Judy's Punch: Through the Looking Glass

Judy’s Punch

the Looking Glass • Through the Looking Glass • Through the Look

Front and Back Cover: ‘Reflection’ by Kien-Ling Liem

Editors: Helena Pantsis, Andrea Salvador, and Dana Jepsen

Executive Producer: Kraanti Agarwal

Acknowledgement of Country

The Judy’s Punch team of 2022 acknowledge that this year’s publication was largely created, curated, produced and edited on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, with works designed and written on the wider lands of so-called ‘Australia’ and their respective Indigenous peoples.

We pay our respects to their elders — past, present and emerging — and acknowledge that the land we are on was stolen and sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be an Aboriginal land.

Pantsis Creative Editor

Salvador Commentary Editor

Jepsen Graphics Editor

When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Through the Looking Glass, we don’t think he imagined that it’d act as the foundation for a women’s magazine exploring the intricacies of gender, introspection, and rage over 150 years later. And yet, that’s exactly what it’s done.

With a tighter deadline this year than most, we were worried that maybe we wouldn’t receive the same calibre of work that we’ve seen in past years, but the women, non-binary, and gender diverse people of UniMelb have surpassed our expectations of what can be done with limited time. From speculative worlds which transport you, to essays on humanity’s most vulnerable aspects, to poems of immense beauty in content and form, to art that buries itself in your mind and your gut, this year’s edition shatters the looking glass and recreates it in the image of a Judy’s Punch we haven’t been privy to before.

2022 has been wrought with issues that have forced us to face our own individual moral compasses as well as the fragility of our safety in the world. The ban on abortions and removal of our reproductive autonomy in the US, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine leaving thousands dispossessed, separated from loved ones, and having lost their lives, as well as the rise of the ‘alpha male’ movement with figures like Andrew Tate causing an uprising of misogyny and male violence — these are just a handful of the atrocities this year has seen. Still, our roles as editors of the magazine have enabled us to bear witness to the cathartic and uniting powers of the arts.

It has been a pleasure and an honour to be trusted with the tender, carefully crafted works we received — regardless of whether they ended up in these pages or not. We want to thank every submitter for the courage and trust it took to share their works with us, and extend our gratitude to each contributor for helping to make this magazine a possibility, and a beautiful one at that. We also would not have been able to publish these works without the help of our brilliant sub-editors and our very talented illustrators, who all worked cohesively to bring our shared vision to life. To everyone that attended a Friday collective, it was a joy to brainstorm ideas and hear about what brought you to us. And finally, a big thanks to our Women’s Department OB, Kraanti, for seeing something in the three of us and giving us the opportunity to work together and create something we could be truly proud of.

Thank you all for allowing us to be your 2022 Judy’s Punch editors. Now, please enjoy the amazing work we’ve put together for you to see, and the amazing talents of our 2022 team.

Warmest, Helena, Andrea, and Dana xx

Helena

Dana

Andrea

6 The Team 7 Women’s Officer Note by Kraanti Agarwal 8 The Cultural Looking Glass by Pritika Sinha 10 Spiralling by Tharidi Walimunige 11 MUD by Birdy Carmen 12 In her eyes by Crystal Lim 14 an echoing whiteness by Kien-Ling Liem 15 Earth Day by Wen Yee Ang 16 a brief history of downpour by Srishti Chatterjee 18 abyss and medusa by Kien-Ling Liem 19 medusa by Kien-Ling Liem 20 The Hydra by Alexia Shaw

21 Symphony for the lonely by Nicole Jalandoni 22 Hey! Here’s an Inmost Letter from Your Ambivert Buddy by Vanessa Chan 24 The Email & The Scholars Report by J. A. W. Uszko 26 Do we really have to prove ourselves? by Celine Hosea 30 Ghost Light by Michelle Huang 32 Illustration by Stephanie Cheng 34 Lifeless Loop by Zhi Syuen Yee (Syuen) 35 my night box by Stuti Wadhwa 36 Navigating Artistic Burnout in a “Post-COVID” World by Marcie Di Bartolomeo 38 down by dotting brook by Tharidi Walimunige 40 Why are we ‘Not Okay’ with unlikeable female characters? by Mia Jenkins 43 Milky Throw by Birdy Carmen

44 Love bled a letter by Kraanti Agarwal 48 Two and Two is Four by Lily Ward 52 a woman’s first sin by Kien-Ling Liem 54 Five Pieces by Janvi Sikand 60 Clandestine Warriors for Justice by Mia Spiteri 62 OTHER by Birdy Carmen

Women’s Officer Note

by Kraanti Agarwal

Intersectional activism, love, respect, and standing up for the student’s safety had been at the centre of this year. With the first year of returning back to campus postCOVID, I was challenged with running the department alone. However, I never found myself alone, well, I guess maybe that’s the whole point of a ‘union’. Despite the challenges, the department has run action collectives, social events, open mics, and also introduced first-ever ‘Feminist Workshops’, giving students an opportunity to share their lived experience through an intersectional feminist lens, and compensating them for their work. It was an incredible honour to serve students, and this union as the Women’s Officer for 2022.

Amongst the utmost chaos, I found my three gems, the editors of 2022 Judy’s Punch – Andrea, Helena, and Dana. I am extremely proud of them. Their hard work, passion, and love for radical publishing are what inspire me the most. “Through the looking glass” is a reflection of the 2022 editorial team, along with the contributors, without whom we wouldn’t have this magazine. Friday afternoons, stealing time from stressful uni work, I have found my team de-stressing through their creative imaginations,

giggles and laughters, oversharing- and sharing ideas with a slice of pizza, and meeting tight deadlines, is what has shaped this year’s Judy’s.

“Through the looking glass”, when I think about it, I can see two versions of myself- a younger 10-year-old self, of whom I am incredibly proud for not giving up. And then, a future one, who I was always unsure about until I found my chosen Queer parent- Srishti, without whom I would have not survived this year. They held my hand throughout the way, especially during the creation and production of 2022 Judy’s Punch. I am thankful for their love, care, support, and unwavering faith in me.

This year, the department climbed another ladder in the ‘Safety on Campus’ campaign, by getting the university to review its standalone sexual misconduct policy, to adapt to an updated definition of consent, and commit to an independent investigative process. I would like to thank Naomi and Lauren, UMSU Sexual Harm Response Coordinators, without whom this achievement is vain, and for holding me and keeping me safe throughout the year. Sending immense gratitude to UMSU Staff, without who’s help, and patience the department would have not been able to achieve anything. Special thanks to Carolyn, my chosen grandmother for the warm hugs that have kept me going. And lastly, my favourite colleague [and housemate], Zachary Matthews, UMSU Enviro Officer, for feeding me and channelling their strength. I know now, the future reflection that I always saw, was the love and support of the people that will bring me courage in hard times.

Dear reader, I hope you find these reflections of solidarity and love in our mirror of 2022 Judy’s Punch.

In loving solidarity, Kraanti

The Cultural Looking Glass:

by Pritika Sinha [CW: misogyny]

“Don’t you feel any shame?” As a South Asian woman, I’ve noticed that I get asked this question a lot. Shame? Shame regarding what? Have I hurt someone? Have I insulted someone’s pride? Have I committed any crime or wrongdoing? Why is “shame” being enforced upon me? Oh, because I went against family pride and explored my sexuality.

There is a concept I’ve been familiar with since I was a child. It is the concept of “Izzat”. Izzat is referred to as the notion of “honour”- in particular, family honour. South Asian women tend to carry the weight of this “Izzat” in practically every part of their life and in every single thing they do – but especially when it comes to their sexual decisions. Hence, I wanted to delineate how this overpowering and overprotective culture over South Asian women came about, and why it still persists so strongly even today.

So, what exactly happens when this South Asian concept of “Izzat” finds itself in proximity to the Western context of sense and sexuality? The common understanding amongst Asian cultures is that when their people immigrate into Western countries, they are entering “sexually charged spaces” [1], and if you look at the media, it’s not an entirely baseless claim. In order to defend themselves against this supposed sexual corruption, cultural communities begin to audit, control and repress the sexual behaviour of their women. They use the concept of “Izzat’’ as a means to justify this repression, and because of this we see a long chain of sexual surveillance emerge throughout the entire South Asian community.

There is a historical basis to this behaviour that can be traced back to the days of colonialism – the days that led to the scholarly establishment of “Orientalism” – the landmark academic paper by Edward Said [2]. Within the theory of Said, in order to further dominate over the minority culture, the dominant power would constrict minority women into “colonial styles” of sexual oppression [2]. Thus prevails some sort of “European male-power fantasy” and the spectre of this fantasy still hangs over our heads today [1].

It is also important to acknowledge that this concept of “Izzat” does not bear the same weight for a son. This can be associated with the origins of Orientalism as a male-power fantasy, which helps form the belief that colonial power is best exercised through phallic exploitation of the vulnerable female. Subsequently, this gender selective exploitation has deeply affected South Asian culture to the point that it is one of the driving reasons behind sex-selective abortion within South Asian families [3] . If you can have a son, you’re better off. No one will question what he does. No one will criticise his decisions. For him freedom would be a universally acknowledged right, not a universally acknowledged burden. Once you’re born as a girl, you’re born into the panopticon: the constant watch tower of sexual surveillance.

Hence, one of the main mechanisms used against South Asian women in order to protect them against a supposed sexual “exploitation” by the colonial phallic agenda is to enforce shame. To be honest, most of the time it works. When you come home after a late night of a bit of fun, hearing your closest family members say they are ashamed of you and the person you’ve become leaves a mark harder than a slap on the face. This “shame” affects the way you walk, the way you talk, the clothes you wear, and the person you now present yourself as. It suggests you should hold yourself back, because it is the right thing to do if you want to protect the “Izzat” of

Can there really be free-will in an environment where your sexual

sexual status determines the honour of your family?

your family. Sexual protectionism perverses itself into your life, and suddenly the aunties have formed some sort of surveillance federation – “Why don’t you watch my girls, and I’ll watch your girls” [3] – under the supposed moral guise of protecting an honour that has nothing to do with you and your own individual decisions.

So is there anything that can be done against this? Or is the concept of Izzat so deeply interwoven within culture and lifestyle that it has a permanent imprint? It feels as though shame is branded onto South Asian women throughout their lives. As a defence against this perverse sexual control the best thing to do is to stop feeling shame – stop enforcing it on others. I no longer feel shame. Why should I? Once, I’m an adult – I am an adult in every sense of the word. I am not a victim of the Western agenda, if anything I am a victim of my own stupid decisions. So please stop feeling ashamed of yourself. You don’t carry the weight of your ancestors. You carry your own freedom.

References:

• Le Espiritu, Yen. 2001. ‘We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 26 (2): 415–440

• Said, E. W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.

• Mandeep Kaur Mucina.Exploring the role of “honour” in son preference and daughter deficit within the Punjabi diaspora in Canada.Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement [Internet]. 2018;39:3: 426-442. DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2018.1450736

Spiralling

i lost a bargain to Time. to dreams of day he banished me, endlessly wandering, or was it wondering?

i forget all in the service of whimsy, a carousel mind. when will I get off? will I even know if the descent is real and true, or will that be Time’s illusory taunting too?

behead me, i think to beg, but Time would plop my head in the juices of unreality. so tart a toxin, it must be cold. i will pickle and he will have won two to nil.

Words and Illustration by Tharidi Walimunige

MUD

Words by Birdy Carmen/ Illustration by Jennifer Nguyen [CW: blood]

shallow entry caught roughly in red dusk the washed memory of sharks which unpredicted always loosen forwards gills crashing failure familiar

chords in irish folk menace any softness unknowable but furrowed ears and isles fastidious to festivities shield last winter’s solitudes reliable as he was not as in a garden where all is green but doesn’t shift to the sun epic refuse the epoch of love for loveless irony also red tepid not gushing a laced bodice laced neck pleasurable in mind hand dawdles sideways and out to sea traced as if it were barely there fleeing a poem read to entertain barred drunks for nothingness and liturgy again red spring I bleed frictionless as hope for a child muddied to earth & crowned

In her eyes

Words by Crystal Lim / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

When I was younger, I used to be scared that my mum would leave me. I remembered always wanting to follow her around the house when I was little, clinging to her whenever I had the chance to. She would get fed up sometimes, as you do with a four-year-old keeping a beady eye on you with every step you take. I knew then that this fear hadn’t come out of nowhere.

I feared that my mum secretly hated her life and wanted to leave at every opportunity that she had. That she was unhappy with how everything turned out. I tried to stop these thoughts, but most of the time they were still there. Especially during those after school hours when I dreaded every second when she wasn’t there. The scenarios would just pop up in my head of her leaving the workplace and deciding to disappear for all of eternity when she didn’t come on time to pick me up. My mother, like most people, had dreams.

She always told me how she wanted to be a teacher, and how she used to pretend to teach her younger siblings but ended up getting frustrated when they didn’t follow along. She always smiled looking back at that. I would smile with her, but then I would get sad, sad that she never got what she wanted in the end; sad that she had to look after her parents which stopped her from going to school. She’s still here, she never left us.

For some reason, I wonder how and why she stayed because sometimes there’s a look in her eyes in which I can see the life that she never had. The travels she would have gone. The dream university course that she wanted to attend. A life where she lived in every moment, a life where she didn’t have us. Sometimes I wish she didn’t, so she wouldn’t have to stress over my sister’s hospital bills, cry over why her eldest daughter doesn’t visit us anymore, or worry over why I’m so quiet all the time.

I looked back often as if she had mistreated us, but it’s the complete opposite. Mum says that she loved us all equally and wouldn’t have it any other way. Maybe I read it all wrong, maybe she didn’t mind how her life turned out. Only now am I coming to terms that she’s not going to leave us now. Most likely anyway.

I never asked how my sisters felt.They were all too busy; one was busy being sick; the other was busy looking after herself because mum got too caught up with me and my other sister. Perhaps they felt the same or shared a similar notion. Or maybe they didn’t care at all.

She’s sitting with me now, over at the couch staring closely at her stitchwork while the TV news blares in the background. Even though she’s here, it felt like every second that I had with her was never enough. That one day out of the blue, she will be gone. Not because she wants to, but because she’s getting older. It’s like I spent all of my time worrying about her when I was younger and now I don’t know how to actually be with her.

If I hadn’t worried so much when I was younger, maybe things would have turned out differently. I could see that little girl now, reading a book on the floor mat as she looked up now and then at her mum to make sure she’s still there. Maybe she needed someone to reassure her that mum was never going to leave. That she will always be there.

But nobody ever did. She’ll be sitting on the ground, reading her book, getting constantly distracted by intrusive thoughts that pervade her constant worrying state of mind. She’ll be left pondering for the next couple of years why she felt like this and whether it’ll ever go away.

In the mirror, I could see it in her eyes that those thoughts still lingered there.

Earth Day

Words by Wen Yee Ang / Illustration by

You don’t flinch when the man on the street shatters. It happens noiselessly, without fuss. The pieces that used to be him tumble to the ground, dissipating when they hit the pavement.

You keep walking, following the steady stream of morning rush commuters. Giggling schoolchildren trample over the spot where the man fell. You eye the white trams streaking past with longing, then turn to take your usual route through a sprawling park.

The grass is neatly trimmed, the towering trees a lush, rustling refuge. The green of your surroundings presses in, enshrouding you in warmth. You smile.

It’s a beautiful day.

Scan the QR Code to read more!

Dana Jepsen [CW: death]

a brief history of downpour

Words by Srishti Chatterjee / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

for my grandmother, and for Jack – you two should have met, but it is truly beautiful that the only way you get to meet is through every poem I write.

I. robert, my thesis supervisor, says that i should believe in myself more. 4 drafts of thesis proposals make their way onto his email on a rainy monday morning — meticulously cited writings/musings about revolutions, unions, and more. i always remember to include an apology in the email– for the quality of words, the unhinged 4am email, or for the deadline delay.

i have inherited my grandmother’s penchant for apology, hidden in the cruel conceit of knowing that despite not necessarily having much to apologise for, a life can be an apology. i’m sorry i am here and she is not. i’m sorry i didn’t talk to her more, call her once more about my day, feed her a little more mashed rice when her body gave up– i tell myself these things and more, futile musings of survivor’s guilt that have become necessary parts of survival.

i cannot be a survivor without guilt.

II.

my grandmother didn’t like the creek behind her house. my grandfather did– it reminded him of the childhood home he had to flee. this is probably why grandmum didn’t like it– who likes to be reminded of a home their husband has left behind?

i am a child of the river. i grew up in a refugee colony-turned-neighbourhood in the southside of calcutta, where a dark, shallow, smelly creek slithered down behind houses and under bridges as a lost and dead tributary of the mighty, divine, sustaining river ganga. my grandfather and his family – our family – fled genocide through these creeks that flew into rivers with mirthful decadence, then a lot more flowing, sustaining, and now, collecting the grim debris of the city– dead.

i am a child of the river. when i was born, the river near our family home flooded with the heavenly grace of myth. my parents, non-believers, named their flood-born child ‘srishti’ – sanskrit for ‘divine creation’. on my birthday, at the beginning of this millenia of disruption where we come digitally pre-defeated, the river sloshed away, receiving the angry, torrential, heavenly downpour, and spreading through the unkempt roads and potholes of my poor hometown.

III.

my partner is a believer. they grew up near the sea. flood-born, river-fled, river-fed — I found my way to them like the river finds the sea — making its way through life, exodus, famine and death, slowly, and then all at once. the river, in the delta a few miles away from my hometown, meanders through a mangrove forest where life stands still. the river, in the delta before the sea, gives up for a little while, before it falls head over heels into the sea, a little bit like love, but with none of its chances. the river is meant to find the sea as foredestined as the emancipation of people – purposeful, meant to be.

IV.

floods, in myths, are about chances. where I grew up, the rain is messy, muddy in a way that claws onto your skin, like swimming in honey. floods ravage hometowns that were built in postcolonial grappling at survival while the world mourns the monarchs in cities where rain falls pretty and summer is beautiful. civilisation is almost taunted by rain – half the world begs for it. the other half watches their homes wash away and washes away with them.

there is no rain without guilt.

V.

my grandmother hated storms. they scared her, deeply. when my grandfather was away on army duty, my grandmother and mother were reluctant victims of warmongers, holding each other through storms that blew off the roof of their house every monsoon. when I was growing up, grandmum used to call us during the storms until her phone died. the cell towers would fall, and electricity would fail, and we’d ask her to not call us. “conserve your phone battery” – we told her – “what will you do if you need to call for help?”

she did call for help. in the eye of the storm, grandmum would call us, because preserving her family was more important to her than preserving the lifely battery of a lifeless phone. the night she died; it poured like the sky cried on my behalf because I had an assignment to finish. my father and I ran to the train station in the pouring rain, holding hands in a way we had never held each other. acceptance, the first stage of grief, came to us because our phones weren’t ringing in the storm. the rest of the stages washed away in the rain, coming back to haunt us in floods.

rain has guilt has love has my family’s stories. rain has bled me, fed me, raised me.

now i fall into the sea.

medussa

The Hydra

Words by Alexia Shaw / Illustration by Melana Uceda [CW: violence, death]

there are many ways to kill a woman

they used to use women as kindling you can fold her into a paper plane and throw her down a flight of stairs they called us witches cause they knew you can steal her breath with firm hands and wine stains our bodies are magic until she exhales like a kettle and runs out of steam now their great great great grand you can shake her like a magic eight ball

fathers have passed on the torch and break her when you don’t like her answer they only stopped burning up witches cause you can stake her through the heart with her very own picket sign they found better ways to ruin us and hold her up in marbled halls like a claw machine prize

they used to use women as kindling it is easy to kill a woman now those same flames will burn them to the ground but you cannot murder now millions we and millions are and millions the and millions house and millions of fire–women screaming in your streets. cut off one head–

Symphony for the Lonely

I am a lonely person, but that’s not a tragedy. There’s a silent comfort, being with oneself, another face in a crowd. And the city, playing its symphonies: Chatter. Chatter. Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter. Screeches. Honks. Laughter. Beautiful melodies…

I am alone in the city – a sardine in a can – the train whizzing, Flashing, Beeping, Screeching. Oxford Circus. Charing Cross. Covent Garden. Sloane Square. To fall in love with a stranger, a single moment there and gone. I am a lonely person but I am not alone.

I am here, wet gravel crunching under my leather. The sky is close to weeping. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. The clock stops. I am a woman out of my time, beauty from a bygone era. The hall dim with bleeding velvet and polished wood. An empty stage, brought to life by black and white suits. Music fills the hall. Intoxicating. I am one in hundreds and I am entranced.

I am a stranger – you’ll never see me again. But for a brief moment, we were one. We stifled a laugh at some corny joke. We got drunk on the drum beat. Wine in hand. Feet tapping. Side glancing. Who are you? What do you do?

Do you love?

Do you long? Are you alone, just like me?

References: Eli. (September 26th, 2016). Mythologies of the World on Stamps. Stampboards.com. https://www. stampboards.com/viewtopic.php?p=4611043

Hans “Zéró” Schleger. (1941). 1941 London Underground Map. Transit maps. https://transitmap.net/ london-1941-zero/

Words by Nicole Jalandoni / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

Hey! Here’s an Inmost Letter

Words by

Dear introverts and extroverts,

Greetings from an ambivert to all humans! Each of us consisting of various portions of introvert and extrovert characteristics was born to colour the black-and-white world. Different settings can trigger chemical reactions in our mind to determine our unpredictable characters. Through this letter, I hope you can understand more about our manners in different settings.

Who exactly are we? We are ambiverts with an uncontrolled energy that enables us to meet new people. But after a minute, our brain gets stuck trying to initiate an intriguing topic. Our mouth screws shut, making it difficult to deliver accurate thoughts. Our body freezes until the indifferent conversation ends. Our divided mind excludes us from intimate, in-depth interaction. Nevertheless, our close friends do pardon us for keeping the sentence short, like “I have a driving licence”, which should never be expanded to the length of a LinkedIn job description.

Party? We definitely perform the craziest dance following the beat before leading the gangs to sing Shape of You despite our rhino voice. Perhaps, our social anxiety is hidden when we endeavour to take the first step to break the communication barrier. But we end up dizzy in the heated ballroom, hearing buzzing around our ears at 12am sharp: Cinderella’s time to rush for home. Burning out so quickly makes us active but isolated members in socialising, doesn’t it?

Some ambiverts like me burst out laughing at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak while many were struggling with the loss of social life. Time lapsed, ambiverts had to come out with a balance to satisfy the needs of both personalities. Sometimes, the issue was resolved peacefully. Sometimes it wasn’t. My situation was the latter: two elves representing my inner introvert and extrovert started arguing with each other in my mind. My irritated extrovert elf suddenly punched the laid-back introvert for not bothering to strive for more socialising. The introvert immediately slapped the extrovert back and responded that East, West, home’s the best. Introvert pointed out that being a group leader in front of a dark screen boosted confidence by reading out the prepared notes, and it’s a pleasure to win all online board games against Discord friends. However, not hugging friends took out the happiness of the extrovert elf feeling lonely and frustrated. Both elves want me to prioritise their needs. In the end I just subconsciously squeezed a smile and lied that I was good when I asked. They created an unknown fear that prevented me from making eye contact with their genuine face while praying that they wouldn’t leave me. Their battle lasted till the lockdowns were eased, and they finally forgave each other for their irrational behaviour with a high-five, like siblings.

Vanessa Chan / Illustration by Dana Jepsen [CW: social anxiety]

Letter from Your Ambivert Buddy

Weekend parties have since returned to the city and we ambiverts have become the pioneers desperately wanting to take revenge on the oppression to our extrovert side. In the middle of a dim ballroom in reality, our mouth has lost the courage to utter a word. It’s challenging to understand ambiverts without being sensitive to their mood, but here are some tips when mingling with them:

• Show interest in ambivert anecdotes. Prompt our speech at the 30-second mark if needed, but don’t interrupt us. Especially in a conversation of three, as we’re good listeners eternally waiting their turn to speak.

• Stay in touch with us after parties. Include us in following activities, no matter online or offline.

• Give us some time to consider if we want to leave our house on a weekend or just plan to lie on the bed as our preference could change suddenly.

• Give us a hug when we smiled ten minutes ago and start standing outside of the group as we want company, but don’t know what we should do.

Lastly, shoutout to people willing to listen to ambivert contradictory life stories in return for respect for our preferred routine and trying to understand our personality.

Best, Vanessa Chan (ambivert)

Please Submit a Scholar’s Report

by J. A. W. Uszko

Dear [name], i don’t know what im doing i have to do something I would like to ask you to take the time im sponsored to be here ive worked to be here and please submit a Scholar’s Report take it take them for what they’re worth for the Melbourne Access Scholarship. take my time and effort and brilliance and The content of your report may be made available to the donor(s) of the rest wont the rest don’t have to do this and the Melbourne Access Scholarship (for compliance purposes) i don’t know how long i can keep this up the lecturers also assisting the University’s efforts in their little eyes little displays little eugenicist readings little “primitive cultures” increasing awareness of the impact of philanthropy. and i dont know how long i can keep this up not Believing - The Campaign for the University of Melbourne. Please complete conversing just nodding smiling grasping the report by 31 August 2022.

the right words to say Should you have any questions, what they said is wrong it just is and please do not speak and their little eyes theyre not theyre just they wont hesitate to contact the scholarships team. Please they hate you how dare you and i don’t know how long before i submit a query using the subject ‘Scholars Report’. just let them say

Kind regards,

i am scholars report

by J. A. W. Uszko

Hi donors! I’d just like to say that when i was 15 and dreamed a man sat down with me and I’m really grateful for the Melbourne Access Scholarship. It looked me in the eyes he told me it’s a really good opportunity its important to have a mentor to expand my knowledge base and commit to studies that’s how you get out in a way that would’ve been impossible without support. get someone to teach you to help you Without this money I would’ve needed to pity you to work part-time to survive and big brown eyes look back take them for what they’re worth he was serious I wouldn’t be able to take all these extra-curricular activities when i was 18 and looking at my ranking to expand my career opportunities. compared to hers i realised what he had meant My grades are going really well and i will never be the same as the pretty white marble version I’m planning on doing [subject] and [subject] i will need to be sponsored and mentored to get some experience for a masters to make it far enough and I am also editing for [magazine] and they pity theyre already getting something from me I have joined [subject] society and [subject] society. they cant exploit me further I am really excited to be here!! i am philanthropy So thank you so much :)

Do we really have to prove

Are attempts to “prove our worth” a form of self-help or self-harm?

by Celine Hosea [CW: anxiety, bullying]

I feel like a white hot star. Shining bright for a moment – before quickly collapsing into a black hole.

“Why can’t you be like them?” my mother would ask.

It’s statements like these that rile me up enough to do something worthwhile. Looking back at my life, I am astonished that someone like me could get this far – considering that I struggled to answer, “What are your passions?” up until now.

What pushed me academically was the sheer strength of my anxiety against social judgement. This pattern of only doing things that were considered socially respectable extended to hobbies. As I deliberately stayed away from artistic pursuits to make time for “more serious hobbies”, like playing the piano and violin. These “hobbies” meant nothing to me, because they did not arise from my passions. They merely reflected the will of others.

When I got into debate, I wanted to prove myself to my family who labeled me as incompetent because I could not navigate the social nuances of dysfunctional Asian family gatherings. I won international debate competitions, with the hopes that they would finally change their opinion on me.

Because of my success in debate, my family members would no longer bring up the awkward silences, blank stares, or words spoken out of turn. My grandma went from calling me “the mute child” to “the only grandchild who is smart enough to bring home a PhD.”

“She won first place Southeast Asia in Yale University!”, my aunt would introduce me, inciting perfunctory oohs and ahhs from her audience. It gave me a temporary boost of self-esteem – before I shrunk back to the nearest corner to chew on my nails.

I did not seek achievements out of praise. I am so anxious about being the centre of attention that even praise would make me uncomfortable. If someone paid enough attention to praise me, they’d also pay enough attention to see me trip and fall. I was so scared of being gossiped about; of being deemed not good enough, of being compared to my beautiful cousins and falling short.

“She’s the fatter sister,” someone would say, comparing me to my skinnier sister. Then they’d follow it up with: “But she’s also the smarter one.” It allowed me to save face a bit.

I started burning out when I went to pre-uni, or the equivalent of community college. I had no real drive, besides going through the motions of what I always did. The remnants of whatever good habits I had carried me enough to graduate valedictorian.

ourselves? self-harm?

I don’t know how I managed this. Maybe I worked hard without noticing. But no matter how hard I tried to practice “mindfulness” and “gratitude”, I still couldn’t muster a single flying fuck about it. Perhaps it was a result of the pandemic. Perhaps I was depressed. It was an empty, blank spot of my life and the only thing I recalled with vivid clarity was recording my valedictory speech from the comfort of my bedroom.

Moving abroad for uni reignited whatever spark I had left – for a while. One morning, I woke up not to sunlight too heavenly, but to my mother video calling me with an all-too-familiar tone. Picking up the phone, I tossed over the bedsheets to stumble over to the laundry room.

“Child, are you aware that Alice got a full university scholarship?”

“No, I’m not aware.” I said, dumping my monocolor pile of dirty clothes into the laundry.

“You seem completely disinterested.”

“I am,” I replied, closing the circular laundry machine door forcefully.

“Aren’t you upset? Why aren’t you upset?” she asked in disbelief.

“Why? It’s her achievement. Good for her,” I began reaching for my comfort sweets in the kitchen.

“Don’t you feel bad about yourself? It could have been you!” If only you tried harder, I’m certain is what she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

“I know.” I popped open a can of tea from the fridge.

“She bullied you at school! Look where she is now. Don’t you want to prove yourself?”

I went silent. I looked back at my phone and felt tears pooling in my eyes. “I… don’t have to. I’m so sick and tired of having to prove myself to everyone.”

I started coughing, and muted myself from the call.

She talked over my silence: “I’m doing this for your own good. You’re always sad about being not good enough. Don’t you want to be better than her?”

“I don’t have to be better than her!” I sobbed, having unmuted myself, “Because no matter how financially, intellectually, or socially ‘inferior’ someone is, I would never treat them how she did me. That’s what matters, not whether or not I achieved more than her.”She stared at me in shock, like I had just exposed the truth of the universe.

Conversations of this flavour have manifested themselves in my head as “Connie the Comparer”. Connie always compares my worst work with someone else’s best work. And this someone else is several years ahead of me in the industry. “Who the fuck would read your work when they can read Mary Gaitskill’s?” Connie whispers. Gaitskill has been a writer for decades and Connie completely disregards the tumultuous journey it took for her to get there.

Or even more absurdly, Connie compares my field of work with someone else’s completely irrelevant field of work. “You’re in bio? How pathetic. Not smart enough for the hard sciences, eh?” Soft, my ass! Physics kids don’t have to memorize the fucking Krebs Cycle, glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, and whatever the fuck chemical pathways they have us recall only to be forgotten completely after the exams.

Connie the Comparer makes fun of literally everything I do. “You like sewing? How… quaint,” he smirks. “Why don’t you take up something useful like coding instead? You know your hobby could be automated, right?”

Every fucking thing has to be number one, and Connie’s the neurotic amalgamation of the shadows that have existed throughout my life. I can’t necessarily pinpoint the source of his birth. He wasn’t born from my mother, or family members, or the condescending mansplainers that happen to be my ex-boyfriends.

Although my friends litter me with high praises: my STEM friends would say “You’re so good at writing! And you know so much about philosophy and politics,” and my humanities friends would say, “You’re in STEM? Wow, I could never!”. I think that Connie is right. I will never be exceptional in these fields due to my long-term commitment issues.

“My goal after I graduate is to work at Atlassian. Hopefully Apple or Google,” a friend studying Computer Science once told me. “What about you?”

Eyes glazed and half-rolled, I shrugged and said: “Oh, I don’t know. CSL, CSIRO… Big Pharma.”

Truthfully, I wanted to say “the UN” or “to write for The New Yorker”, but those are lofty dreams that I have long dropped, due to wanting to impress my family with a STEM degree.

“She’s the only one in the family doing STEM,” my aunt would say during Chinese New Year.

In uni, my dispassionate and uninvolved study method of reading whatever and submitting whatever wasn’t enough of a carry. Far removed from the people who plagued my insecurities, I felt no pressure to prove myself and faced Ps with complete emotional detachment. Because I no longer saw grades as a measure of someone’s success, it no longer seemed necessary to compare them. Passion is a much more enviable thing.

I am astonished by how often the philosophy of “proving people wrong” is still touted as virtuous by well-intentioned people and self-help media. “Do it for the people who want to see you fail,” recommends a QuotesGram post, with the bold and condensed typeface that is the standard for male-centric motivational social media pages.

I have spent nearly two decades of my life trying to “prove people wrong”, and it has left me a husk of a person devoid of any passions apart from a few respectable achievements.

But when someone asks me how I feel about these achievements, I truthfully admit that my dopamine receptors are unable to latch onto anything that’ll give me any semblance of happiness.

I feel the impulse to smash mirrors because staring into shattered glass is a more accurate reflection of how I feel: being made up of parts that’ll never consist a whole – the contradicting wills of all those who still haunt my self-conception.

Like a white hot star, I wish I could say that I did not peak at high school. But perhaps I did, if only for a chapter in my life. And now, it is time to start anew.

Ghost Light

by Michelle Huang

Yet another social gathering. Exposure therapy will be good for you. I scoff at my own attempt at persuasion. All these strangers exist on the other side; in an elusive space I cannot comprehend nor reach. It’s an otherworldly performance.

Inhale, exhale. Let’s try to give them a good show. Break a leg.

“Let’s break the ice!”

They encourage participation like a Primary School classroom. Cross-legged on the carpet, a teacher directing the cohort with a white-board pen. There seems to always be a few extroverts that you can hear best. They banter like it’s improv, bouncing off one another without a beat of hesitation. Or maybe it’s more like a well-rehearsed dialogue, the comedic timings deliberate yet natural. Who gave them the script?

“Let’s go around in a circle!”

I see their efforts, I see their effortlessness. Their cohesive wardrobes, the sensible colour palettes. I’m admiring the way their hair falls, their already identifiable quirks and habits. I hear the way they speak, the timely wit, the pitch of their laughter. I take note of their eyes when they’re listening to others, their manner of nodding, the pattern of their responses. The pages of my mental notebook are covered in scribbles; dark, heavy-handed scribbles. The ink is spilling over the other side.

“What’s your favourite food?”

Who am I? What do I like? All memories and facts about myself escape me in the face of these nameless people. I close my eyes and trace through all those moments I have lived. But I only read the books on other people’s shelves, I add the song they listen to my playlist, I buy the clothes they’ve worn, I watch the films they reference. I imagine that I was a collection of all the things I loved about the people I have met.

“If you were an animal, what would you be?”

I wish I could see myself that way, something as captivating as a technicolour mosaic, a stained glass window that reflects glowing colours from the sunlight, one that picks up the pieces from people I have met, all assembled into a personality I claimed as my own.

“What’s your favourite movie?”

But I feel that I am not this kaleidoscopic good-looker, nor alluring, nor ensnaring. I am cheap – a shell of a person – suffocated by superficial moments of identity. In the pit of my stomach, a brewing sour admiration and bitter respect for these strangers consume my every being. I repeat the punchlines I hear, I repeat the fun facts, I pretend these opinions are mine, I cannot formulate a single thing that belongs to me. I am a regurgitation of all the things that I have seen and heard.

“What do you like to do in your spare time?”

There is no poetry in this envy. No green serpent that’s wrapped around my neck. It is simple, clichéd, ego death.

“Who’s your favourite artist?”

I don’t seem to have a ‘favourite’ anything. I have tried tirelessly to make something my own. I’ve never discovered any cool bands or artists on my own. It was all through listening to what my friends liked, and weeding out the ones I didn’t like as much. It made me feel like a copy. Am I the feedback from a microphone? An unoriginal echo of what my peers were – empty, paradied scraps of an incomplete person?

“What’s your dream travel destination?”

I’m picking at my cuticles again, I’m biting my nails. The room is dark, only dimly lit, but when I leave and reenter the light, I know I’ll find dried blood around my nail beds. Red-stained and jittery, my fingers and teeth will be raw and sore. I’ll find flesh, exposed.

Maybe it’s time to go home. Maybe draw the curtains close.

Stephanie Cheng’s

Illustration

Lifeless Loop

Words by Zhi Syuen Yee (Syuen) / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

Any flower that blooms at the peak of spring loses its colours and withers into nothing but frail twigs by winter. Each face imprinted as a memory so present will eventually fade into an occasional dream, a spiritual reminder of a past that was once present.

So, does “present” really hold that much importance if it is but a speck of dust in the temporal sand? As each second passes again and again, life passes again and away.

my night box

Words by Stuti Wadhwa / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

It’s the middle of the night and I see a box, disfigured and black, yet so alluring. Breathless, I caress it. The box clicks open:.

and a hand grasps me, pulling me inside. Too weak to fight, I fall back. It is a bottomless pit, yet I feel the end inside, whiskey dark.

Fear cascades down my spine, the silence deafening, my heart racing. A cruel laughter fills the space, a cocky callousness swarming, my existence a mockery.

A cloud of misery engulfs me, my lungs fighting for air, and I feel light. I look for a window. Yearning for oxygen, I almost miss a voice so mean, it’s barely heard. The menacing words, echoing inside, piercing through my body. My blemished skin exposed, tiger stripes running across my hips crooked teeth, thighs graced with cellulite; all my vulnerabilities, dug out from the deep. In the early hours, the grey light of dawn pours inside. If only I could silence the voices, I’d hear the sweet chirping of the birds.

I hold it together just long enough for it to be over, then the sunlight hits. In the golden light the voices fade, sharp winds striking my face.

My lungs fill with air, I can smell the dewy grass; It’s a new day. I can finally feel my limbs.

White beads are scattered beside my bed. It’s time for my pills. The box slowly retreats until the night comes again.

Navigating Artistic Burnout

by Marcie Di Bartolomeo [CW: chronic illness, mental health problems, and traumas]

Growing up I have always been creating. Writing stories. Performing monologues and songs to express myself, and to connect with the people around me, in one of the few ways I knew how. It was no different as an adult; though chronically ill, wherever there was a creative venture I would always be the one to raise my hand up. From theatre to film to short stories to novel-writing, I would float from project to project, working and writing and creating, until my eyes were red, and my body bone-tired.

Then COVID-19 happened. For the longest time I had to learn how to be okay with being confined to a chaotic home, with a chaotic family. Most of my creative projects; theatre productions, radio shows, club activities, 99% of my creative commitments were all suddenly cancelled. I was stuck in a rut for the longest while, and resigned myself to writing stories, bingeing all the Netflix shows I would always put off, and retreating into the world of D&D and Tabletop RPGs — all on Zoom of course. I became very acquainted with Zoom, like most people during the lockdowns.

Slowly but surely, though, I would become accustomed to this strange new normal. In time, I would be making new forms of art: Zoom theatre shows, and Zoom radio plays. I would focus more on script writing, and on my studies (for once). I suddenly slowed down for the first time in a while, and it was both deliberating and liberating. All around, a strange but nonetheless welcome reprieve from the hustle and bustle of pre-COVID life. That’s the thing about pre-COVID: one of the reasons I typically would get chronically ill was because of how fast life was, and how easily overwhelming everything could quickly become.

You would not be surprised to know that once life started transitioning to a “post-COVID” world that the hustle and bustle would return. During 2021, I found myself working on not one, not two, but THREE theatre productions — and not just small roles too: from directing to writing to production managing to welfare & equity and producing… I had enough hats to cover the wild crow’s nest on my head and then some. Of course, 2021 would end up being defined by more lockdowns, and two of the productions I was working on would be cancelled outright (aside from a zine and a trailer for each one, to showcase the months and months that went into both before their cancellations). The cancellations were abrupt changes that we had to adapt to quickly — after all, there were other projects to work on. Nonetheless, re-experiencing the grief of a show cancellation and the infinite what-ifs of what could be was exhausting, and left my centre of gravity shaken. The third one was another Zoom show. It was a successful Zoom show, and my team and I made the most of Zoom’s quirks. In less than a month we pulled off a quick transition from in-person theatre in a black box to online theatre on laptop screens. It was a jarring transition, an overwhelming series of short, sharp changes that necessitated my brain to work overdrive, and my body to overclock. While invigorating, it was a process that required more spoons than we had to spare, and left us in the depths of post-show burnout afterwards.

And then there’s 2022: a year where everything was supposed to “go ahead as usual”. A return to a pre-COVID way of art-making. Except it has been anything but. I have witnessed many productions have to get cancelled, or postponed due to cast and crew getting sick, and/or succumbing to the ever increasing presence of COVID in the air. I have seen a whole bunch of people pulling out of productions due to sickness, or just because they had too much on their plate. And a large reason for this could be simplified to biting off more than one can chew.

However, I believe it’s more nuanced than that. Think about it. We have come out of a multitude of lockdowns (despite COVID being on the rise again and again), and I know that the student theatre community in particular — starved of several years of in-person theatre — would be grabbing at every opportunity to make in-person theatre again.

in a “Post-COVID” World

I am no different; despite working what is effectively a full time workload in the arts (including but not limited to: organising and running workshops, parties and festivals) I still find myself going for creative opportunities wherever I can see them, including the UHT Writers in Residence playreading program, collaborative novel-writing, and writing a column all about witches, recipes and rituals. I thought that I would be able to accommodate all my commitments, even after reducing my study load to part-time. I was dead wrong. I am numb. I am cold. I am fatigued and get out of breath by even walking to uni nowadays. I am unable to even do all-nighters, the main way I would stay on top of my work. My body now compels me to be asleep before midnight, whether or not I have finished with a day’s workload. I’m behind on everything, and just another bad day away from dropping everything and taking the rest of the year off.

I will admit: I am bad with boundaries, and I am bad at saying no, especially when something interesting comes my way that I really want to be involved in – something that will give me a rush of dopamine just by thinking about it. And I doubt I’m the only one. Part of my role as a Creative Arts Office-bearer is to check in with students wherever I can and ask about how their art making is going. And each time I get the same kind of response, “I’ve got a lot on my plate, I am really fatigued and run down, but I can’t stop myself from taking on more creative projects.”

What I have realised — and I can’t speak for everyone, but you may relate to this too — coming out of lockdowns, coming out of what has become your comfort zone, and relearning the hustle and bustle of day to day life, is difficult while acclimating to the overwhelming outside world. Re-familiarising yourself with in-person art making and networking in person with fellow creatives, has got to be a really exhausting endeavour. This isn’t helped by the collective and accumulated traumas of the past several years, and the emergence of chronic illness and mental health problems. (Plus long COVID ain’t fun whatsoever.)

For those where art-making is a part of your career, and is how you survive in this scary world, you’re most likely relearning how to make art and facilitate art making in your career too, and a lot more prone to burnout and making mistakes as a result. It could be compared even to relearning how to ride a bicycle, or reinventing the wheel — particularly if your organisation has lost a lot of knowledge and resources from years of being in isolation, and people resigning and moving on. There may be that pressure to work consistently beyond your capacity — until you burn out big time and can’t work for a while, which is a scary reality for many. My main source of income this year has been my work as a Creative Arts Officer, which made me feel pressured to keep working and working, even with the temptation to resign. I don’t want to burn out to a point where I can’t work, but if I take a break now, it is also not without its consequences.

So what to do? Well, it’s not easy, but I have got to be kinder to myself. Slow down and focus on a couple of creative ventures, rather than stretching myself thin with all of them. And be okay with saying no, and with taking breaks.

I will be honest, I am still working on this. I still find it saying no to new projects and ideas that float my way. The pain of FOMO saying no to something can sometimes be more painful and draining than saying yes to a new hyper-fixation. That being said, if a new project is making your old ones feel like chores, is it best to give those up? Resign from those old commitments that only drain you? There’s also the level of responsibility that comes with following through with a creative venture, and the impact of your departure from a commitment, particularly if it’s due to taking on new ones and having too much on your plate.

I don’t know the best answers right now, but right now I am trying to be kinder to myself, and respecting my boundaries more. And you know what? If you do the same, we may be able to recover from this collective artistic burnout together.

down by dotting brook

by Tharidi Walimunige [CW: blood]

golden rays of midday glide around lavender bouquets, dangling in doorways—

place your ring finger at petal’s edge and wait for ladybirds evacuating,

single file, a stream of red bleeding down the back of your hand, a scuttling heart-line.

midnight calls rope to bedposts over / under / around / through rabbit holds true, its tail locked by iron.

twelve chimes in the bed alights as if taking a breath. water swells on floorboards, a pond of fronds, sunset lilies and glowing mushrooms have come to visit you, and snaking through algae is a feathery dragon. whiskers tickling your nose, you wait for its cheeky nip THWACK! a wooden spoon to the snout works wonders. dreamtime now; a lonesome lily and pad have followed you, webbed clasp peels the purple petal to peek. you’re to play host to an emerald frog with a message:

“this is no place for your head!” says the amphibian, and with a speedy SQUICK!

its propelled tongue moistly meets the centre of your forehead.

it pulls and pulls, and with an almighty YANK! off goes your head, spouting glitter rain by the fountain of your bereaved neck. to the clouds frog and bounty both.

tea first thing in the morning you don’t notice the fairy nibbling at congealed crystals of sugar, crusted to the bottom of your cup— too late,

you pour. drifting to the top, drowned fae of chamomile clogged wings fished out. it is fated for the inky embrace of a fresh trash bag.

prick of a finger on tooth of white picket, you pledge to the winking lights barely caught at the edge of your sight. blood drop wakes and blood drop welcomes all to the thatched roof nestled in forest depths.

Why are we Not Okay with

characters?

by Mia Jenkins [CW: terrorist bombings]

The satirical black comedy Not Okay attempts to create an insightful social commentary yet fails to leave a clear resounding message with its audience. Nevertheless, the film frames an important statement on the absurdity of internet culture and the gap between antihero and antiheroine characters in Hollywood films. While its cast offers praiseworthy performances, the writing of the film falsely proclaims itself to be socially enlightened, and ultimately makes an example of the exact behaviour it criticises.

The film follows Danni Sanders, a lonely 20-something New Yorker, fuelled by her desperation to become loved, successful, and famous. When she finds herself wrapped up in a lie about going on a writer’s retreat to Paris, Danni decides to fake her dream life by photoshopping pictures of herself in Paris on Instagram. Yet, immediately after posting a picture at the Arc de Triomphe, news breaks that a thread of terrorist bombings has hit major Parisian landmarks. Danni then spectacles her fake trauma on social media using the hashtag “#iamnotokay”, garnering national support and making her dream life a reality. This façade of unjustly victimising oneself to gain attention and success is directly aligned with the reality of influencer-corruption on social media. Although the film is a satire, its compelling depiction of the dangers of confusing reality with the make-believe world of social media is anything but exaggerated.

The film’s cast includes big names such as Zoey Deutch, portraying main character Danni Sanders, and Dylan O’Brien, portraying social media influencer Colin. Both actors offer praiseworthy performances through their ability to physicalise their characters in an extremely realistic manner. Yet it is breakout actress Mia Isaac who shines in her ability to bring depth and rawness to her performance, establishing her final monologue as the most memorable scene in the film. If anything is to be commended in this film, it is Isaac’s delivery of Rowan’s speech of spoken word in this closing scene. Her impassioned and emotional performance offers a powerful sentiment to the audience and makes a commendable effort to make up for the film’s undiversified writing perspective.

Directed and written by Quinn Shephard, the young filmmaker attempts to make commentary on internet culture, race, sexuality, social class, political power, fast-fashion, and hook-up culture. Yet it appears that a genuine voice behind the film is lost through Shephard’s excessive comedic jabs on societal inequalities. This is typified when a matcha café owner forces a woman experiencing homelessness off their street to leave an “influencers eat free” sign in her place, and again later in the film when Danni ‘compassionately’ offers the same woman an influencer freebie bag with a teeth-whitening kit. Although this commentary demonstrates the unethical nature of influencer culture in convergence with issues of social justice, the film overwhelms itself in attempting to combat an inundated number of social issues.

We see this further when Danni exclaims “Yass queen, slay!”, at the mention of her co-workers’ queer-bowling night, and again during a montage of “#iamnotokay” tweets which parade self-victimising testimonies, including “my boyfriend only loves me because I’m hot”. The list of these satirical jabs goes on, in which Shephard uses

unlikeable female

her characters to mock one’s desperation to feel loved and included – whether that be as a part of a minority or a self-victimising social media movement. While these jabs are humorous, Shephard makes the mistake of generalising all social and political issues, in which one real and raw message is largely lost upon the audience. It is this transparent goal to create a socio-politically sophisticated movie for her “zilennial” audience that causes the insufficiency for a true transformative power.

Although Danni’s character isn’t given a redemption arc, the audience is still positioned to empathise with her. Shephard intentionally includes empathic scenes of Danni helping Rowan overcome her stage fright before their rally, and of Danni being violently harassed after the public learns of her lie. Moreover, this decision to ultimately encourage the audience to commiserate with Danni is encapsulated in the final scene, where we see Danni attempt to make amends with Rowan. In this scene, Danni is seated in the auditorium of Rowan’s spoken-word recital, reviewing her pre-written apology. This notion of creating a formulated and insincere ‘apology’ that failingly attempts to reconcile the damages of one’s actions is undoubtedly a replication of the actions of real influencers.

We’ve all seen them: teary YouTubers reading their apology from a script off-screen, Instagram posts with a blank backdrop, typewriter font, excessive full stops and lower-case characters – all these theatrics just for their followers to forget about it the next day. Yet after watching Rowan’s performance, Danni leaves the auditorium, tears rolling down her face, her final attempt of reconciliation symbolised through handing the narrative’s voice to Rowan and exiling herself from the story altogether. Although Shephard attempts to resolve the film through Danni’s final decision to remove herself from the story, the directorial choice to focus on Danni’s sadness and guilt during Rowan’s speech is defective. While it is important that Danni’s character is still seen as a human being who doesn’t deserve to receive death threats, the decision to position her audience to ultimately empathise with Danni is distasteful.

Furthermore, in her interview with MTV (see: [1]), Shephard divulges that Danni’s character is partially based on herself, and the character should be relatable to “all young white women on the internet”. However, this begs the question of whether Shephard has commendable authority in her depiction of social struggles. Shephard, who was largely introduced to the filmmaking world through her mother, a pre-established Hollywood director, is bold in her decision to partake in a criticism of societal structures from which she, herself, has largely benefitted from. On one hand, Shephard makes an important exposition on the necessity for antiheroine characters like Danni, who in their womanhood are complex and unconventionally immoral, and face a greater response of aversion from audience members compared to their anti-hero counterparts. Yet, while Shephard deems it okay to have entirely unlikeable white female main characters, it is not okay to have well-rounded, fully developed and partially flawed person of colour (POC) female characters.

In essence, Rowan’s character falls into the trope of a saintly and morally superior POC character who comes to the aid of the white main character to teach them a lesson (see: [2]). Shephard’s perpetuation of this trope in which a POC character lacks any humanistic moral flaws is problematic, and ironic when considering the film itself aims to provide social commentary on racism. Evidently, Shephard’s portrayal of female characters highlights the issue of intersectionality in Hollywood films.

Ultimately, this film misguidedly oversimplifies the complexities of social struggles, and it lacks a clear, impactful message on the detrimental impacts of social-media influence. Nonetheless, Shephard creatively illuminates the juxtaposition of social triviality and political gravity. While the satirical comedy in the film offers relief to the serious subject matter it attempts to navigate, Shephard falls short in her aspiration of creating a forward-thinking social commentary.

References:

• Oken A. Internet Scammers And Doomscrolling Sparked Quinn Shephard’s Viral Hit “Not Okay” [Internet]. MTV. 2022 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://www.mtv.com/news/u8fsdg/quinn-shephard-not-okay-interview

• Magical Negro - TV Tropes [Internet]. TV Tropes. 2010. Available from: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro

• Cusic S. The Magical Negro Trope in Literature and Film – Confluence [Internet]. Gallatin. 2021. Available from: https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/the-magical-negro-trope-inliterature-and-film

Milky Throw

Love bled a letter.

Words by Kraanti Agarwal

Translation by Srishti Chaterjee Illustration by Dana

Jepsen

[Note from Srishti Chaterjee, translator: Translation for Kraanti, my family and home– with a little prayer of hope that we will spend the rest of our lives translating love for each other, and the poems about grief will be beautiful only in hindsight, never to be written again.]

Love’s ink, dotted in darkness, pens a letter to love. A love that now holds someone else’s hand, grapples at someone else. I have a question–

Do you love her – like you loved me, or, at all?

Are your feelings more fleeting– new, untouched by us, fluttering with promises that changed the way you held my gaze?

You look decked, with a familiar happiness– a little lying, unsure. Dotting my feelings about this, is a little prayer for you: I hope you tell her of the things you conceal under your soft, knowing smile, your destitute dreams, your desperate, unseen grappling for love.

Even if you don’t muster, courage, love, valour even, to tell her–I hope she knows. When you leave, I hope she grapples at you instead. A steady, visceral, desperate hug.

With my prayer, I add a blessing her way– I hope she knows where you hurt, where innocent mistakes and shy apologies dot your stories in clandestine ink.

Does she like the stories you tell that I was there for? Do her words collapse unto each other for your questions–Yes, no. Maybe? Almost.

Does she receive, into her open, quiet heart, your pride–about your love? Does her heart, after having you in it, lurch in paranoia, at your goodbye, or worse, at your insidious departure without a ritualistic, sacred last hug before you go?

Meh. These prayers, blessings, questions– these are strange ways to remember you, of how much I hated the idea of losing you.

Now, when you have her in your heart, I hope it frees you, graced with reminders that you have each other, in hearts, bodies, skins. The debts I incurred from love, [not that I was keeping count]–

I pay back with this poem: memory, metaphor, and such. The pieces of you, your touch, our touch that lingers on my everyday in arrogance of being irretrievably yours– I gently place back at your doorstep. It’s yours now, like this poem.

In these couplets, that I am giving back to you, I am setting myself free, away from you. Away from the daily hauntings at your doorsteps, awaiting–Goodbye.

Liberation, not love, dots the ink that bled this poem, for you– now someone else’s.

Distances, spaces, they abolish themselves. Love is our emancipation. I know that now.

Love bled a letter.

Ishq ki siyaahi se yeh khatt uss mehboob ke naam jo ab kisi aur ka dildaar hai, bas ek sawaal–kya tumhe usse pyaar Hai? Ya yeh bhi bas kuchh kore ehsaas aur jazbaat hain, Jinke panapne ka kaaran tere mere ye badalte haalat hain?

mudda yeh hai ki tum khush nazar aate ho, ummeed hai ki usse haal-e-dil nhi chhupate ho… kaise tum bheetar se toot kar upar se muskurate ho Yeh mehroom-e-khaas jazbaat, use toh batate ho?

zubaan se nahi toh unn nazro se samajh jaati hogi, tumhe jaata dekh voh bhi gale na lgane se mukar jaati hogi

use bhi ilm hoga tumhari har kamzori ka, galtiya karne ke baad uss masoom si seena zori ka...

achha, vaise tumne use bhi apne tamaam haseen khwaab sunaye honge, tumhare badan ke har nishaan ke kisse sunaaye honge…

Kya use bhi tumhari kahaniya pasand hain? Kya uski bhi haan uski naa mein band hai?

kya voh bhi tumhari magrooriyat ko apnaati hai? Aur har baar tumhare dur jaane ke khayal se ghabrati hai?

Par khair, maine bhi kya gazab kohraam machaya na, tumhe khone ke darr se tumhe bhula na tumhe paaya na… ab jo tum uske saath ho toh zara adab se rehna, kitna chahte ho use yeh baat har dafa kehna… mai chukati hoon tere mujhpe jitne bhi ehsaan hain, teri yeh hassti meri inn nazmo mein jawedaan hai… voh gumaan tera yun chur kartii hoon, ki ab tu jo saath nhi toh tere na hone ki kaifiyat se nahi darti hoon… mai inn nazmo mein qaid hokar tujhse azaad hoon, meri jaan ab mein tujhse dur hi abaad Hoon…

azaadi kii siyaahi se yeh khat uss mehboob ke naam jo ab kisi aur ka dildaar hai, yeh duriya aur yeh faasle bey-ikhtiyaar hain…

Ishq ki seyahi se yeh khatt

Two and Two is Four

by Lily Ward

In the heat of our living room, Mama tidies my hair. Her attention waxes and wanes to the song of our television. Riots in Manila. A typhoon in Ilocano. Aquino running for president. The brush turns my ringlets into TV fuzz.

Mama has picked my most special dress.

Any flower that blooms at the peak of spring loses its colours and withers into nothing but frail twigs by winter.

I am wriggling impatiently and I twist to face her in my chair. Mama has a gel-lacquered comb in her teeth. She chooses then to tug my hair into two sections. My scalp strains towards her.

Aray! I begin to cry.

Each face imprinted as a memory so present will eventually fade into an occasional dream, a spiritual reminder of a past that was once present.

Jusko naman, she laments. You need to behave today. She untangles the two pink hair ties I’d looped over my fingers, tying two fluffy sections of hair. My pigtails drop like an exhale. I rub at the tightness in my middle part.

It hurts because you turned around, she snaps, using the same breath to call out, Kuya!

Our bedroom opens. Kuya scowls and clutches a metallic rectangle to his chest. His wet hair has been brushed back.

I try loosening a cherry knocker ball in my hair but Mama ushers me off the chair, then points to Kuya’s feet. Put shoes on.

Kuya’s scowl deepens. I’m bringing my Game Boy.

No. Mama!

So, does “present” really hold that much importance if it is but a speck of dust in the temporal sand? As each second passes again and again, life passes again and away.

If you lose it, Daddy won’t buy another.

When he’s far away, Mama doesn’t use Daddy’s name. I don’t remember his name because it isn’t mine. How do names change? Sometimes Mama calls him Kangaroo, like a joke but when there’s not enough for rent or bread, she says it like a bad word.

That bloody Kangaroo.

We leave our house and walk to the main road. Mama shouts down a trike driver, who straightens from his slouch. Ano po, ma’am? The driver’s eyes flash down at us, two pale-skinned children. He demands sixty piso for our fare to Angeles City. Mama shepherds us into the tinny cart attached to his motorbike. She comes last; she is hovering over the carriage opening and not us.

It takes two jeepneys and a bus to reach Manila airport. We don’t find him in the sweep of taxis and hopefuls. Parched and tired, he waits for us inside a tourist bar beside the terminal. We wander directly past him.

He sneaks up behind us and taps Mama on the shoulder. She jumps up, clings to his neck. His grizzled cheeks are warm when I touch them. Tiny thorns spike from the sun-bruised landscape of his chin. They are like the ribs of fish mama guts in the sink.

He takes up two seats to himself. His bags are stacked underneath Kuya’s feet. Kuya’s head is bent. He is fran tically pushing buttons and arrows on his Game Boy.

Mama is making conversation with him. She is using all her English words. Only while we’re this small will her English be better than ours.

I sit on her lap and stare at his long nose. All the time he’s with us, I’m awake to the three fingers’ width of seat padding he doesn’t occupy.

My tita tells me lots of stories about a man I don’t know. His name was Jesus and he used to be alive. On our thirty-piso jeepney fare back to Balibago, I look at this man sitting across from me and think of the Jesus man. If Jesus was alive, he would see me clinging to his luggage, his armpits dark and sweaty. He’d pluck me from the ground, sun bearing down on him, like a gilded giant. He’d call me Shirley Temple — an American girl I don’t know. He’d exclaim, “I don’t remember you being this big.” If I touched his pink face, it would be full of thorns.

He sees I’m watching. He reaches over to tickle my sandaled feet. I kick at him. The jeepney sways. “Hello, little Lily.”

I understand hello and Lily. I kick at him again. Mama grabs my legs, making them still.

He squints playfully. “Did you learn that at school?”

Mama pounces on that recognisable word. “She is in school, yes,” she says loudly, smiling. “Yes. She starting in September.”

He looks pleased. “Already?”

“She very smart in her grade!” Mama puts her face next to my ear. “They both very smart. Show Daddy you are smart.” Nudging me. “Go.”

I say nothing.

She clicks her tongue and nudges again. Sige naman. Kuya looks up from his pixelated combat. I wish I could rehearse in the reflection of a metal panel above my head.

“One times one equals two,” I imitate, “and two times two equals four. Four times four equals…” I pause for the correct number of beats, “eight!” I’m counting the wrong number of fingers on my hands. I don’t know how to multiply. I only know how to mimic sounds American children make in the DVDs he sends us.

He claps. It startles the other passengers. “What else?”

I think over what else I’ve practiced for this moment — Ariel’s verse from The Little Mermaid. Dialogue from Ren and Stimpy episodes, songs from Barney & Friends. God’s prayer book which Mama tucks under my pillow. I am thinking so many English words that my brain is carsick. I rub the tension in my scalp. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy part of your world—

I frown and shake my head.

Daddy snorts. “Lily the cockatoo.”

Cock-a-too sounds like kang-a-roo. His American words are slippery, but I will learn.

“We headed straight to the bahay?” he asks Mama. They are always showing little pebbles they’ve taken from each other’s pockets.

“You rest and shower first.” Mama’s voice sounds like she is being hassled by street beggars. “You want to going somewhere?”

“You need to take shower!” she insists, clutching me. She smells like the sun.

He looks down at himself. “That’s what a swimming pool’s for, isn’t it?”

“Dirty,” she chastises him, but her voice doesn’t sound mean. “You bastos Kangaroo.”

“Go on, Vicky.” Daddy is smiling. “The kids wanna swim.”

I plait my fingers through Mama’s thick hair, confused in the threads of their English. Swimming? I feel Mama not wanting to say yes; it is an itch in my throat. My eyes glaze over. I don’t want to listen to so much talking. I’ve left my floaties at home.

And then I understand: Mama can’t swim and Daddy doesn’t know.

Mama leans her body to the front of the jeepney. ‘Scuse me, po. Anong jeepney papuntang San Fernando? We hop off carrying three suitcases. Daddy carries one bag and holds Kuya’s hand. The taxi men are sprawled out over the streets. They are waiting for my Daddy — all of them. The ride costs three-hundred piso.

When the car stops, Mama is red. The building with the swimming pool inside has a hut dome and the outside walls are painted over with English words.

I am running my hands over its bumpy brick texture andI feel the tacky, sticky give of the blue, red, green words. I sound them out. Swag-man. I trace the next letter. Re-sort. There is a strange symbol beside it; a pregnant cross. Kuya wanders over. Mama is shouting behind us.

“That one means and,” he says.

And. I make it sound correct in my mouth. Ho-tel.

Daddy appears, one hand each on our shoulders. “Go on. Go inside.”

“What is swag-man?” I ask him shyly.

“A roaming old codger like me.”

“American like you?”

“Australian.”

I frown up at him. Sometimes he made no sense.

We enter an outdoor dining room. Daddy’s cold green beers are in the fridges. The other daddies look like mine. They have bushy light eyebrows, round bellies, blue eyes, deep voices.

My eyes find the hyper-blue pool to our right, beyond a cluster of tables. Kuya and I tug at our mama’s clothes. Please? Please, please, please?

One of the daddies lock eyes with mine. His face opens to a pink, gummy smile.

“G’day, Gerry!” He gingerly rises from his seat, spreading his arms. “Why haven’t you unpacked, mate?”

“Where have you bloody been?” Daddy hollers.

Mama’s face is still red from the taxi ride. She drags the suitcases towards a corner table and bends down very close to our faces. I smell fire in her breath.

If you misbehave, she hisses, we go home. If you fight, we go home. You swim in your underwear and don’t get your clothes wet. We’ll use Daddy’s towels.

Kuya and I are beside ourselves. We nod. Up and down, Yes mama, up and down, yes, po.

I swim in tight circles near the steps of the pool, forbidden from going further. Mama sits two arms-width away with her legs crossed.

“How’re the visas coming along, Gerry?”

“Ah, we’ll get there.”

Smiling Daddy and his friend sit beside her, talking their strange English. Mama is silent. The cool, lapping blue over my skin feels like a happy song. I gaze longingly at my kuya’s dark head, bobbing near the deeper end.

I tip the back of my head into the water and grip the edge of the pool with my tippy toes. I am Ariel. My voice is beautiful. Every word comes out with perfect, rounded American vowels.

“Might be easier if you married.”

“Doesn’t matter. Kids are happy.”

I sing with my eyes closed.

a woman’s first sin

anger. it is a woman’s first sin. it is the woman that always first sins – eve.

i am tired. i am tired of the hand over my mouth and underneath my skirt.

i am tired but not defeated. this fight - it is not about fighting. it is about solidarity, a solidarity that we may never achieve, but it is a goal i will never stop fighting for until my head lies on the soil of my grave.

i think, as women, we are raised to be blamed. we are the fault of society. maybe the seed in your body, the way your stomach is the size of a balloon and stretches your skin till it’s purple – it has died. your body failed to cultivate the seed of life. you bear the fault.

maybe the moon has waned and waxed too far. the crops are dying. it is the witch’s doing.

we are raised to be blamed from the instance of eve. eve is the original sinner and adam her witness, the com panion, but never the perpetrator. eve was too tempted, adam not tempted enough. the apple was eve’s fault.

you put on a nice dress. sure, it reveals parts of your chest and a lot of your thighs. but you look good. the men in the room look at you differently, and for some sick reason, that makes you feel better about yourself. but it’s time to go, so you step out the door to make your way home alone.

and suddenly that dress you’re wearing doesn’t seem so nice. it’s sexy in the wrong way. suddenly the way that men look at you on the street doesn’t feel so good anymore. their gaze feels animalistic. they have eyes of a tiger and claws for hands, and they’re snarling at you. they’re growling for you, barking at you to come home with them. some of them think it’s funny. you’re the prey and they’re the predator. you’re the victim, yet the narrative doesn’t seem that way, because why were you walking alone in the dark? why were you wearing that dress in the first place if you didn’t want that attention? it’s your fault. men will be men - they can’t help themselves. you can’t control them, but you wish you could.

you’re wearing that sexy dress in a club. it’s dark. drinks are spilling on the floor and down people’s throats. you make eye contact with a man - whether it was accidental does not matter. he approaches you with the intent of dancing with you, touching you, putting his lips on yours and his hands on your waist and taking you home. he comes up behind you and pulls you, puts his mouth on your neck and sways his hips against yours. you can feel his parts on yours. you feel dirty, contaminated. shame courses through you for everyone having seen you being touched like that. you feel like your body isn’t yours any more - it’s a man’s. it belongs to them. theirs to touch, to see, to possess, and to discard when he wants to. to him, i am simply a failed opportunity. to me, his presumptions are a violation.

Words by Kien-Ling Liem / Illustration by Melana Uceda [CW: sexual violence, self-harm, miscarriage, and blood]

a man

you’re at a club. the lights are dark, the music is loud. you’ve had one too many drinks yet you swallow the sour liquid in your hand. your friends are in the corner, telling you you should get a girl. it’ll be a good opportunity. so you make your way onto the floor and observe your selection. not that one, she’s too tall. not that one either - she’s got too much weight on her bones. then your eyes fall upon a girl with a short, black dress. her cleavage is showing. her lips are plump and pink and her eyes dark. her waist is cinched in that dress and rides just slightly up her thighs. you want to bring her home, but you’re not sure if she wants the same thing. but what’s the harm in trying? so you weave your way through the crowd. you’re attractive enough. she won’t be able to say no. you put your hands on her waist - she’s the perfect height to rest your mouth against her neck. you imagine biting her neck the way lions bite their prey before consuming them. the sheer thought of that turns you on. you’re so into it that it doesn’t matter if she’s not, so you keep go ing, but she pushes you away. you’re confused, and that slight tinge of rejection pulls at your heart. but it’s fine. there will be other women for you to bite their necks with.

adam was tempted and just like eve, he gave in. he tried to take what wasn’t his.

but it is all still eve’s fault. — — —

going home, my mind is cast back to how this has been the basis of so much of society since the ancient Greeks and Romans. Plato and Aristotle did not think women were human. their definition of humanity was narrowed, and women excluded. times may have since changed but mi sogyny holds, and what is important is that it once was like this. because what was once, becomes what is now. beliefs don’t just go away. they trickle down.

i have many things to say, but never a voice loud enough to say it. it shakes and cracks until it falls through the gaps of my fingers and all that i am left with is shards of glass words that lie at my feet. the glass pools beneath me. the pieces become sharp with criticism and shine with shame. the more i grasp at my splintered words, the more they cut my hands. my own words turn on me. my voice is hurting me. my throat itches from the screaming. i can feel the blood rise in my throat. and my hands they bleed and bleed and bleed until it drips down to my feet, and all that i am left with is a pool of my broken words drowning in the anger of my own blood. intelligible. incomprehensible. so utterly useless.

as a woman all i want is to be taken seriously. i am strangled by own uterus, my own fallopian tubes.

Words and Illustration by Janvi Sikand

2. my mother does not know anything about me

5. if you turned into a snail

1. room for one more? this one’s kind of crazy, so read it how you like. but i will tell you that when things go wrong, as things often do for a variety of reasons outside my own control, i start to wonder whether it was all my fault. is this karma in action? are the sins of my past life bleeding into this one, and manifesting as mean baristas and bad hair days? i begin to believe that if i trace the butterfly effect back far enough, i can find my misstep. as you can imagine, this is not quite how things work. if shame has become your primary emotion, angel, i want you to quit the self-flagellation spiral and squeeze out of the perpetual confession box you’re locked inside of. read “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver and kiss your knees and knuckles.

2. my mother does not know anything about me me? i’m my mother’s little pet. her jaanu doll, her first baby for as long as she lives and probably after that, too. and she’s my idol, my bestie, my frenemy for life; god, she’s been through so much, how could i not admire her? but when she sends me pictures of childish fast fashion clothes she thinks i’d look good in, or asks about a hobby i abandoned in my mid-teens, i wonder if she knows me at all. i thought we had a telepathic connection, hasn’t she been listening to the inner workings of my mind in the years since i left home? doesn’t she see that i’m not a child anymore? but it’s my own fault: there’s so much i haven’t told her, my immigrant princess, trauma mama, light of my life. i don’t want her to regret loosening the grip on her only little girl, i don’t want her to worry. still, i’ve only known her for twenty years. sometimes she begins a story about her life before a family– her dreams deferred, her wild twenties or the atrocities of youth– and breaks off mid-sentence, saying i’m better off not knowing.

3. saved you a slice you know the saying that goes, “future you is watching the current you through their memories right now”? creepy, right? but my past self is prime time television flickering on the back screen of my mind, and i get why my high school friends didn’t stick around with the resident militant SJW, little miss pick-a-fight. i can see all the mean things i said to my little brother in our youth, the silly decisions i made in my first year of uni, the cringe stories i overshared to random strangers at parties. i inadvertently sabotaged every relationship i had, and i’m so sorry, but look! i’m better now! the girl i am now has a cat that i hold baby-style and sing nursery rhymes to. i’m a nanny and i make money and spend it on vintage red leather boots. i have a new haircut and new housemates and new tattoos and new bedsheets. i haven’t had a panic attack in a year and i listen to the music you introduced me to. my grades are so good and my research is so interesting and sometimes my mother will ask how you are. and i say i don’t know, we don’t know one another anymore. don’t know, we don’t know one another anymore. you’re the reason i changed, so thank you, i suppose, but i wish you were here to witness it. you’re still the voyeur in my mind awarding me gold stickers for most improved, one of a growing collection of my ghosts watching trees fall in forests. i want to call you back with an ouija board, conjure you into my living room because tonight, i’m hosting a soirée for all my friends. i’ve baked three cakes that you’ll never taste and put on a dress you’ll never see, and you should be here. don’t worry though, i’ve saved you a slice, just in case you ever decide to swing by one last time.

4. same body forever you give birth to a pale, squirmy baby girl, and before you know it, she has a full head of hair and can walk. she outgrows infant shoes, loses teeth, wears glasses and braces. gains a few, loses a few, develops stretch marks, scrapes knees. gets tattoos, picks at her legs, donates her hair. experiences joy. experiences horrors. is this the same tiny body you grew within you? or has she become a new beast? the science brain knows that this body is only the latest iteration of complex physiological interactions, the selective activation of new genes, proteins twisting into quaternary structures. that it’s only a matter of time until my telomeres begin to wither away and smile lines turn into wrinkles. am i damaged goods for having to drag around the same carcass that has suffered so? or should i feel grateful to lead my squirming baby body through a life that can be so good? is your body really yours? will you keep it forever?

5. if you turned into a snail love endures. love permeates and persists. tell me what you need. pass a folded note into my sweaty palm. visit me in my dreams and drop me a line. leave a letter in my mailbox, send an email to my inbox. i am searching for signs of love everywhere, just say the word.

Clandestine Warriors for Justice:

The Janes Who Saved Women in the Pre-Roe Era

by Mia Spiteri [CW: abortion]

The Janes is a moving feature documentary which could not have come at a more timely hour.

Just months ago, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade was overturned. The decision reignited discourse on the need for reproductive rights, and sparked fears for the future of female reproductive health. In the same year as this announcement comes a feature on the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation.

The expository work by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin explores the underground abortion clinic of Chicago organised and operated by self-proclaimed “warriors for justice.” We meet a group of women who created a space for themselves in the male-dominated rights movement with “a lot of testosterone” – a group of women operating under the name of ‘Jane’. Undeniably, the documentary focuses on the pivotal women in the Jane Collective, but also the critical need for abortion care and access.

Relentless in their support for women and their abortion journeys, the Jane Collective facilitated more than 11,000 safe, low-cost, illegal abortions between 1968 and 1973. Many of these were performed by the Janes themselves. Legislation in Chicago during this period criminalised abortion, as well as conspiracy of involvement. Many women pre-Jane sought assistance from the Chicago mafia – which was oftentimes a dangerous way to terminate a pregnancy. Former Jane member Katie describes Jane as an “outrageous undertaking by a lot of smart women.” If you were unmarried, pregnant, and looking for support, Jane answered the call.

In the decade prior to Roe v Wade, an estimated 200,000 to 1.2 million illegal abortions occurred per year, with many self-induced under desperate circumstances as women took abortion into their own hands. This led to a large-scale hospital phenomen of septic abortion wards dedicated to women who had chemical burns, perforations to the bladder, vagina, or uterus, life-threatening infections or septic shock. The Janes features the Cook County hospital which had a 40-bed Septic Abortion Ward. It is unsettling to learn that death became a common occurrence here.

Directors Pildes and Lessin prioritise the voices of the Janes, allowing them to give firsthand accounts in a series of intimate interviews. You can feel the sense of trust these women have in each other, and their vulnerability on screen is gripping. The Janes aren’t afraid of politics, nor of doctors, who were the kings of the day. The highly patriarchal medical structure of the decade meant that women’s understanding of their own bodies and health was filtered by their doctor, who was in most cases male. Additionally, prescription birth control was accessible only to married women, or women wearing a wedding ring. Doctors decided who would be left at risk of unwanted pregnancy.

The personal testimonies are powerful. Each Jane featured brings forward stories, accounts and pivotal moments. For many, it is their first time sharing their experience on record. Jody, another former Jane, highlights a “philosophical obligation … to disrespect a law that disrespected women.” With the stability of Roe v Wade unravelling before our eyes, The Janes reminds us of the cruel realities women face when their rights to medical care are limited. This knowledge, which puts the work of Jane into a new context, weighs on the mind and soul as the documentary continues.

What becomes increasingly apparent is the refined skill, competency and capacity of Jane, so easily underestimated by law enforcement. The women recount the use of code names and undisclosed locations in order to protect the operation. The scale of Jane is revealed by their clientele, which radical lawyer Michael notes “included daughters, wives, mistresses of police, state attorneys [and] judges.” Eleanor makes particular note of the first policewoman to call Jane, leaving her work number at the station in her voicemail.

In an interview with W Magazine, director Tia Lessin spoke on the creative choice to feature a range of documentary participants: “It was important to us to show that it was such a diversity of people. They were college students; they were homemakers. There were women with quite a few children — Martha had four — and women brought their children with them to their procedures. One of the Janes has said that most of the women she counselled were mothers who didn’t want their second or third or fifth or sixth child.”

Watching The Janes, I feel a deep emotional resonance with the women. Their storytelling is captivating, and I cannot help but feel frustrated and disheartened knowing the work stemming from Roe v Wade has been undone. This documentary has informed me of the horrific consequences likely to reoccur in the United States without the protective legislation. Navigating a world post-Roe overturning is riddled with uncertainty, especially now that there is a precedent for our individual rights to be redefined. Can we have faith that a new generation of Janes will answer our call?

Aside from the women on screen, the documentary is curated with care and clear emotional intelligence. The music choices bring a well-defined balance suited to respective scenes. We hear high-intensity instrumental pieces reflecting the tribulations of Jane, and uplifting underscoring during moments of hope.

Pildes and Lessin also make strong use of archival footage. The 1960s and 70s are brought back to life with colourful tape of Chicago street scenes, protests, and meetings of the young Janes.

Former Jane member Laura proclaims “we were really ordinary women and we were trying to save women’s lives. We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.” As you watch, it becomes increasingly clear that these women are anything but ordinary.

References

• Eckardt S. “The Janes” Is the (Surprisingly Uplifting) Abortion Story We Need Right Now [Internet]. W Magazine. W Magazine; 2022 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/ the-janes-hbo-documentary-abortion-directors-interview

• Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue? [Internet]. Guttmacher Institute. 2004 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue

• Twitter. 2022 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://twitter.com/MJ_OTTAWA/status/1553200945085009922

• Radio F. Filmwax TV: Emma Pildes & Tia Lessin (THE JANES) [Internet]. YouTube. 2022 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxgw6HUb4sI&ab_channel=FilmwaxRadio

• The Janes | Watch the Movie on HBO | HBO.com [Internet]. 2022 [cited 2022 Oct 20]. Available from: https://www.hbo.com/movies/the-janes

Words by Birdy Carmen / Illustration by Dana Jepsen

Silhouetted leniency in cowboy boots pure silvered as a mitski prophecy & earth-veins & belt-buckles in reclining sun crinkled crows’-feet & crows’-nests w/ brimmed treasure & lost secrets self-knowledges & turned backs oh god it’s coming clear now unto me and I stand a wretch for truth as always

Judy’s Punch is autonomously created, produced, and published by the UMSU Women’s Department, publishd under the General Secretary of the UMSU.