engender
healthy relationships issue
a p roduction of the
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Contents Letter from the Ed ito
rs
A Leaf in Your Hand Alexia Rauen
hy You! The Best You Is a Healt Catalina Malinowski
Untitle Bethan d1 y Lynn Fowler This Time Anna Durham
Bethany
Untitled 2 Lynn Fo wler
laylist nships P io t la e R onado Healthy Dani Mald
This zine is a collection of thoughts, comments, and research on gender and related topics. It is a continuation of the discussions that are already happening within the Rice community and beyond. The purpose of this zine is to create a platform that consolidates ideas and perspectives to give voice to concerns specific to our Rice community.Our goal is to engage the entire campus by exposing students to conversations on gender and sexuality, among other things, through a unique lens—a lens created by and for our community!
Letter from the Editors
We publish this issue with a focus on healthy relationships, looking ahead to the coming month and its focus on intimacy and love. From Valentine’s Day to the Vagina Monologues, individuals of every background and orientation are inundated with messages of partner- and self- love. While relationships can be an incredibly uplifting and important part of life, they also have the potential to be draining, damaging, or even abusive. We’ve chosen to focus this month’s issue on the idea of healthy relationships, stressing the importance of not only acknowledging your own experiences but also validating the experiences of your partners, friends, and family. This issue uses art, poetry, and essay to explore healthy relationships—we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together! We hope that this zine will engender discussion among friends, classmates, and colleagues about the many ways in which gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by our culture. We welcome your feedback and contributions—contact us at womenrc@rice.edu or stop by the Rice Women’s Resource Center in the RMC. Thank you for reading, and be on the lookout for future issues of engender! Anna Durham and Julian Wilson Editors-in-Chief
A LEAF IN YOUR HAND Alexia Rauen
if you only held the leaf
in your palm, instead of
shre d d i n g
it at the veins, the way they become isolated
if you r i p
at the sharpness of the lines
I know it may only be out of boredom. but Would it be alright, I ask, to pick the leaf up off the ground simply hold it and place it back on the branch the tree has lost it, but maybe you could give it back?
If you must, simply listen. Could you?
The Best You is a Healthy You! Catalina Malinowski
Healthy relationships with others are incredibly important, yet no external relationships can exist or be maintained if you are not cultivating a healthy state physically, emotionally, spiritually, or even mentally. Especially on a college campus, it is very easy for people not to nurture the most important relationship there is—the one with yourself. While it may seem like you can balance a healthy relationship with a friend or a significant other amongst whatever other fifty billion things you may be involved in at Rice, everything kind of falls apart when you’re not well. I’m pretty sure that everyone has gotten to a point where you are so overwhelmed with work, life, stress, or anything, really, that it starts to affect your interactions with others. Of everything I have experienced here at Rice, there are three general things that have helped me (and now hopefully you!) to have a happier and healthier relationship with myself:
Take time for yourself!
Even if you have a bajillion things to do, take a step back from it all and take time out of your day to have a little so-called “you time”. Whether that involves writing in a journal, watching netflix, going biking, or even just a walk around the inner loop, do it! You will be pleasantly surprised by how much stress just eases off. This time gives your mind a chance to take a break and relax from the mayhem going on around you.
Take care of your wellbeing.. seriously.
I’m pretty sure that we’ve all heard it from our parents a million times by now, but I know we’ve all been guilty of letting meals slide by and sleep deprivation accumulate—come on now, we’re better than that. Make sure you eat! If your excuse is that you don’t have
time, then how will you have energy to do everything that has you so overwhelmed? Eating gives you a break to socialize and refuel before tackling your workload again. Sleep! Get enough sleep, or at least try to nap every now and then. I know it gets difficult when exams suddenly are hitting you back to back, but you need it—you know you need it—especially since you can only function so long on coffee and energy drinks!
Laugh! Whether if it’s goofing around with friends or taking a break from studying to watch a silly video, everyone needs to laugh at the very least once a day. Laughing even helps you burn calories! A good laughter session will definitely help bring in those abs for the summer, especially if you have one of those deep down to your belly laughs. But seriously, laughter helps you feel better, relieves built up stress, and just brightens your day in every way possible!
At the end of the day, do whatever works best for you and especially do what makes you happy. If what you’re doing doesn’t make you happy, change it! Any healthy relationship you foster with someone else will always come back to the relationship you have with yourself. Do what you love, enjoy what makes you happy, and everything else will fall in place from there.
Untitled 1 Bethany Lynn Fowler
That boy must be an idiot. He thinks I’m talented—what a fool! He says I’m smart and even charming: Quite delusional. What’s more, he says I’m gorgeous! I would swear to God he’s blind. Only not, of course, since he is perfect Besides agreeing to be mine.
This Time Anna Durham
My grandmother’s cancer came back after nineteen years of hiding small and silent, deep inside her right breast. It snuck up on her, a dark spot on a mammogram, like an inkblot test—what do you see in that image, doc? This time around, I was older. I witnessed her strength, her pain. She looked for reassuring signs from my late grandfather in the way that crows flew around the parking lot of her grocery store. She grabbed at wooden spoons for support, cooking all her worries into my breakfast so that I could consume them, drawing them out of her chest so that they hung in the air, obvious but unexpressed. She called me, and my mother, and my aunt, and spoke to us warmly, warningly. This time around, she had company. Her sister-in-law was going through chemo around the same time, maybe on the same day, that my grandmother found out. They spoke on the phone, then in person, and something splintered. My grandmother had been a veteran, a survivor, guiding her sister-in-law through thinning hair and sickly pink presents; now she was a companion, lapsed back into the race. It felt like shame, that after all this time, it was rearing its ugly head again. This time around, they skipped the preamble. She sliced off her breast, cast it away, a traitor in her body. No scooping out of tumors, no severing of my lymph nodes—just gone, gone, the whole thing gone. They found more cancer while they were there, surprise cancer. It’s always a surprise. They cut that out, too, but we never know what it means. She hurt, and then she didn’t. She’s still getting well, still looking for signs in rainbows and hummingbird flights. It isn’t over.
When you hear about healthy relationships, you hear about romance: husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, high school sweethearts or dating in old age. Nobody ever talks about family, having these great blossoming parts of you that keep growing up your sides like ivy until the tendrils are buried so far in your heart that you’d go, too, if you tried to pull them out. But that needs to be healthy, too. You need to prune and water and love that ivy, keeping it grounded with heavy supportive words so that the wind can’t blow it away. This time, I watched my grandmother lean on her sister, hold up her sister-in-law, and call out to her late husband. I spent long nights crying, sometimes to my mother, making her carry me even while she drove to and from appointments, stubbornly insisting on activity and passion and life-fullness when my grandmother was so very tired. I heard about my aunt driving, terrified, in a snowstorm to get her home, and of my grandmother laughing madly the whole time. These are the pieces that make me whole. These relationships are the healthy ones, the ones by which I model the rest of my life: supportive, laughing, beautiful, fixing the broken parts of another with food and paint and love.
Untitled 2 Bethany Lynn Fowler
It’s cold outside. Through the windows and through the sheets, I can feel it. My body aches at the thought of stepping into it, into the dark, between the trees, over puddles that glimmer but don’t reflect. Silent thanks to the night for hiding the scene I know all too well. His hands are on my waist. I wonder whether anyone will be home, if the neighbors will be awake or if I’ll have to slip off my shoes before heading up the stairs, taking out my earrings, creeping into my own bed. I try to remember if I left the heat on. His head is on my chest. My hands grasp one another. I fight the urge to trace my fingers along his, to touch him, to taste and smell him and let myself be brought back to the man I last loved. It’s not like that. I can play it cool. He kisses me on the neck. Up. I have to find my socks. One more moment and I’ll be asleep and a burden. Unwelcome. Unwanted. Expired. Another clingy girl. Another story to lament to his friends. He kisses me again. Slowly. Carefully. “Don’t you want me to leave?” “Never.” Huh. Imagine that.
-Dani Maldonado
see you in the next issue of the engender zine!
Editors in Chief
Anna Durham and Julian Wilson
Contributing Authors
Alexia Rauen Catalina Malinowski Bethany Lynn Fowler Anna Durham Dani Maldonado
Want your ideas on gender issues published in future engender zines? We welcome all original content, both visual and written - anything from commentaries to comics to recycled academic papers. We want your thoughts represented! See back cover for more information.
Want to submit someting to the next edition of engender? Sent your submission to womenrc@rice.edu!