Issue
In This
The Battle of Forgetting
Lauren Aratani 4
Faulty Lines
J.B. Novak 2 A&C STAFF 4
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures Tal Frieden 6
PROGRAMMING BY A&C STAFF 5
INTERVIEW WITH IFF
Gender Revalligator
Short and Smart
postCover by Claribel Wu
APRIL 13
VOL 21 —
ISSUE 10
FEATURES
Faulty Lines
A
Politics Along the U.S.-Mexico Border written By J.B. Novak - PHOTOS BY J.B. NOVAK AND DYLAN QUINTAL
few weeks
Letter from the Editor
ago, I went on the annual DEEPS (Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences) spring break field trip to look at rocks in the desert of West Texas desert. We traveled along the border between the United States and Mexico to see the geological features formed by the awesome power of plate tectonics, which births volcanoes and causes oceans to rise and fall. I expected to see some cool rocks, but I did not imagine the trip would inform my understanding of the politics along the U.S.Mexico border. Our first stop was the Hueco Tanks—referring to the Spanish name huecos for the hollows in the rocks where water collects—a formation of volcanic rock that looks like the shell of a giant red tortoise resting in the middle of a desert basin. The water in the huecos supports an ecosystem of organisms such as fairy shrimp—translucent quarter-sized crustaceans that are unique to the larger western Texas desert region. The water and wildlife at the Hueco Tanks made it a settlement location for native peoples in the region. There are over 3,000 pictographs and petroglyphs at the site, which record human habitation over the past 10,000 years. The mystical characteristics of many of these pictographs suggest that the various peoples who lived there regarded the Hueco Tanks as spiritually significant. The extant Native American groups that left pictographs at the tanks—the Kiowa, Mescalero Apache, Comanche, Tigua, and the people of Isleta del Norte Pueblo— were placed on reservations in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas from the 1850s to the 1870s after their lands were taken from them by the U.S. government. A pictograph we saw on the trip depicted the theft of the land from its rightful owners, telling of the escape of a band of Kiowa warriors from U.S. Cavalrymen. We also saw Native American pictographs and petroglyphs at later stops we made on our trip. Along with signs demarcating the U.S.-Mexico border, they stood on the state park trails we hiked as intermittent reminders of the violent history that shapes the region. Together, these icons and signs symbolized a central irony of U.S.-Mexico Border politics—the land that we Americans are so
protective of is not our own. Our next destination was Big Bend National Park in the Chisos Mountains. The park’s boundaries follow the path of the Rio Grande, which marks the boundary between the U.S.-Mexico border. During our time there, we were confronted daily with reminders of the politics that shape the U.S.-Mexico border region. Some of them—Confederate Battle Flags in the front yard of one of the few homesteads in the Chihuahuan Desert, a cargo container left by the roadside that read, “Resist! No Wall Here!”—seemed typical to me, being from
We traveled along the border between the United States and Mexico to see the geological features formed by the awesome power of plate tectonics, which births volcanoes and causes oceans to rise and fall. the American South, but others stood out. We periodically drove through U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints situated along the highways of Big Bend National Park. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agency prohibits racial profiling when screening people at these checkpoints, but it’s still routine. The white members of our group, including myself, were let through the checkpoints without presenting our documentation, while the minority members had to provide theirs. Later, while walking a short trail in Big Bend’s Boquillas Canyon (right), we saw a small group of Mexican teenagers and twenty-somethings camping on the opposite riverbank of the Rio Grande. One of them was riding a horse at a trot up and down the Mexican side of the river. We waved to them, and they waved back.
Dear Readers,
Places to Live After Getting Rekt by Housing
Ahead of the last and greatest Post- of the April 9 may not have been a national holiday,
year next week, the Spring Weekend issue,
but it was a very special day for us at Post-:
we spotlight the Ivy Film Festival, the world’s
the birthday of our editor-in-chief, Saanya!
largest student-run film festival. Read
Since her appointment last year, Saanya
about J.P. Novak’s travels along the U.S.-
has held Post- together through some tough
Mexico border, and enjoy Tal Frieden on the
1.
Inside Blueno
times. We turned over nearly our entire
symbolism of gender-revealing alligators!
2.
managing, design, and illustrations staff,
We couldn't have published all this amazing
The CIT (there are showers!)
while simultaneously expanding our social
work, and so much more to come, without
3.
The couch of your lucky off-campus friend
media presence (Like us on Facebook!) and
the hard work and commitment that starts at
4.
The Ratty (also has couches)
launching a podcast. Staving off attempts
the top. Thank you, Saanya!
5.
Under the warm air vent in front of Bio Med
6.
The SciLi basement
7.
Shiru Cafe
8.
Your current dorm (they can’t make you leave)
9.
BDH Office
by the BDH Board to eliminate Postaltogether, Saanya has made the most out of a compromise. Despite a reduction in pages, our magazine is better equipped to showcase student writing and appeal to a diverse readership than ever before.
2 post–
Sincerely,
Josh
managing chief of a & c
10.
A cardboard box
Our fear of U.S. Border Patrol prevented us from wading through the knee-deep water and speaking to them, and them from reaching us. A massive fault along the river’s course has eroded the canyon, which seems to symbolically punctuate the arbitrary political boundary between our two countries. About halfway down the trail we saw a collection of bright trinkets and decorated walking sticks that had been left out near a fallen tree. Marked at a few dollars apiece, they lay next to a plastic jar with a slit cut into its top. Instructions were written on its side in Sharpie: “Please pay here. Donations Welcomed!” Another hiker explained to us that the trinkets were left there by the people who live nearby on the Mexican side of the border. The souvenir vendors want to sell their goods to hikers, but cannot stay on the American side of the border to do so out of fear of detainment by Border Patrol. We saw these crossborder souvenir stands on other trails as well; some that we came across were hidden, perhaps out of fear that the goods would be confiscated should a Park Ranger or Border Patrol Officer find them. We saw the goods, but never the purveyors, until we encountered two of the cross-border souvenir vendors at a hot spring on the bank of the
Rio Grande. The two men were wearing waist-high waders for the journey across the river. We and the other visitors to the hot springs ignored them, but we were surprised to see that they had crossed the Rio Grande there. The water was much deeper there than it was at Boquillas Canyon, and the current was strong enough to carry away a weak swimmer. Seeing that they had crossed the Rio Grande at such a deep, swift, and dangerous point in the river allowed me to grasp the extent of their economic need. I was struck by how profoundly wrong it is for the wealthiest nation on the planet to force people to come to the United States this way, hounded by Border Patrol Agents. The people who come to the United States illegally are no different from most of us, or our parents, or our grandparents, who immigrated to this country in search of a better life, for themselves and for their children. Who are we, as a country, to deny it now to others? Some of the most compelling moments on our trip came from seeing the terrain where the United States’s current administration proposes to build a border wall. The notion of building a 30-foot-tall wall and sending 4,000 National Guardsman to “protect” it seemed ludicrous after visiting those
locations. The U.S.-Mexico Border is demarcated by the Rio Grande, which the delicate ecosystem of the Chihuahuan Desert depends on for water. A border wall on the U.S. side will deny local populations of black bears and other fauna access to the water they need to survive. Moreover, the creation of a border wall would stop the historically free movements of bison herds, pronghorns (the American antelope), and coyotes across the western rangelands of the Chihuahuan desert. The amount of food available to these populations will be reduced dramatically if their movement is restricted, and their numbers will plummet as a result. Furthermore, the proposed wall is an insignificant barrier to entry compared to the existing variegated terrain. This was especially clear at the Santa Elena Canyon in the Chisos Mountains, where we walked past a cross-border souvenir stand that had been set up 100 feet from the parking lot. The person who came and set up the stand must have crossed into the US through the Chisos Mountains, which stretch on over twenty miles of the U.S.-Mexico Border and have peaks that are over 7,000 feet high. I challenge the U.S. government to stop him with a 30-foot wall.
Top: The Rio Grande as seen from a nature trail in Big Bend National Park. The near riverbank is the United States. The far riverbank is Mexico. Bottom: Trinkets sold by illegal migrants at the hot springs trailhead in Big Bend National Park near the US Mexico border.
“Viruses are not contagious!! OHMYGOD!!” “Everyone who’s interested in men’s clothing seems to be a fascist.” “Don’t get all existential about it.”
april 13, 2018 3
ARTS&CULTURE
The Battle of Forgetting
Viet Thanh Nguyen Rewrites the Vietnam War By Lauren Aratani illustration by remy poisson "I'm a refugee. It feels funny to say that because if you look at me, it’s obvious that I made the transition from refugee to bourgeoisie,” said Viet Thanh Nguyen as he stood in front of a packed room in Pembroke Hall on Wednesday night. Just moments before, as Nguyen first took the podium, he whipped out his phone. “I’m going to do what I always do at lectures,” he said as he filmed the audience from left to right. “I can’t help it—I’m Asian.”
When writing The Sympathizer, Nguyen said he wanted to write a novel that offends everybody (“except the Pulitzer Prize committee,” he joked), forcing people, especially U.S. readers, to see...themselves as inhuman This kind of sarcastic, biting humor may seem familiar to those who know Nguyen’s writing, the most famous of which is his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer. The novel is about an undercover Vietnamese spy who is loyal to North Vietnam but is part of the U.S. military in South Vietnam. When the U.S. troops go back home, they take the nameless narrator with them, and he becomes a refugee, still undercover, in a new land. I’ve read The Sympathizer for two of my classes, and I have to admit that it’s not an easy book to digest. Flashbacks get conflated with the present, there are no quotation marks to separate dialogue from narration, and the narrator himself remains nameless throughout the entire book, which is unsettling. But after listening to Nguyen speak during his lecture Wednesday and attending the seminar he held with undergraduates Thursday morning, I have a new appreciation for the book. Though I originally cast off the novel as confusing and opaque, hearing Nguyen speak about his writing and the purpose he undertook when writing The Sympathizer helped me understand
ARTS&CULTURE the larger message it carries about memory. Nguyen’s lecture discussed his ideas of memory and three different types of remembering that define war. These modes of remembering revolve around what people view as human or inhuman. The first mode is “remembering one’s own,” which entails believing that your own people are human and should never be forgotten, while the enemy is inhuman. The second mode is “remembering others”: seeing both yourself and the enemy as human. The third is what Nguyen called “the more radical version of remembering others,” which is believing that you and your own people are inhuman, while the enemy is human. This third mode of memory can be seen in The Sympathizer. So often we encounter movies, television shows, and novels that depict the war and its fallout for the United States, yet the narratives rarely focus on the resulting destruction of Vietnam and the plight of Vietnamese refugees. When writing The Sympathizer, Nguyen said he wanted to write a novel that offends everybody (“except the Pulitzer Prize committee,” he joked), forcing people, especially U.S. readers, to see the Vietnam War in that radical third mode of memory where they see themselves as inhuman. He framed the novel as a confession of one Vietnamese to another, centering the Vietnamese perspective and directly challenging the U.S.-centric viewpoint of the Vietnam War. In the novel, Vietnamese characters are both the victims and the killers. The mixture somehow allows them to retain their humanity. Even though Nguyen wrote his novel with radicalism in mind, he describes himself as “more of a guy who is in the industry.” By that, he meant the “industry of memory”—essentially the system that capitalizes on nostalgia by selling memories in the forms of movies, television, books, museums, period costumes, and even certain tourist destinations. Nguyen expanded on this concept of a memory industry in his nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War in which he argues that a path to equality—to “just memory”—requires giving up the memory industry to “the poor, the marginalized, the different, and the demonized, or their advocates.” Nguyen’s novel trivhes to, and I would argue succeeds in, taking this industry of memory and offering it to the Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans whose narratives have been neglected. Fortunately, The Sympathizer is not the only prize-winning, bestselling novel that has entered the mainstream with the purpose of changing the industry of memory. Looking back at the past couple of years, prestigious fiction prizes like the Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize have been awarded to writers of color, such as Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad), Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killing) and Paul Beatty (The Sellout), joining Nguyen in trying to make Americans recognize that there are accounts of history that drastically differ from their own.
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures
Introducing the Ivy Film Festival’s Screenplay Selections By A&C staff illustrated by Miranda Villanueva The Ivy Film Festival’s Screenplay committee, led by Daniel Wayland ’18 and Dominique Pariso ’18, has been working hard for the past year. While the Screenplay department perhaps lacks the glamour of Programming or Industry, which schedules celebrity guests, Screenplay champions the most underrated creators of film: student writers. Submissions come from across the country and vary widely in terms of content—from stories of Jewish mafias to timetraveling bargoers. From the 88 submissions the Screenplay committee received, the team has curated a group of 15 finalists spread over five categories. This diverse body of work will be showcased at a table reading, on Saturday, at 11 a.m. in the Granoff Auditorium. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Q: Could you tell us about the submission process and where these scripts come from? DW: [The 88 we received] was a record for us. I think our goal is trying to get as close to 100 as possible. There was definitely a wide range of graduate and undergraduate submissions; there was definitely a lot of Brown participation, but it really spreads out throughout the country. A lot of places like Emerson, USC, and NYU send us a lot of scripts. Q: Could you explain the different categories for submissions? DP: We have our pilot category, which is undergraduates and graduates lumped together. We have our short category…[and] our feature category, which [are both] split into undergraduate and graduate. So there are five categories overall. Q: So what are the screenplays like in the pilot category? DP: We have three. The first one is Murder INC., which is a historical, hour-long drama that follows a group of Jewish men getting involved in the mafia. And we have one called The Reboot, which is a cute, animated, half-hour comedy that’s more of a script for teenagers. And we have The Pezzullos, a 30-minute comedy satirizing the Italian-American mafia. DW: [The Pezzullos is] about a guy trying to leave a crime family who gets promoted, becoming the sort of reluctant Don of the family.
4 post–
ARTS&CULTURE Q: Are writers submitting pilots just turning in a single episode, or is there a larger outline?
Q: Both of you have been on Programming in the past [This is Ballarini’s fourth year and Venkatesh’s third year] on staff. What has changed compared to previous years?
DW: We don’t get future plan sheets or things like that. I’d say pilots are the category we treat most differently [from] others because we’re thinking about how these narrative trajectories might play out over a season. If it feels like it’s too contained of a script, that works against a pilot. It helps to have a kind of road map to the season within the first episode. Q: Could you talk a little about the graduate feature category? DP: Yeah, we have three finalists. The first is called Élan, which is based on a true story about the Elan school, which was a private institution where “problem” kids were sent and often abused. DW: We also have Bin, which charts the relationship between a young Muslim boy and an Iman, and it kind of has a Good Will Hunting feel. And then the last one is Zenith, which is a self-discovery story. DP: [Zenith is] about a black woman who is adopted into an all-white Mennonite community who then goes into the city to find her biological family and discovers her identity in some ways. Those are all very serious dramas. Q: And you mentioned Emerson, USC, and NYU. Are you reaching out to these organizations, or are they finding you? DP: They usually find us, for the most part…Our marketing department does a really great job getting the word out. DW: And then we have an outreach department that works with satellite film festivals and reaches out to other schools. We have a solid reach now—I think we’ve sort of built up a base. When Shia LaBeouf came on Monday, he mentioned that he submitted his screenplay to us because we’re listed on one of the top 50 film festivals to submit screenplays to. Q: But Shia LaBeouf's screenplay was not chosen? DP: Unfortunately, Shia LaBeouf's not a student. But we did have fun reading that one. We read it anyway just for kicks. It’s being produced now. It’s called Honeyboy, and it’s based on his childhood growing up in Hollywood. Lucas Hedges, I think, was just cast to play young Shia, and Shia’s playing his father. DW: Through Film Freeway, [the website he submitted his screenplay to], the Industry people were able to reach out and [get him to come to campus]. Q: Is there anything else Brown should know about IFF Screenplay? DP: A lot of our screenwriters are coming. They’re visiting campus for the weekend. So for the screenwriting community here at Brown, it’s a really great opportunity to come and network and chat and talk about the craft, and this is the one event where screenwriting like this is really showcased on campus, and there’s a huge community of writers out there on campus who sometimes don’t feel really connected to each other, so if you come and meet people, it’s a really good way to get everyone in a room. DQ: Last thing, just kind of a shameless plug about [Screenplay], the reason we have such a strong body of work this year in terms of our finalists and nominees is because of the work that our team [of 16 people] did. I think we had an exceptional [group]...that was really committed to doing heavy lifting. Our team was awesome this year.
LIFESTYLE
Short and Smart Introducing the Ivy Film Festival’s Official Selection
By A&C Staff illustrated by katya labowe-stoll Out of the nearly 500 submissions it received, the Ivy Film Festival will air 25 student-made short films during three sessions on Friday (4:30 p.m.), Saturday (3 p.m.), and Sunday (1 p.m.) in the Granoff Martinos Auditorium. Post- spoke to Cristina Ballarini ’18 and Kripa Venkatesh ’19, the directors of the Programming division and its 21 staff members. Ballarini and Venkatesh explained the process that went into choosing the short films and what to expect of the Official Selection. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Q: Could you explain the selection process? Christina Ballarini: We assign each member of our staff about three films to watch each week, they write a little review in the master spreadsheet, and, if they like anything, we bring it up and screen it at [our weekly] group meeting. Early on, we vote whether to give it a 1, 2, 3, or 4, and later on, whether we want to keep it in the selection or not. Kripa Venkatesh: We try to encourage each person’s reviews to be on the film’s conceptual merits, technical merits, and writing and acting performances. Those are the three umbrellas we look for. Other than that, we try to encourage the staff to look at how [a film] looks in the Selection and what IFF stands to promote. Q: Could you give an example of a film that was really important to watch as a group? KV: [A film we discussed at the end] was Sober Octaves (showing on Friday), which is actually this visual album, which wouldn’t [normally] be seen in a film festival. The themes of the music alone and the visuals were crazy, [and] it’s actually by a group at Brown [called] Diaspora...It’s five music videos, but there are overarching themes throughout and recurring characters...and there are some really cool computer graphics in it. Q: As you got closer to the festival, did you have a group of finalists? When did you choose the official selection? CB: Things we felt pretty good about, we piled them on the shortlist, and once we got toward the festival, things became a little bit clearer. KV: We actually decided our final selection right before spring break, so a month and a half ago we started getting really serious about the shortlist.
CB: I think there is a lot more focus on what kinds [of ] things we reward as a student film festival... One thing that is cool about student films is they get to try a lots of things. It doesn’t always work...But there has been a lot more desire to reward things that don’t completely work [but] are conceptually interesting. KV: I feel like IFF’s position has really strengthened in the past three years, so [we have] been thinking about what films would benefit from being in our selection. Ballarani and Venkatesh cited Cry Baby (Friday), an animated short by a RISD student, Xiner Jiang, as an example of the sort of experimental work the festival is championing. Cry Baby uses cutouts of live-action people, overlaid with narration of a woman calling her mom, to create tension between the image and sound. Q: What other films should people be paying attention to? CB: Sin Cielo (Sunday) is this American Film Institute film, which we usually tend to be pretty skeptical of because they have these huge budgets and tend to be indulgent, but this one was so good. It’s about this border town and this romance between a young man and a young woman. There is always this presence with the town, a danger. You think there is organized crime. KV: There is a dark shadow looming that no one talks about. There is more not present in the film than there is. Eventually, it becomes devastating...I really like Life After (Saturday), a graduate film about how an Indian mother copes with her daughter’s death and finding out about her daughter’s identity. CB: Klarinet Klub (Friday) [is] a U.S. undergraduate comedy. The official blurb is: A boy is pressured by his gynecologist father into performing a Caesarean section at his school’s talent show….It is basically about a person who loves his clarinet and his community. It is so beautiful. The production design is impeccable, and I feel like it is a style of comedy that Brown students will really jive with. The longest film, The Little Dictator (Saturday), is 28 minutes [and] is a take on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The shortest is Matter Out of Place (Sunday), [which] is two minutes long and has a stop-motion feel with weird, breathy audio. Q: Getting so many submissions, what were big themes or ideas you saw this year? CB: This year, lots of films wrestled with identity, borders, and nation. Those were the three big ones...I remember last year, [it] was bees and children, [which] made me think that people were worried about the future because the bees were dying. The IFF Programming staff awards a prize to the best film in each of the seven categories, while the audiences vote on an Audience Award. A panel of industry professionals chooses the top honor, the Special Grand Jury Prize. IFF films will screen its selection in Los Angeles in June and at universities both in the United States and around the world during the next school year.
april 13, 2018 5
NARRATIVE
Gender Revalligator
Nation-Building and Narrative Around Gender Reveals Written by Tal Frieden Illustrated By Molly young Maybe you've seen them on your newsfeed— people cutting cakes, opening fake presents, shooting guns at tannerite explosive, all leading up to the magical ~reveal~, blue or pink. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re missing out. There’s an entire genre of videos dedicated to announcing the gender of an expecting couple’s newest addition to the family. The videos are presumably intended to be shared with family members, but the most outlandish often go viral. As if the doctor’s “It’s a —!” weren’t enough as a performative speech act (meaning that the baby becomes legible as a particular gender through the doctor’s utterance), these couples gender their children through an expansive array of technologies. When a soon-to-be father shoots a rifle with a sniper attachment off of a pickup truck in Granbury, Texas— an act which is then digitally recorded, uploaded to YouTube, and watched over 40,000 times—the baby’s gender becomes part of a larger web of nation-building ideology. It’s not the doctor who decides the gender here, and it’s not really the father either. The gun, the bullet, the tannerite explosive, and the pickup truck are the agents that come together to produce the gender, signified through a cloud of pink smoke. There is an assumed agreement between the viewer, the father and videographer, and the tannerite. Pink = girl = female, blue = boy = male. While there is no explicit reference to sex, a prenatal assessment of gender or
The main question we’re left with is, who is performing the reveal? In other words, who is speaking, who is calling the baby’s gender into existence? sex could only rely on sex characteristics such as those identifiable via ultrasound technology, and not the child’s self-identification. It is here, on the back of this Texan pickup truck, that gender becomes ideologically bound to sex, because before the fetus is even separated from the womb, it can be characterized by a plume of pink smoke. The instant these cultural icons (blue, pink) are assigned to biological sex, we link the realm of sex to gender and biology to culture. While the parent in this video hits a bullseye, ultrasound technology often misses the mark—sex assignments via ultrasound are only 75% consistent, according to an article published in the Australian Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. This genre of video also makes interesting claims about (un)awareness. Never does the viewer see the
person who “sets up” the reveal, who picks the pink paint. It’s sometimes unclear whether the parents already know what color they’ll find, or whether that really matters. Presumably, the information that determines the color in the explosive is determined by someone operating an ultrasound, who would only be able to share the information to someone other than the person carrying the baby with a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act release. The passage of information here from ultrasound machine to technician to person to explosive color to bullet to parent to phone camera to viewer is remarkable, like a game of gender-binary telephone (literally, passed as a series of binary code via cell phone). Interestingly, in some of these videos we hear an off-screen voice proclaim, “I knew it!” but it is unclear what “knowing” really means. Does the premonition of a certain sex assignment constitute knowledge? These interjectors claim that their knowledge predates the ultrasound’s and that they, too, are qualified to assign sex to an unborn fetus. My favorite bizarre gender-reveal experiment in home cinema is a video from Slidell, LA (according to the Facebook geo-location), in which a circle of smartphone-toting onlookers observe a tattooed Crocs-wearing Louisianaian wrangling a huge alligator in what appears to be someone’s backyard (we can see a basketball hoop, garage, driveway—all the typical fixings of suburbia). Again, there’s a ten-foot long alligator, in someone’s backyard, wrestling with a tattooed man in Crocs. The man is handed what appears to be a watermelon and pries the alligator’s mouth open. Then the alligator’s mouth snaps shut, almost chomping the man’s hand. Again, the jaws are pulled open, and this time the watermelon is dropped inside. As the ten-foot long amphibian’s jaws pull together, the watermelon is smashed, spewing what looked like blue Jello. We hear hoots and hollers—“It’s a boy!” The alligator starts to move—“It’s on the run!” The man returns from hugging his presumed partner to subdue the animal-announcer, pressing down on the alligator’s jaw. Reinforcements come in, and two people clamp down the jaw, pushing
“I say, let me eat, you bureaucratic heathens.” —Kathy Luo, SciLi Staplers Suck 4.13.17
“I just googled salad bra, and evidently your bras will last years longer if you toss them around in a salad spinner with some gentle detergent like little gems of lettuce.” —Pia Mileaf-Patel, Salads ‘n’ Stuff 4.13.17
6 post–
the animal’s body to the ground. The main question we’re left with is, who is performing the reveal? In other words, who is speaking, who is calling the baby’s gender into existence? The alligator in the video is in the yard, a guest at the party just like the humans (though it is quite rude to play with the mouth of a party guest). There’s no denying that the alligator performs an intentional role here—the watermelon could have just as easily been smashed on the driveway, or the ‘gender’ could have been ‘revealed’ through a short SMS. Instead, the alligator is given the honor of gendering a prenatal fetus, with the help of some humans and their Jello-filled watermelon. This gator-reveal, alongside the rifle-reveal, puts on display the ways in which the ideologies of nation and region play out in the field of gender. For the Texan, the rifle is the device through which gender may be ‘revealed,’ and for the Louisianian, it’s the gator. Kylie Jenner’s reveal included a professional photographer and confetti cannons, with luxury cars in the background. A luau-themed gender reveal party asked the question, “Will it be a hula boy or a hula girl?” A video from Illinois features pink and blue pumpkins. The translation of information from ultrasound imaging to blue Jello or pink explosive activates a wealth of cultural assumptions and understandings linking biological sex to socialized gender. Objects and animals are transformed into accoutrements to underline the context through which the unborn baby will become their assigned sex/gender. Through their relationship to the rifle and the gator, these Americans will come to understand and negotiate their genders. It’s worth noting that the ultrasound and the doctor’s office are themselves two alternative media through which to understand gender and sex, no less politically and historically relavent than the rifle or the gator. Regardless of the media used, all of these videos left me asking, why do we really want to know the sex? EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ARTS & CULTURE
LAYOUT
Saanya Jain
Managing Editor
Ro Antia
a
Josh Wartel
Nina Yuchi
FEATURE
Section Editors
Jacob Lee
Managing Editor
Celina Sun
Jennifer Osborne
Marly Toledano
MEDIA
Section Editors
Julian Castronovo
Claribel Wu
Anita Sheih Kathy Luo
Samantha Haigood DESIGN
Anita Sheih
Sarah Saxe NARRATIVE
ILLUSTRATION
Managing Editors
COPY
Miranda Villanueva
Annabelle Wood-
Chief Alicia DeVos
Phoebe Ayres
ward
Zander Kim
Pia Mileaf-Patel
Amanda Ngo
Section Editor Divya Santhanam
Want to be involved? Email: post@browndailyherald.com!