, leading to excess waste. Consumerism often encourages the disposal of all things plastic in one’s possession and the purchasing of eco-friendly materials. But this just contributes to waste. Why throw out the plastic forks that are already in your possession just to buy new bamboo forks instead of just using what you already own? Of course, this is not to say that individual action is irrelevant. If you have the privilege to do so, you should absolutely consider your individual impact on the climate. Foods like beef, lamb, and cheese have enormous effects on the environment, with one kg of beef resulting
Estes, however, describes that Indigenous land defenders and water protectors go by the saying, “Mni Wiconi,” translated loosely to “water is life.”
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In Los Angeles, over 71 percent of Latinx folks live in the areas with the most polluted air. Black children are five times more likely to have lead poisoning than white children due to proximity to waste in the United States. This problem is not confined to the United States. In the UK, Black children have been found to be exposed to up to 30 percent more air pollu tion than white children are. Not only does this affect Latinx and Black communities, but Native communities have historically emitted the least amount of greenhouse gases, yet have had overwhelming health issues due to uranium mining on their land. Lung cancer, high levels of radiation, and other conditions stemming from radon exposure are very prevalent in the Navajo community in New Mexico as toxic dumpsites are intentionally placed on their land — another form of Theviolence.firstenvironmental legislation was passed after the Industrial Revolution caused spikes in pollution, but environmentalism came long before the creation of the United States. In “Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance,” Nick Estes –– author and member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe –– de scribes centuries of Indigenous resistance lead ing up to the #noDAPL movement. As Estes ex plains, many Indigenous communities have lived among the bounds of our natural environment, harmonious with the land, before white settlers occupied what is now the United States. Humans were then seen to be the conquerors of nature. Settlers separated the land on which we live from human life and constructed the harsh boundary of “nature” to be different from us.
ty, North Carolina in 1982, plans for a hazardous waste landfill to be constructed were protested by the local, predominantly Black, community. This community also brought attention to redlining and racist zoning policies that lead to hazardous toxic sites constructed in BIPoC communities. The EPA later found that other landfills being constructed in the South –– particularly in Alabama and South Carolina –– were also all located in low-income predominantly Black areas. This is just one ex ample of climate racism, as the movement that Black folks started continues to still leave them out. Overwhelming evidence of environmental racism can be found by examining statistics and data.
driver’s side door. “Fuck! Fuckfuckfuck!” He didn’t consider himself violent or vulgar. People always said he was quiet, maybe a little Paultense.heard a dog howl. A lonely and wretched sound. Familiar too. Who had told him dogs can always sense a storm? The air was humid and urgent. Paul could smell himself, a desperate Heodor.knew this road. When he was an early teenager he used to hitch rides from Fountain Hills to Phoenix to go dancing. If he was lucky, mothers on their way home from work would pick him up, truckers if no one else would. That wasn’t him anymore. He wasn’t the type of person that needed to hitch a ride. He had lived in four major cities in many beautiful and well-furnished apartments. He owned three expensive cashmere mock turtlenecks and a pair of shoes he only wore on special occasions. His mother had ruined all his dry clean only. Not in 60kg of greenhouse gas emissions. However, when influencers are preaching the use of metal straws that they have ordered from Amazon while traveling on a mission trip, they are more focused on the presence of a symbol of zero waste rather than the emissions of the plane flight, the ethics of the mission trip, or the carbon footprint of Amazon. Amazon alone emitted 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, which is equivalent to Norway’s annual emission as an entire country. Environmental justice cannot simply mean shaming individuals into action when only 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions. The mechanisms at play here include capitalism, consumerism, white ness, celebrity, money, and power, all of which effectively target lower-income folks who cannot afford Beyond Meat or metal straws. This in turn makes individuals feel at fault for climate change while we let these 100 companies get away with out Theconsequences.“discoveries”that white settlers make in the sphere of environmentalism have already been incorporated in practices of Indigenous land defenders and water protectors. These folks have done important global work and yet still have force used against them by state actors who then “re-discover” their same traditional practices. Those making the real structural change are most vulnerable to climate change, while people who promote individual actions are least vulnerable and think they are doing extraordinary work. Even though European countries are applauded for their environmental work, their policies are still loaded with racism. Both Denmark and Norway are praised as “green countries,” as they have bike rental programs and levels of emissions at the production level are low. However, if we measure the levels of emissions from consumption of products rather than production of them, these countries are not off the hook. They simply pay China to produce the emissions, contribut ing to an uninhabitable country for BIPoC and a green-washed country for white folks in Nordic “Green-washing”countries. is a practice that white folks and wealthy folks often use in corporations or in their own life where they market themselves as more sustainable than they are. This came about because of the push from public social movements in which consumers are demanding more environmentally friendly policies. But rather than measuring a country’s carbon emissions based on consumption, corporations and governments have chosen to measure a country’s carbon emissions based on production. This actively lets nations off the hook for harmful environmental actions and places the blame on other nations that are already bearing the burden of climate change. The rhetoric surrounding environmentalism often centers white vegan women who own metal straws, rather than the long-term effective BI PoC change makers who do not subscribe to the socially constructed concept of “nature” as being separate from humans and other animals. These change-makers include Indigenous land defenders and water protectors who bear the brunt of climate change as redlining, suburbia, and zoning disproportionately places them in locations more affected by climate change. This climate racism dictates that the Earth only belongs to the white and the wealthy who can afford not to live next to a radioactive coal plant. What is at stake if we do not shift the possession of this movement to its rightful owners? Everything. that it mattered anymore. The muggy air pasted his hair to his forehead; now the shirt on his back was wrinkled and askew like damp tissue paper. He opened the steaming hood of the car and a splatter of motor oil sank into his slacks. His mother’s white car looked lavender in the dark. He al ways hated this car. It smelled like lipstick and Pepto Bismol. There was gum hardened in all the cup holders and ash trays. The back seat was covered in scratched CDs in broken cases. Smoke billowed and hissed from the engine, barely perceptible in the dark except for the acrid smell. Good riddance.
SEMI Charlie Stuip; design PaulCollettebyLeekickedtheshitoutofthe
The beam of a semi truck cut across the road. Paul stuck his arm out, his thumb shining in the headlights. The truck came to a heaving stop. Driver leaned over and opened the passen ger side door and a bittersweet smell wafted from the dark cavity of the cab. His joints recoiled, as if to tell him he would be better off walk ing along the highway till he got to Phoenix. The next bus out of the state till daylight left at 2:00 am sharp if he remembered correctly, and he wasn’t gonna miss it. Paul suppressed his instincts and pulled himself into the cab where Driver sat –– with a nicotine stained beard and wide wet eyes. “Thank you,” Paul said with forced politeness. “Gotta get my good karma where I can.” As soon as the semi truck took off, rain oozed and vined down the widows. Cigarette butts and candy wrappers carpeted the floor at Paul’s feet. “So, where you headed?” “Phoenix, for now.” “What are you in such a hurry for, leaving your own car like that? You could have called a tow Paultruck.”didn’t answer at first but the driver waited. There was something grandfatherly about him. A little salacious too. The corners of his mouth had a per petual web of saliva. An ache in the cant of his shoulders, a piti ful and good-humored bounce to his knee. “No time. And no service.” Paul turned to the window, crossed his arms, pushed his sweaty hair back. “You forgot your seatbelt.” Before Paul could pull his seat belt across his body, Driver used one hand to do it for him, 35
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“It gets jammed a lot,” Driver explained, sensing Paul’s dis “Icomfort.drivea semi back and forth across four state lines. It’s a lonely profession. Forgive me. Can I ask your name at least?” He didn’t answer, pressing his forehead to the window. “Yeah. Yes. Sorry. My name is Paul.” Paul heard the click of the CD player being turned on, of tracks being skipped. The opening whistle of a ballad he knew well. He was in his childhood living room on the green couch covered in plastic. One mo ment stacked on top of anoth er: his mom down to the end of a cigarette, animosity and Marlboro thick in the air. The song reached for Paul’s neck like a hand, his mother’s hand. He saw the chipped pink nail polish, scratched raw near the nail beds, the too big — never consummated — engagement ring, the thick veins crawling from her knuckles. A hand that gripped the back of his neck, rubbed in cold cream, through the TV remote across the room. It reached from the speakers, straightened his collar. Pepto bismol. Lipstick. Hardened gum. He slammed the radio off. “Not a fan of Glen Campbell
“No,huh?”I’m not a fan of Glen Campbell.” Driver gave a hum like he had run out of ideas. He noticed Paul’s posture, his shoulders high and uncomfortable by his ears, shadows around his eyes. Paul felt him watching. He thought back to the boys he would see hang out by the club when he was a teenager, the trucks that would pick them up. They were lanky and disheveled — sometimes with slicked back gigolo hair and sometimes not. He took a look at himself in the window’s reflection. He looked dirty. Kind of rakish too. Like a street cat. Shit. “You know the freight line gives us the worst mattresses for the sleeper cab, but I have it done up okay. My daughter got me one of those uh, timparpedic, is that the word? Well it’s a nice little mattress cover —” Paul felt sick, but more so angry. “AreIrritated.youcoming on to me?” “What?”“I said are you coming on to Driver’sme?”eyes darted back and forth between the road and Paul, whose face had sharp ened into something hateful. “Oh uh, I must have misunder stood. I’m an asshole —” “Let me out.” “I swear I’ll just drop you off where you need to go and —” “Let me out.” “I’m just so lonely —” Driver shook his head, took on a pathetic lilt. “I said let me out! FUCK!” Paul slammed the window with the flat of his hand. “It’s pouring!” Paul sank back into his resentful hunch. A sign reading Phoenix, 20 miles flashed in the darkness and whooshed by. The Driver gestured at it. “See? You’ll get there.” Sweat soaked Paul’s shirt through. His mom had always made snide comments on how much he sweat. Now his shirt seemed to smell like her hair product. Like aquanet. He looked at Driver, whose face was tragic and haggard. He looked small. Paul knew then that there was nothing insidious about him. He knew what evil was, how it could contort a face. “Do you have any cigarettes?” Paul asked. Driver raised his brow in surprise, not expecting anything but hostility. “Yeah, in the back. Should be in my jacket pocket.” Paul got on his knees and leaned around the back of his seat, rifling through Driver’s junk. CDs, clean underwear and a pair of red flannel pajama pants folded in a box. No jacket. Paul realized how his ass was sticking out as he bent over the seat, his jeans stretched tight. He quickly fell back into his “Nothingseat. back there.” “Try the glove compartment.” The glove compartment fell open with a click, and there it was. Shiny and damning. Paul was not a violent man, but the curves of the gun as he took it in his hands felt sensual, organic. His hands as they were four hours ago seemed so far away. In that living room they were tame and folded in on themselves, even as his mother screeched at him, even as he watched her foam at the mouth and keel over. He looked at his hands now, which seemed to glimmer and change form. Driver seemed nonplussed, maybe even embarrassed. “Oh that. That’s just for if some one tried to rob me.”
“What if I tried to rob you?”
“Where are you from?” Driver went on, still good-natured and overly intimate. Paul kept laughing, shaking his head at the gun. The gun trans ferred to him a growing power, a bitterness.
clicking it in.
“No offense. You’re a slip of a Paulthing.”scoffed. His hands glim mered then transformed around the gun — taking on wrinkles and papery skin, the mirage of an old engagement ring, bat tered cuticles and sickening pink nail polish. Paul reached back into the glove compartment and pulled out a cigarette from a box of Marlboro reds, the gun resting against his lap. Before Paul could reach in his pocket for a lighter Driver was holding out a flame. Paul took the light, his face close enough to Driver’s hand to smell its
“Yousavoriness.arevery well dressed for this part of the country,” Driver observed. A big cruel laugh shot through Paul like a lance.
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LesbianReclaimingStories
A lot of the time, the women in mainstream lesbian porn are not even queer themselves, which serves as a comfort to men. In the minds of the male audience, this display of sexuality is not a marker of intimacy between two people, but something fabricated entirely for their visual pleasure. Men love watching lesbian porn so much, I think, because it allows them to feel less threatened by the concept of lesbians themselves. Lesbians are able to have fulfilling relationships and lives without any men in the picture, which scares men. In an effort to insert themselves into something that has nothing to do with them, they’ll fetishize the concept of lesbianism by obsessively watching porn that depicts a bastardized version of lesbian Or,sex.as another example, take “Blue is the Warm est Color” (Kechiche, 2013), which was widely criticized for catering to a creepy, voyeuristic male gaze. The film is an adaptation of a graphic novel centered around a teenage girl who de velops a romantic and sexual relationship with an older woman. Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel the film is based on, lamented the film’s interpretation of her story, calling it “porn.”
A few weeks ago, I found myself talking to a straight man about movies –– I know. During our conversation, I mentioned that “Jennifer’s Body” (Kusama, 2009) –– the campy horror comedy classic starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried –– was one of my favorite movies of all time. He “Youlaughed.like that movie?” he asked, incredulous. The film is often dismissed as a look-at-Megan-Fox’shot-body movie for teenage boys that a woman like me would never enjoy. I tried to defend the film’s honor by explaining that “Jennifer’s Body” is so much more meaning ful than it’s often made out to be. In the movie, a high school girl named Jennifer gets turned into a succubus after a group of men try to sacrifice her. She then kills and eats several boys at school, and falls in love with her best friend Needy. (Technically, the falling in love with Needy part is subtext, but barely.) I explained that I find the film to be an incredibly cathartic and satisfying revenge fantasy against the patriarchy. I also explained that as a lesbian, I find the film to be an undeniably queer story about a complex relation ship between two women. It’s no secret that a lot of mainstream lesbian representation is created for the male gaze. This term refers to how in the media, women are often treated as sexual objects to be looked at and possessed by heterosexual men. While it may seem odd that books and videos about lesbianism, which by definition excludes men, could somehow be twisted to cater to the male gaze, it happens. These stories portray lesbian relation ships and sex as something for men to get off to, or put forth a shallow, one-dimensional portrait of Take,lesbians.for example, lesbian porn. The vast ma jority of mainstream lesbian porn is catered to what men want to watch, which most of the time involves femme white women doing things that I know for a fact aren’t making anyone feel good. These actresses don’t look like any of the queer people I know in real life –– they’re specifically cast to appeal to male fantasies. Lesbian porn has almost nothing to do with queerness itself.
“As a feminist and lesbian spectator, I cannot endorse the direction Kechiche [the director] took on these matters,” Maroh wrote. This type of terrible representation is what lesbians have to deal with far too often. These books, movies, and videos feed into the notion that lesbians themselves exist to be possessed and consumed by men. The male gaze tries to worm its way into anything that has to do with queer women. For “Blue is the Warmest Color,” the male director found a lovely graphic novel about queer women and made it gross, while with “Jen nifer’s Body,” the creators tried to make a movie for girls, and it was dismissed because men didn’t think it was sexy enough. Of course, lesbians don’t give a fuck about what men think does and does not belong to them. The only people who could ever possibly begin to possess lesbians are ourselves. The way mainstream media depicts lesbians up sets and disgusts me because it tries to portray us as existing solely for male visual pleasure. In the midst of my disgust, I find great comfort and joy in works of art that reclaim lesbianism and poke fun at male audiences. This reclamation operates on several levels. First, these books and movies visually reference the objectification of lesbians, only to flip that objectification on its head. They’ll include imagery that intentionally mimics lesbian porn, but pairs those visuals with plots that explore deep, nu anced relationships between women. This sex ualized imagery confuses the poor straight men who try to engage with the media. They’ll open up a book that has scantily-clad women draped across the cover or watch a movie with women posed suggestively on the poster, which makes them think they’re the target audience. Then, when the piece is revealed to have great emotional depth, they’re disappointed. These “mixed signals” upset these simple men, so many of these works of art have been dismissed by main stream critics as nothing but failed erotica. That’s where the next layer of reclamation comes in. Queer fans have always refused to allow these works to be sidelined, and have worked hard to get these books and movies the recogni tion they deserve. In recent years, there’s been an explosion of articles, blog posts, books, Tik Toks, and more that are finally bringing people’s attention to how layered these works of art are. Queer audiences snatch these works out of the clutches of misguided men, reclaiming them for ourselves. Here are three examples of stories that embody lesbian repossession.
Alana FrancisCrow; design by Grace Ciacciarelli
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Given the film’s voyeuristic nature, it’s not sur prising that it was directed by a man who seemed to have no interest in portraying authentic queer intimacy. In a blog post, Maroh wrote about one of the graphic sex scenes in the film, recalling that the “...so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling.” She went on to say that “[t]he gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convinc ing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”
As for the covers, lesbians have found a way to reclaim those too, years after the genre has died out. There are now lots of Etsy shops that sell prints of the covers for people to display proudly in their homes –– here’s a link to all the “Satan Was a Lesbian” posters, shirts, mugs, etc. that Etsy has to offer. It’s so satisfying to draw humor and pleasure from the absurd way lesbians are characterized.
In the mid-20th-century, there was an explosion of books in the lesbian pulp fiction genre. These pulps would be sold at drugstores and bus terminals, and were cheap enough to throw away. Their covers were often outrageously (hilariously) sexual. Almost all of them depict white femmes posing suggestively ––classic male gaze material (Bannon, 1957) to illustrate what I mean.
In the introduction to Novelist Katherine V. For rest’s book “Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” she writes that “Odd Girl Out” literally saved her life. “Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air...I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was,” she Ofwrote.course, these pulp novels are far from perfect. They’re overwhelmingly white and femme, and often end tragically, typically with one woman magically becoming straight in the final pages of the story, like in “Odd Girl Out.” It’s widely spec ulated that many of these books could not have been published at all without that final heterosexual twist. I like to imagine that many of the authors (many of whom were lesbians themselves) imagined alternative endings to the books, even if they didn’t get to publish them.
2. “Jennifer’s Body” (2009) When “Jennifer’s Body” was first released, critics hated it. Released at the peak of Megan Fox’s sex symbol Transformers era, it was marketed toward teenage boys who wanted to look at her body. But much like the lesbian pulp fiction novels of the mid-20th-century, it’s a nuanced story about queerness, patriarchy, and relationships between women disguised as a slasher film for boys. Since it failed to live up to its own market ing expectations, the film was derided by critics and sidelined to failed bro flick status.
“Jennifer’s Body” actually reminds me of “Odd Girl Out” and other lesbian pulp novels in more ways than one. Just like “Odd Girl Out,” it’s about a complicated relationship between two women navigating an overwhelmingly patriarchal world.
1. Lesbian Pulp Fiction (circa 1950-1960)
How sneaky of this book and other lesbian pulps to hide such a heartfelt exploration of queerness into a package disguised as male-gazey erotica.
Lesbian novelist Ann Bannon’s “Odd Girl Out” tells the story of college freshman Laura who meets a girl named Beth in her sorority and falls in love with her. Laura is tormented by her love for Beth as they begin a secret affair. In the end, Beth leaves Laura, claiming to love a boy, and Laura is left heartbroken yet thanks Beth for teaching her who she is. One would not expect such a touching, complex story based on the cover of “Odd Girl Out.” The cover features a painting of a naked woman and a blurb that reads “She was the brain, the spar kle, the gay rebel of the sorority, and wonder of wonders, she chose Laura as her roommate. That was how it began...Suddenly they were on an island of forbidden bliss.” The back cover of the book includes a review from the Chicago Free Press that reads: “Sex. Sleaze. Depravity. Oh, the twisted passions of the twilight world of lesbian pulp fiction.”
It’s easy to dismiss these novels based on the covers. (Personally, I think they’re wonderfully campy and ridiculous, particularly the cover of “Satan Was a Lesbian.”) But if you look at the contents of the books themselves as well as what they’ve meant to generations of lesbians, there’s a much deeper story to be found. In the context of the intensely heteropatriarchal mid-century United States, these novels provided a home and community for lonely lesbians strewn across the country. I’ll focus specifically on “Odd Girl Out” 40
In “Jennifer’s Body,” Jennifer turns into a flesh-eating demon after a group of men try to sacrifice her in order to make their band less deeply shitty (yes, really). They assume that Jennifer is a virgin, but since she is not, she turns into a demon instead of the sacrifice going as planned. Like Laura in “Odd Girl Out,” Jennifer’s best friend is quiet and unassuming. The two girls have a push-and-pull dynamic; Jennifer is often mean and petty to Needy. In my opinion, she’s also in love with Needy, who is taken by a painful ly boring boyfriend.
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As I read those lines in the final chapters of the book, my heart ached for Laura. I thought about the thousands of other lesbians who have read this book over the decades since its initial release who must have felt the same way. I thought about the people who must have worked up the cour age to buy these books at a gas station, hid them under their beds, laughed at the same parts I laughed at and cried at the same parts as well.
Laura, our main character, begins the novel as “innocent” and shy, questioning all of her feelings and how they fit into her understanding of the world. Laura thinks to herself, “...if I’m a girl, why do I love a girl? What’s wrong with me?” But by the end of the novel, once Beth has rejected her and everyone has tried to tell her to “grow out of” her love for women, Laura is sure of herself. She says to Beth, “I can never love more or better than I love you –– only more wisely maybe, some day, if I’m lucky. It can never be any other way for me. What I mean is –– there can never be a man for me, Beth. I’ll never love a man like I love you.”
I’m tickled at the thought of men who were promised “sex, sleaze, and depravity” buying the book and being utterly disappointed. These books tease men with the false notion that they can pos sess lesbians, only to slide a life-affirming lesbian narrative under their radar.
During many of the sex scenes between the two women, there’s a striking similarity to mainstream lesbian porn. But unlike in “Blue is the Warmest Color,” the filmmakers were aware of what they were doing and consciously referencing it. Like the Letterboxd review pointed out, the women engage in tribbing/scissoring, referencing the way that women are depicted in lesbian porn. Almost every lesbian porn video includes a shot of the actresses scissoring because it looks good to the male audience. But in real life, most queer women don’t scissor because it doesn’t actually feel that good. In another sex scene, the women in tentionally recreate one of the erotica stories that Kouzouki, Hideko’s uncle made her read aloud. In the composition of the shot, the two women are positioned symmetrically, which adds to the feeling that the scene is meant to feel staged and Thesymbolic.filmis based on the novel “Fingersmith,” by Sarah Waters, a lesbian author. Once again, unlike with “Blue is the Warmest Color,” the author was extremely pleased by the film adaptation of her work. She wrote, “‘Fingersmith’ was about finding space for women to be with each other away from prying eyes. Though ironically the film is a story told by a man, it’s still very faithful to the idea that the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires.” The male director’s thoughtful adaptation of a lesbian story is the only reason why I would ever add a film about lesbians directed by a man to this kind of list.
In my favorite scene in the movie, Sookee dis covers all of the disturbing erotica that Hideko has been forced to read aloud her whole life. In an enraged frenzy, she goes around the library, smashing and ripping apart Kouzouki’s texts, while Hideko watches with grateful tears in her eyes and eventually joins in. It’s one of the most romantic, touching scenes I’ve ever watched. At the end of the scene, Hideko says, “The savior who came to tear my life apart. My Sookee.”
What I love about the film is that it’s a powerful love story about two women who find one another and save one another. It’s about wish-fulfillment and revenge against the predatory, violent men who have attempted to control and possess these women for their whole lives. It’s about queer women reclaiming their lives and themselves. All three of these works are wonderful examples of lesbian reclamation that deconstruct, subvert, and defy the male gaze. Men may think that they can possess these texts, but the joke is really on them. Lesbian pulp fiction, “Jennifer’s Body,” and “The Handmaiden” belong to no one but lesbi ans and queer people. They exist for us, and no amount of men who scoff at “Jennifer’s Body” is ever going to change that.
In a review of the film for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw applauded the movie’s “addictive and outrageous sexiness.” In all of Bradshaw’s talk about how hot and stunning he found the movie, he somehow managed to write a whole review of the film without once mentioning the words lesbi an or queer. I find it hilarious that men somehow manage to gloss over the queerness of a movie that is literally about lesbians triumphing over disgusting men.
While the straight men in the theater may not have picked up on this, I think of “Jennifer’s Body” as a tragic love story. To me, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the boys Jennifer chooses to eat are the ones who express an interest in Needy. At school, Jennifer is known as the hot girl who could have any boy she wants, but the only person she seems to have any genuine interest in is Needy. The two girls have a lifelong bond deemed “totally lesbi-gay” by a classmate –– Jennifer even mentions that she and Needy used to “play boyfriend-girlfriend” together when they were little.
In “What Megan Fox Taught Me About the Power of Subversive Girls,” lesbian journalist and Tik Toker Lena Wilson writes about how she didn’t initially watch the film in theaters because she “did not think it was ‘for’ [her].” But when she finally did see the movie as a teenager, she connected to it deeply, remarking that “Jennifer’s Body” was the first thing that “showed [her] the messy, risky rapture that could await her” if she learned to be a woman on her own terms.
Over ten years after its original release, lesbians are reclaiming this movie as our own. Critics are now paying attention to the nuanced queer and feminist themes of the film, which fans have recognized since it came out. Just like lesbian pulp novels provided a sense of realization and comfort to queer women, “Jennifer’s Body” has done the same thing for a different generation of “Thelesbians.Handmaiden” (2016) I’ve noticed that a lot of the men who share their thoughts about “The Handmaiden” (Park Chanwook, 2016) think of it as a titlating, erotic thriller.
I read Jennifer as a traumatized, lonely lesbian who eats boys as an act of revenge for the trauma the patriarchy has inflicted on her and out of jealousy for their access to Needy. Jennifer’s character, rendered expertly by the creators of the film as well as Megan Fox’s acting, is nu anced and layered. She’s also a misandrist icon. In one of the best lines of the movie, Needy tries to reason with Jennifer and tells her “You’re killing people,” to which Jennifer replies, “No, I’m killing boys.” I can only imagine how the straight men to whom the film was marketed would have reacted to a statement like that. They came to see Megan Fox look good and instead got their very humanity Thequestioned.trailers and posters for the film make it seem like it’s all about Jennifer looking pretty and spooky. In reality, the movie is dark, emotional, and complex. Like many lesbian pulp fiction nov els, it’s a sad story wrapped in a deceivingly sexy package. The scene where Jennifer and Needy make out is only about twenty seconds long, and more sad, confusing, and tender than the hot girlon-girl action the men moviegoers were hoping for. Many parts of the movie are incredibly dis turbing and heartbreaking, too. During the sacri fice scene, a terrified Jennifer sobs and screams in fear, begging for the men not to kill her and crying out for help. The film was not created with men in mind at all. Writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama created the film as a campy, satirical take on horror films and high school movies. In a 2009 interview, Cody wrote, “[t]his movie is a commen tary on girl-on-girl hatred, sexuality, the death of innocence, and also politics in the way the town responds to the tragedies [of the bloody deaths of several young men].” Cody also wrote, “...I want people to really understand how badly Needy wants Jennifer. There is sexual tension between them. It’s not just a friendship.”
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“The Handmaiden” tells the story of a woman named Sookee who goes to work for Hideko as her handmaiden (her maid and personal assistant, essentially). Hideko lives with her uncle Kouzouki, who has been grooming Hideko to be his wife and has forced her to read erotica aloud to him and other adult men for her whole life. Sookee and Hideko fall in lust, then in love, and ultimately outsmart all the men and both escape Hideko’s creepy uncle, living happily ever after.
Whilescenes.some people have written off the movie’s sex scenes as gratuitous and objectifying, I see them as a clever and satisfying spin on lesbian objectification. On Letterboxd (a social media app for film reviews), a reviewer named @leoswartz remarked that “u [sic] know it was directed by a dude when they fucking scissor lmao.” While I agree with Leo that the scissoring indicates a clear reference to the male gaze, I think the director knew exactly what he was doing when he included it.
Just like lesbian pulp fiction and “Jennifer’s Body,” “The Handmaiden” is very much about reclamation. It actively references the ways that lesbians are depicted by the male gaze and winks at the audience, particularly during the sex
This part of the film is simultaneously such a physical embodiment of love and rage as well as a wonderful symbol of lesbian reclamation. Together, the women destroy the objectifying char acterization of womanhood and create their own.
carved Jasmine Kaur; design by Neha Dhiman CW: Bondage, consensual physical harm, blood play, branding He clutched the knife tightly as he propped him self up over her. He looked down in disdain, keeping the blade between them. Every day at 12:05 p.m., he sat next to his girl friend at his chipped, blue lunch table, clutch ing her so tightly she couldn’t walk away. His head was buried in his girlfriend’s strawberry hair, smelling the flower fields melded into each strand. As much as he wanted to smell the scent of the fresh red fruit right in front of him, he kept catching the lingering scent of vanilla and almond that was far away. She sat across the room, glancing toward him every once in a while. His eyes narrowed when he caught her looking at him; she looked away, ashamed. She pretended to lend an ear to the conversation at her own table, while the other ear listened for the slight hum of his voice and his lullabies that filled his girlfriend’s ear across the room. His girlfriend believed they were made for each other; despite his hesitance, he continued to speak her dreams into reality. They both bathed in this delusion every night, dousing themselves, so the smell of this perfume never faded. He continued to stare at her from his table, mock ing her as his lips traveled along the side of his girlfriend’s neck. He marked his property with red and purple bruises he’d renew every couple of days. Sometimes, he kept his girlfriend’s neck bare when he was sick of the madness of her wishful thinking. But, sitting across the room, she was the only one who could detect the smell of their deceit. He was a vicious lion in a fragile cage. Now, as she lay spread-eagle over the bed, her wrists tied to the bedposts above her head, she was sure someone had rattled his prison. The knife lingered above her stomach. Her breath caught. This moment had been her exact desire, one she’d whispered about, one her shadow-self thrived on. He was in her head, and that was the worst form of play. He knew her thoughts: how they were born, how they vanished, where they went, and where they wanted to go. It was a eu phoria only he could lead her into without shame or regret. Any play with him left lasting imprints on her soul. He would take her to the brink of absolute humiliation. Right as her other foot was about to slip off the ledge, he’d grab her at the last sec ond, only to reassert his power over her. Today, he’d leave a new signature on her: one that was permanent. Her heart pounded fast. She tried to close her eyes, but they kept flicking open, catching glimpses of the silver blade. Her breath quickened. She couldn’t bear the humili ation of giving up all control to him, but it was so familiar. It was second nature, the way her body betrayed her. Her wrists flexed forward, clawing at the leather that bound her. Her heart thumped hard and fast. The blood shifted inside of her. His pupils dilated at the scene. Fire burned in between both of them. His lips parted, just barely. Blood rushed to his face, his warm bronze cheeks flushed to a shade of pink that was her favorite color. His wrists flexed, veins swelling. His hand moved slowly to her hip. She first felt his calloused fingertips trace circular patterns and letters over her tender skin. She shivered, rough goosebumps replacing the smooth skin. A slight pause allowed his fingertips to be replaced by the cold, metallic blade. It followed the same patterns as before, tickling her as it traveled. Slowly, she felt a small scrape against her skin. The tip of the blade made the smallest paper-cut, an incision against the side of her stomach. Suddenly, she was overcome by a quiet that was so loud, so chaotic, so thunderous, and so droning. Her heart pulsed just a bit slower, sensing the blade leaving her skin, but with him, she never knew when he’d finally leave her head. His knuckles gripped the knife tightly, the skin turned from red to white. He stared at the blade with intensity, blaming the knife in his hand. This wasn’t about her. This was about the boiling loathing inside of him. She turned her head. Her eyes opened in small slits. She flinched at the slightest peek of him peering at the curve of her “Ihip.fucking hate you.” His eyes raged red when they flicked to the wound. His grasp stayed firm on her shoulder, holding her down. She felt him shake in arousal, his vulnerability on display. “I know,” she whispered, closing her eyes and turning her head away from the pain. She winced at the gathering pool of blood. His left hand trailed up from her shoulder, to her face, and over her eyes. His grip hardened as it fitted against the curve of her nose, like a blindfold. The pressure of his body shifted as he leaned against her side, his elbow propping him up off the bed. The cold feel of metal returned, dragging against her warm brown skin. It felt like an itch she couldn’t reach. The sharp edge pinched into her skin and forced the cut wider. She pulled at the restraints that kept her bound, helpless to what was happening. Flinching, she tried to focus on anything but the pain. A wave flew through her: one of contentment and acceptance that replaced the fear and anxiety. The only noises in the air were her whimpers or his shallow breaths. A minute passed. The carving stopped. His hand lay firm against her eyes and the bridge of her nose. She felt his soft lips on the cut. They pressed softly against the curve of her hip: hard, and then soft again –– a kiss. His lips parted. Heat spread across her skin, but her body shivered in pleasure. His tongue passed his lips and softly traced the cut on her side and licked every drop of blood. He stayed there for a while, admiring his work. His hand lifted from her face, but she kept her eyes closed and steeled herself. He grabbed the gauze and antiseptic off the dresser and gently dabbed the cut. His fingers traced the wound, circling around it. When he was done, he got up and freed her from her restraints. He massaged the pressure points below her wrists. He helped her put on her shirt, and gently guided her to lie on her side. As he caressed her bare skin, he spooned her from behind. She would never understand him –– the genuine hatred she saw in his eyes, believing it was aimed at her, when the truth was that he felt it for himself. When she woke up the next morning, she lifted the faux satin teal pajama top to see a permanent mark of possession: his initials. She was a part of him. The lion roared, and the cage had broken. When 12:05 p.m. came again, she sat at her yellow, chipped, lunch table staring at him from across the room, watching his nose buried in his girlfriend’s sweet strawberry hair. This time, as he started his routine of claiming his ephemer al property by putting his lips on his girlfriend’s neck, he paused and looked across the room
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I remember watching Gandhi, in the well-known biopic of the same name, be played by a lightskinned biracial man in brown face, as though there were no other great, actually-brown actors in the entire world to film the part. I remember watching a clip that showed children believing that the Disney movie “Pocahontas” was an accurate depiction of history, and feeling disgusted in how easily white murderers can feign innocence. I remember watching numerous critically-ac claimed films, from “The Help” to “The Blindside” to “Greenbook,” that depicted white saviors bestowing their charity and generosity upon marginalized BIPOC, but denied the autonomy and agency of Black and brown characters. This media exists not to educate audiences about the trauma of BIPOC, but simply to make white people — who are responsible for the systems and institutions that have maligned them — feel good.
I remember robotically singing “The Star-Span gled Banner” and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with the rest of my peers from elementary through high school. They were drilled into us since before we could form complex sentences on our own, and we held our right hands over our hearts without ever knowing the ramifications of what we were saying. We were taught to revere America, to devote ourselves to our country without challenging its darkness; we did not question it because we did not know that there was anything to question. We were privileged in our ignorance because we could say these words without feeling the true pain and wrongness of them. This country, comprised of stolen land, was not made for everyone; it was created by and for wealthy, white, cisgender, heterosexual men. Oftentimes without knowing, we give power to the very institutions that “other” and oppress us simply by regurgitating the nar ratives they have force fed us. Racism, (hetero) sexism, classism, ableism, sizeism, xenophobia, and religious prejudice thrive in the spaces where knowledge is lacking or distorted. We owe these distorted views of history to the narratives constructed by the conquerors. Narratives are the core of our complex identities. Stories and storytellers influence how we see ourselves and how we perceive others. Imag ine repeatedly hearing a tale about someone or something else, and associating that person, ob ject, or place with a specific emotion or category. Our identities are made up of the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories that are passed down through written works or oral histories.
Throughout history, BIPOC have been portrayed
Navya Nagubadi; design by DodballapurShreya
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Narratives have the power to make us empathize and understand, but they can sometimes be used in the opposite vein to distort and stereotype. In her notable TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian author and speaker Chimaman da Ngozi Adichie explains that this power “is the ability to not just tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”
In the hands of the corrupt and powerful, stories have been used to malign, dispossess, and break the dignity of a people. We are taught that there can only be one history — the history told by powerful men in the West — even though such narratives are whitewashed and distorted. When stories are told for us, they fail to do justice by us. Therefore, historical retellings, such as those about European colonization, or modern propaganda, such as those promoting the white savior complex, can do great harm to marginalized groups. Ngozi states that by showing a people as “one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, [then] that is what they become.”
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I remember staring at the blindingly beautiful Koh-i-Noor, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, originally from India, set in the crown of Queen Mother Elizabeth and showcased to mil lions of visitors each year in the Tower of London. It was protected by a case of glass, like so many artifacts are, away from the land and the people from which it came. It was brown hands like mine that originally cradled the jewel, brown hands that are now prevented from ever touching it again. I was a child when I first saw it, and yet I already knew that there was something very wrong in being a spectator of my own people’s disposses sion. England claims that this precious stone, a religious and cultural symbol to multiple South Asian groups, was obtained legally, omitting the fact that they coerced the then 10-year-old king of Punjab to sign it and his claim to sovereignty away. In doing so, they have purged themselves of their colonial history of looting and murdering, and continue to refuse to return the Koh-i-Noor to its rightful home. “Transferred” — what a wonderfully harmless way to say “stolen;” what a wonderfully harmless way to perpetuate the colonial mindset by actively denying past tragedies and culpability.
I acknowledge the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands). I pay respect to the Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders), and ‘Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/ relations) past, present, and emerging. “History is written by the victors.” This well-known saying refers to the way implicit biases of scholars and storytellers filter historical narratives. Conquerors have often diminished the influences and existences of the conquered through the destruction of their lands, institutions, and traditions. Even today, when historians argue that history is objective, victories are overestimated while injustices are censored. Although the accuracy of this phrase remains contested, those of us whose ancestors have lived without pow er — and those of us who may still live without power — know that this sentence speaks many unfortunate truths.
Owning Our Stories
Instead of constructing a binary between the “winner” and the “loser,” what would happen if we examined the liminal spaces of morality and challenged injustice on every end? In her 1982 speech at Harvard University, “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde said: “if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
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as dangerous and barbaric at the same time as they have been hyperimagined as helpless and inferior. One overlooked example is the deliberate misinformation of mapping. We do not think of maps as inherently political; maps give the illusion of permanence, and we accept them and their histories as they are. I urge all of you to take a closer look at the Mercator projection, which is standardized in our educational institutions, and notice the irregularities that indicate inaccuracies and past injustices. Firstly, Greenland and Ant arctica are significantly distorted, with the former rivaling the African, South American, and Aus tralian continents in size when the reality is far from it. Our eyes are immediately drawn to North America and Europe, which are conveniently placed front and center. Secondly, observe how modern maps with border delineations only rec ognize nation-states — a Western notion — not nations. Specifically, Indigenous nations, which have centuries-old territories and cultural sites, are erased. Finally, pay special attention to the African continent: while most border lines move unevenly and organically, illustrating geographi cal formations, many African countries, such as Chad, Mauritania, and Egypt, have deliberately straight delineations. These abnormalities are legacies of imperialism and colonialism, the rem nants of the “Scramble for Africa” which caused unfathomable devastation. In the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, powerful white European leaders gathered together to divide and ‘claim’ African territories, without ever having been there, con sequently destroying whole peoples, civilizations, and cultures. Today, these same racist govern ments have the audacity to dub African states as places of inherent darkness, vehemently refusing to admit the main role they played in mak ing them that way. Border irregularities can be observed throughout the Global South, and they are, unsurprisingly, sites of contemporary conflict and violence. Not only can physical objects, landscapes, and bodies be stolen and appropriated, but the nar ratives they are imbued with can be twisted to benefit the hegemonic forces in power at the expense of those pushed to and over the margins. This process of perversion means that our stories are not our own; they have been violently erased or changed. We — the dark and beautiful, the nonconforming, the non-heteronormative, the nonbinary, the proud owners of different bodies, the original caretakers — have been forced to watch and listen and surrender to those who somehow deem it appropriate to tell our histories for us. I know I am not alone when I say “no more.”
Though we will never be able to truly right the wrongs of the past, we can begin to reclaim those stories that have been stolen from us. We are in a unique position to publicly challenge distorted tales and histories through modern technology and social media, whereby narratives can be changed on a much larger, global scope and at a significantly faster pace. For example, through platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, Indig enous activists and influencers from around the world — like James Jones (@notoriouscree) — as well as their information sites — like the All My Relations Podcast (@amrpodcast) — do the work of cultural and historical educators. From shar ing their experiences through dress, dance, and song, to advocating for wellness practices and spaces of healing, they bring justice to perverted narratives. For those of us who may not have ac cess to personal or local sources of information, this knowledge is invaluable. However, we must still remain wary of performative activism. The globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement through social media has shown us that while on line activism can facilitate positive policy change, it can replace the work of real activism because there are many privileged people who continue to get away with claiming space meant for marginalized groups. We must collectively move to dismantle the false narratives told about us and others, and we must all work to rewrite one-sided histories. In “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde argues that “[our] silence will not protect [us].” For every moment we speak for ourselves, we reclaim the stories that have been twisted to work against us. Furthermore, when we are confronted with truths that challenge our misconceptions about others, it is all of our responsibilities to listen. We must make an effort to combat single stories everywhere. There are not always safe spaces for activism, but we must claim those that exist and construct new ones if necessary, whether that be through community organizing or starting dialogue with those of different perspectives. And for those of you who come from privilege — if you are white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, economically secure, able-bodied, from the West, et cetera — you must do the work of actively giving up and making space.
We have all heard and perpetuated single stories of other people, objects, and places, and have sought to define what could not and should not be defined. Many of us also battle against others’ misconceptions of us, trying to escape the con fining spaces of what society has determined we can or cannot be. Because we all impose and are imposed upon, we must all do the work of revers ing socialization and false constructions.
The truth will not always set us free; the world is too messy and imperfect for anything to be as simple as that, and we must constantly evolve to find our place in it. But one day, I want to ask a complete stranger for their tale, in all its joy and sorrow, and hope that they are free enough to truly own it.
What would happen if we questioned the nu ances of history instead of glossing over them? What would happen if we were exposed to more than one story, more than one way of thinking?
Florence and the Machine - “Bird Song” Bit of a darker song. The actual events are the following: a bird sees something that the person in the song does, crows about it, is put down, and then the same song it sang comes from the person in the end. I interpreted the bird as being a tangible representation of fears or secrets and the girl/woman was possessed in her efforts to stifle it until she realized it was her thoughts all along.
Lake Street Dive - “You Go Down Smooth” Lake Street Dive paints a picture of need for possession in their song “You Go Down Smooth”. The first lines are, “Would it be true to say that I ordered you / Or is it you that ordered me?” The song, as indicated by the first two lines, is about possession in relationships. The song plays on the idea of possessing a loved one and the strug gles and glories that are associated with that.
Jamie’s Recommendations
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Rodriguez - “Sugar Man” I love this man! Sixto Rodriguez is a Mexi can-American musician from Detroit whose album was influential in South Africa. This song is about waiting for a crack dealer, and then experiencing the high that’s possessing your body.
Maggie Rogers - “Say It”
Kamaiyah ft. Keak Da Sneak and Capolow“Oakland Nights”
Lavanya’s Recommendations
SnowThaProduct - “Nowhere To Go” My quarantine song. An absolute B O P. This song is about staying home during the pandem ic and disrupting a busy tour life to totally give yourself to someone you love, in this case her girlfriend. It’s sweet, it slaps, it’s lighthearted, it’s a vibe.
SnowThaProduct - “Butter” Really anything from SnowThaProduct’s discog raphy. She’s kind of my fiancé. She just doesn’t know it. This song in particular appropriates the womanizing, luxurious, excessive imagery of masculine rap songs to work for a progressive, gay Mexican woman. Exemplified by this line: “Want the privileged life like a fucking white man/ But I’m a cute Mexicana with a butter-like tan.”
Etta James - “Something’s Got a Hold On Me” It’s Etta James, darling. This is a recognizable song to yell-sing to. It was featured famously in the movie “Burlesque”, the ridiculously campy movie that somehow owned the airwaves, and covered by Christina Aguilera.
This song tackles the emotions of fresh, new, raw love and all the feelings someone experiences when they realize they are falling DEEP. She feels herself battling having possession of her emotions and simultaneously being possessed by overwhelming love. A love so different and heartfelt that it’s more than she’s ever felt before and hard for her to admit to.
PWR BTTM - “I Wanna Boi”
Joji - “Slow Dancing in the Dark” It’s a song about trying to leave a toxic relationship. One of the lyrics is “you looked at me like I was someone else” so it’s like the singer is possessed by the memories of their failed rela tionship and also of the toxicity, which is why they broke up in the first place.
PlaylistPossession
Chloe x Halle - “Lonely” Nobody is killing it more in the virtual perfor mance department than Chloe and Halle Bailey. This song touches on the importance of repos sessing your self-worth and loving who you are without anyone else to define yourself against. Instead of needing to possess someone or worse, being possessed by another, this song offers a chance to look at who we are when no one is watching and to embrace and fall into ourselves no matter how ugly or painful it is. Who are we when we are forced to sit with ourselves and just feel?
A rags to riches story that holds true for a lot of young Black people. This song is a celebration of working towards your goals and possessing all the greatest things you’ve always wanted. An homage to getting it out the mud, sticking to the rules of survival, and living your wildest dreams.
Deliliah’s Recommendations
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down“Meticulous Bird” The song, as described by Thao, is a “reclama tion of the body” for survivors of sexual violence. Beyond this audience, in lyrics such as “I am here for the masterminds” and “The visitors are
Haitus Kaiyote - “Fingerprints” Nai Palm (songwriter) speaks about the fleeting memories of their childhood. All the nostalgia and warm feelings of her childhood days playing now in her possession as memories that she looks back on to relive or to feel joy. This song rep resents the beauty and pain of growing through loss.
Amy Winehouse - “He Can Only Hold Her” It’s a song about a woman who is emotionally and mentally absent from her relationship with a man. He can only hold her because her heart is “stole” and “what’s inside her never dies.”
Diana’s Recommendations
Police State - “Pussy Riot” Pussy Riot has been arrested multiple times for fighting for LGBTQ rights and against domestic abuse. Its members have been taken to court by Putin for being too “lewd” in its name. They’re fucking badass! Their entire discography is the punkest thing of the decade, strongly anti-police, and also fucking bops.
Sara Bareilles - “Fairytales” Covers the unhappiness of Cinderella and other fairytale characters after their “happily-ever-af ters” as they take possession of their lives and move beyond the stories that have been written for them. Love the theme of obtaining self-satisfaction before the satisfaction of others.
Anjali’s Recommendations
meeting to decide/If you can come stay,” the song expands its gaze to other power structures that take control away and centers around the gaze of the “meticulous bird of prey” perched above it all.
Grace Ives - “Mirror” A story of uncertainty in relationships and a story of a lack of possession and a desire to possess. The song is about a desire to possess knowl edge about a lover and knowledge in general. The song paints a powerful image of desire for possession and a desire for the possession of knowledge.
A playful, fun, grungy ballad about wanting a boy! Being gay and craving something, anything, to come and sweep you up off your feet!
The Stranglers - “Golden Brown” A song about someone that can’t stop thinking about a woman with golden brown skin… almost like they are possessed :0
FEM NEWSMAG 2020