The College Hill Independent — Vol 49 Issue 1

Masthead

MANAGING EDITORS

Jolie Barnard

Plum Luard

Luca Suarez

WEEK IN REVIEW

Ilan Brusso

Ben Flaumenhaft

ARTS

Beto Beveridge

Nan Dickerson

Paulina Gąsiorowska

EPHEMERA

Anji Friedbauer

Selim Kutlu

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

FEATURES

Riley Gramley

Angela Lian

Talia Reiss

LITERARY

Sarkis Antonyan

Georgia Turman

METRO

Cameron Leo

Lily Seltz

METABOLICS

Brice Dickerson

Nat Mitchell

Daniel Zheng

SCIENCE + TECH

Emilie Guan

Everest Maya-Tudor

Emily Vesper

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Ash Ma

WORLD

Aboud Ashhab

Ivy Rockmore

DEAR INDY

Kalie Minor

BULLETIN BOARD

Qiaoying Chen

Gabi Yuan

DESIGN EDITORS

April S. Lim

Andrew Liu

Anaïs Reiss

DESIGNERS

Mary-Elizabeth Boatey

Jolin Chen

Sejal Gupta

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Seoyeon Kweon

Saachi Mehta

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Rachel Shin

COVER COORDINATORS

Kian Braulik

Brandon Magloire

STAFF WRITERS

Layla Ahmed

Tanvi Anand

Hisham Awartani

Arman Deendar

Nura Dhar

Keelin Gaughan

Lily Ellman

David Felipe

Audrey He

Martina Herman

Elena Jiang

Daniel Kyte-Zable

Emily Mansfield

Nadia Mazonson

Coby Mulliken

Daphne Mylonas

Naomi Nesmith

Caleb Rader

William Roberts

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Natalie Svob

Tarini Tipnis

Ange Yeung

Peter Zettl

COPY CHIEF

Samantha Ho

COPY EDITORS /

FACT-CHECKERS

Justin Bolsen

Jackie Dean

Jason Hwang

Avery Liu

Becca Martin-Welp

Lila Rosen

Bardia Vincent

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Julia Cheng

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Mia Cheng

Anna Fischler

Mekala Kumar

Mingjia Li

Ellie Lin

Cindy Liu

Ren Long

Benjamin Natan

Jessica Ruan

Jackson Ruddick

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Elliot Stravato

Luna Tobar

Catie Witherwax

Lily Yanagimoto

Alena Zhang

Nicole Zhu

WEB EDITOR

Eleanor Park

WEB DESIGNERS

Kenneth Anderson

Jinho Lee

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Annika Singh

Brooke Wangenheim

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

Kalie Minor

Nat Mitchell

Eurie Seo

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

SENIOR EDITORS

Arman Deendar

Angela Lian

Lily Seltz

MVP

Jed

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

*Our Beloved Staff

Week in

We’re So Back

( TEXT ILAN BRUSSO & BEN FLAUMENHAFT

DESIGN MARY-ELIZABETH BOATEY ILLUSTRATION ELLIOT STRAVATO )

“We’re so back. We’re so totally back. Back and better than ever. Back with the best. We’re back bitches! Bitches, we’re back! New dorm, same tea. Back! Back! Back!” At least, this is what our friend Regina Spektor sang out as we three plopped down our luggage outside Perkins Palace and took a deep breath of that sweet, sweet Providence air. Inhale. Exhale. Perfection. But what Regina said about being back is only sort of applicable to us as we clack away on our shared keyboard from the secret gay club attached to the SciLi. We are back in Providence, but we are new to this section. We are Ilan and Ben, and we stand ready to write.

One of our special talents, along with cuticle care and topiary, is a little thing called ~divination~. We see it all (everything!) unfolding before us, and we aren’t going to waste a second playing dead. This semester we want to be not dead at all which is to say we want to be ALIVE. We want to take it all in as if we’ve never seen it before, like we are alive for the first time. Yes, like we are as alive as we possibly can be, and it is for the first time!!!!!!!! Picture a child wearing a sundress noticing the smeared rainbow of an oil stain on asphalt. She thinks to herself: beautiful! That is us. We are that kid, seeing the Mona Lisa in the mud. We almost can’t believe ourselves! We see the Mona Lisa in the mud! How special of us! We are such good boys! Oh to be a kid again! As we get older and ever closer to whatever day it is that we will die, we learn that life is short, but the summer is looong. Long enough to start on Long Island and end in Edinburgh, or Paris, or Pennsylvania. Long enough to swim all day and then go play hopscotch, eat dinner, watch TV, and swim all over again, wearing the same damn bathing suit…so gross that it’s even good!! Long enough that lots of moments weren’t good at all, like when Ilan had to gentle parent his boss or when Ben clocked his own tea. What do we do with moments like these? Well, we dust off the dust. We see the Mona Lisa in the mud. The summer was long so we made it golden. But literally nothing gold can stay. Later that same day, Regina told us something troubling, something that killed our joyous back-ness until it was all the way dead. Regina said, “Wanna get coffee at Small Point?” In unison, we deflated. With our second year in Providence about to commence, we looked out over the city from College Hill and recognized almost nothing, like a blurry photo taken by a

dirty iPhone camera that had dirt on it. We had never even heard of Small Point. Come to think of it, we hardly ever leave campus! Come to think of it, we’ve never even been on campus at all! The city is our campus! And we’ve seen none of it! Well actually, we’ve seen some of it. We’ll never forget the time we stretched our slim selves flat on mats at the swingin’ hot yoga joint in Olneyville. Only in Olney! And what about that jaunty little bitch named Heather who gave us sexful cheek kisses under the pedestrian bridge? My oh my! Ugh, and then that time we (again) ran into Heather at India Point Park, and she briefly flirted with us before promptly exploding into 12 million doves. #canonevent.

But other than that, the city remains mysterious. There are buildings here that are really tall, and pits in the ground that stretch deep into the mantle. This semester (this damn semester!) we will finally get to know Providence, joined by our posse of friends: Regina Spektor, Laffin’ Lucy, Zoe, Honest Abe, Julia, George, Amelia, and more! This is a city of vicious symmetry and each week we seek to explore a unique facet of its glorious folds. These people and places most certainly have a thing or two to teach us. Our arms are outstretched. We are ready. Are you?

ILAN BRUSSO B'27 and BEN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 know nothing, which is everything to them.

My Monastic Summer

An Illuminated Descent Into Vellum-Induced Madness

silverpoint, prick-marks, glair, earth, plant, and mineral pigments, charcoal, chalk on parchment (12 x 16 in.)

c Over the summer, I decided to reproduce folio 210v, one page out of a 516-page-long Medieval manuscript called the Lindisfarne Gospels. It was presumably written, illuminated, and bound sometime between 700 and 720 CE on a tiny island off the coast of Northumbria, now known as England. It is described by medievalist and manuscript curator Janet Backhouse as “the most complete and best documented of all the Insular Gospel books of its period.” The page itself is a carpet/window/prayermat-like composition, brimming with polychrome cruciforms, gilded spirals, over-entangled birds, and interlaced dog heads. However, as one does, I wanted to execute this idea as faithfully as possible to the materials, techniques, and personal experiences of the 8th-century monk Eadfrith, the alleged sole author of said manuscript. Across time and space,

the monk and I were in this one together. He made these 516 pages in about ten years—how complicated could it all be?

I acquired a leaf of goatskin vellum, I sketched the design of folio 210v (in reverse!) onto the back of the leaf with a drypoint and straight edge, I pricked the design’s points of intersection through the back onto the front of the page with a divider compass I had not used since high school math class, I covered the front of the page with a mixture of gelatin, chalk, and water, I connected the points of intersection with silverpoint, I did not use a ruler because I was working with a primary spacing system of 2.8882.906 mm—obviously, a ruler would not have made any sense, I prepared my paints by mixing natural pigments with egg glair (the yellowish goo that remains when you whip up egg whites and let them

rest for an entire day in room temperature and then remove the foam off the top) and vinegar, I applied my paint *carefully* onto the front (not the back! Make sure it’s not the back!) of the leaf, I filled in the rest of the spaces with charcoal, I accentuated all the contours with charcoal too (i.e. I sketched the entire thing all over again), and then I realized my summer was over. That must mean I’m all done, right? Right?? I only have 515 pages left to go.

PAULINA GĄSIOROWSKA B’27 is happy the BAI is down to dedicate grants to her weird ideas.

New Duties, Same Demands

Community Coordinators strike a path forward

c It was a freshman move-in like no other. On Wednesday, August 28, there were no student residential workers stationed to check in the class of 2028. Instead of carrying suitcases and boxes to Keeney dorm rooms, Community Coordinators (CCs) carried protest signs, drums, and megaphones. Beginning at 7 a.m., dozens of CCs picketed in the first undergraduate union strike in Brown’s history.

The labor action came after almost seven months of bargaining between the Labor Organization of Community Coordinators (LOCC) and the University. CCs entered negotiations with a variety of demands, including increased compensation, a formal grievance procedure, a protected rehire policy, and standardized job responsibilities. The union’s goal was to have a contract in place before the start of this academic year, but by late August, no agreement had been reached.

On August 26, the union filed an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that the University had engaged in “surface bargaining.”

Per the NLRB, “employers have a legal duty to bargain in good faith with their employees’ representative.” Surface bargaining occurs when one party—typically the employer—negotiates without the intention of reaching an agreement.

“A lot of our bargaining has felt like this,” said LOCC organizer Anna Ryu B’25, a thirdtime CC. “We are starting somewhere, and it’s not that we are trying to progress further and fight for better conditions. The University and ResLife are setting the goalposts back and forcing us to bargain back to the status quo.”

The union also filed a second ULP charge over a lack of flexibility regarding training attendance. According to Ryu, ResLife threatened to fire CCs who were unable to attend all training sessions due to conflicting athletic schedules or TA orientation.

“That felt very unfair to me, especially because these students did everything in their power to let admin know,” said Gaayatri Godbole B’25, also a third-time CC.

Previously, informal accommodations were made for CCs who held other positions on campus. LOCC’s filing alleges that this move constitutes an unlawful unilateral change to working conditions.

On Sunday, August 25, union members voted to authorize a strike over Brown’s alleged Unfair Labor Practices.

The union announced the following five strike demands:

Align CC job expectations for the upcoming academic year with the 2024-2025 Job Description distributed to CCs at their time of hiring.

A protected process for rehiring CCs who

perform the job well and express the intent to return, as has been practiced in past years.

Flexibility around training week conflicts for CCs with other on-campus obligations, as has been policy in past years.

No reductions in the budgets that CCs are allotted to provide community building programming for their Residents.

A compensation proposal that addresses CC needs for Room and Board.

LOCC announced the strike the following morning. Hours later, during their final training session, CCs were informed that their job responsibilities had changed. Now, if two CCs collaborated on an event, only one would receive credit. They would need to host six “engagement hours” and two educational events on a mere $250 budget. Perhaps the most distressing change was the restructuring of Bear Talks, a program which previously consisted of optional one-on-one talks with residents. Going forward, CCs would be required to complete individual 30-minute meetings with every resident by October 13. With some CCs overseeing nearly 50 residents, this seemed an arduous task that would significantly increase their expected working hours.

“I wonder how much residents even want this,” said Godbole, who works in an upperclassman dorm, serving residents who are generally already integrated into the Brown community.

“Basically, we were told that our jobs would be made four times harder, four times more work…Our jobs were just completely redefined in a way that was more restrictive, more demanding, and more unreasonable. Unrealistic, to be honest,” said Ryu.

“Some CCs were so upset they were in tears because it’s like, ‘What has this job become?’” Ryu continued. “A CC I know who has literally an entire dorm to herself…she was like, ‘I cannot do all of that by myself.’”

When CCs sought clarification on their new duties from their Area Coordinators, minimal explanation was provided, Ryu said.

The CCs who spoke with the Indy expressed feeling devalued by the administration. This sense was renewed when University spokesperson Brian Clark described the CC role to the Brown Daily Herald, implying that the scope of CC’s responsibilities does not warrant a pay increase.

Previously, LOCC proposed an annual stipend of $17,444, a sum equal to the current cost of room and board. (CCs currently earn $10,500 per year.) The union claims the proposed stipend is comparable to the compensation earned by residential assistants at peer institutions. But in his statement to the Herald, Clark challenged the idea that the CC role is analogous to other residential assistant positions.

Clark said Area Coordinators, not CCs, are “responsible for response to policy violations, individual student support, crisis intervention, serving as staff on-call, helping with lockouts and addressing facilities concerns.” It was a characterization many CCs took issue with.

“It felt disrespectful to our CCs who work in these positions,” said Godbole. “This is not really a job where you sign off and you’re out of work for the rest of the day. Things can come up any time, and those things can last for days or weeks and have a really personal effect on you and your residents.”

Both Ryu and Godbole said the work CCs end up performing often falls outside the bounds

( TEXT LAYLA AHMED & EM ILY VESPER DESIGN ANAÏS REISS ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ )

of the job description. CCs are Campus Security Authorities under the Clery Act, meaning they are obligated to report criminal offenses. Ryu recalled several occasions in which a resident disclosed information which she was forced to escalate to the Conduct and Title IX offices. She has also supported residents with facilities requests.

“We are not on-call on paper, but we are effectively on-call. If a resident knocks on our door at 3 a.m., we’re gonna respond,” Ryu said.

The strike began at Keeney, where picketing CCs and community members drummed, chanted, and marched while passing out pamphlets to freshmen and their families. From there, the crowd walked to a noon rally on the steps of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center. They were joined by several notable community members, including state senators, city council members, and a representative from the American Federation of Teachers, the union’s national body. They finished the day with protests in front of north campus dormitories.

Because this was an Unfair Labor Practice strike, the University was legally prohibited from hiring replacement workers. As such, they relied on volunteers—many of whom were employees of the Admissions Office—to staff the move-in. Bruno Leaders and Meiklejohn peer advisors were also asked to volunteer, but according to Ryu, many refused to perform tasks that fell outside the scope of their roles in solidarity with the striking workers.

During the strike, University administrators passed out a form inviting students to “voluntarily reaffirm [their] commitment” to the CC role. In response, LOCC filed a third ULP charge on August 29, alleging that the form constituted interference with the union’s “protected concerted activity.”

A bargaining session the day after the strike began left CCs frustrated and disappointed, according to Ryu. “It felt like we went nowhere. No progress was made,” she told the Indy.

ResLife threatened to withhold pay from striking workers and revoked their swipe access to other dormitory buildings. While the University had the right to do so, CCs were nonetheless afraid and unsettled, according to Ryu. Morale was decreasing, and it had become increasingly clear that the University was unlikely to accept the proposed $17,444 stipend.

“[Room and board] was the demand that we went into this process with, and one of the demands that was the foundation of LOCC’s creation, so I think for a lot of people, that’s something they were really hoping for,” said Godbole. “Most of us

In light of this, the union made the difficult decision to shift priorities. Shortly after the bargaining session, union leaders met with representatives from the University’s bargaining team to discuss the ongoing negotiations in an off-the-record sidebar. LOCC offered to lower their proposed stipend to $12,500. In exchange, the University agreed to “move forward” with negotiations around training, job responsibilities, and the rehire process, Ryu told the Indy.

“All of it was verbal, none of it was written—which is why it’s a commitment on trust,” said Ryu. “We are all putting that trust in the bargaining that is to follow in the coming weeks. We will make progress in ways that we haven’t been able to all summer, all spring semester.”

LOCC voted to end the strike the following day. That weekend, CCs returned to their posts to assist with upperclassman move-in.

Bargaining resumed on Wednesday, September 4. Ryu and Godbole both identified a positive change in the University’s willingness to engage with the union’s proposals. “I’m seeing a different tone from admin…More cooperative and amenable to the things we’ve talked about,” said Godbole.

“We have had productive conversations in recent days, we’ll continue good-faith efforts toward LOCC’s first contract with Brown, and we’re

optimistic about additional progress as bargaining proceeds in the days to come,” Brian Clark wrote in an email to the Indy. He declined to comment on his statement to the Herald and the ULP charges.

“I’m critically and cautiously optimistic,” Ryu said. “My optimism is rooted not in some sidebar conversations with admin or some promises we’ve received by word… my optimism is in truly witnessing what we can accomplish as a collective.”

With negotiations ongoing, the full impact of the strike is still unclear. The union expects to reach agreements on training, job responsibilities, and the rehire process. Godpole is hopeful that future CCs will resume the fight for room and board in the years to come.

The strike was not without criticism. The CCs who spoke with the Indy attested to hearing negative comments about the union and the strike from fellow students, both in person and on the anonymous platform Sidechat.

“I was definitely aware that there was some backlash to the strike…Students are curious: what is this strike really about?” Godbole said. “But I think when they were made aware of the sudden

changes in the job and how ResLife was portraying CCs, there was a shift in many of their attitudes.”

“It’s really important to highlight that the strike wasn’t just about CCs, but more about how student workers are treated on this campus, and I think that can resonate with a lot of students across the campus, whether they’re CCs or not,” she continued.

For now, the union is beginning the school year with a renewed sense of strength and community, according to Ryu—and the strike is largely responsible.

“It was a really historic thing, and I hope our CCs remember that,” Ryu said. “Seeing the way CCs stepped in to support each other through the hours and hours of chanting and marching… It was very inspiring and incredible to see.”

“The fact that we went on strike, I hope, sends a message to Brown that we are not messing around,” Ryu continued. “If you try to mess with our CCs, threaten termination, change our responsibilities without any of our input, or make student workers feel disempowered… you cannot take us lightly. Because when the time comes, we will stand with each other.”

LAYLA AHMED B’27 and EMILY VESPER B’25 love their CCs.

A Free Academy for a Free Palestine

Student representatives debate on discourse and divestment

c On Wednesday, September 4, six members of the Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) stood in front of a panel of students, faculty, and staff to make their case that Brown should divest from companies facilitating Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and its longstanding occupation of the West Bank. Five days later, on Monday, September 9, several other students approached the same panel to argue against divestment. These forums came more than four months after pro-Palestinian campus protesters reached an agreement with the University that would guarantee a divestment vote by the Brown University Corporation this fall. Brown’s Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, or ACURM, will rely upon the arguments presented in these and two additional September forums to determine whether or not to recommend divestment to the Corporation prior to the vote.

The first two forums, which each comprised a 30 minute-long presentation and 45 minutes of Q&A, were intended to help committee members examine a two-pronged set of criteria for divestment: either ACURM must find “that divestment would likely have a positive impact toward correcting the specified social harm,” or “ACURM may recommend divestment when the company in question contributes to social harm so grave that it would be inconsistent with the goals and principles of the university to invest funds.”

Despite the specificity of ACURM’s charge, much of the conversation during both of the proceedings revolved around “academic freedom”—an ideal both the proponents and opponents of divestment claimed to champion.

“We are here in the spirit of academic freedom and inquiry,” said Niyanta Nepal B’25, one of the presenters for the BDC and the president of the Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS). She acknowledged that divestment is an issue on which “we will always have discourse and disagreement.” Far from stifling that discourse, she and her co-presenters argued, divestment would indicate that the University could be responsive to the outcome of a “decade” of “discussions,

debates, classes, and conferences; teach-ins, referenda, petitions, and committee deliberations.”

James Kellner, chair of ACURM, worried about the effects that a “yes” vote from Brown on divestment could have on some students’ “free inquiry.” During the Q&A portion of the forum, he mentioned a letter written by 24 state attorneys general, threatening financial consequences if Brown divests. Specifically, they warn that certain states, such as Arkansas, could be prevented by anti-Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) state legislation from contracting with Brown if it divests. “What do you say to the PhD student who’s funded by a grant that came from the University of Arkansas?” he asked the student presenters.

Rafi Ash B’26, UCS Treasurer and a member of both BDC and Brown Jews for Ceasefire Now, was quick to emphasize the dubious constitutionality of anti-BDS state laws like Arkansas’, citing the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in NAACP vs. Claiborne that recognized political boycotts as protected speech acts. The National Lawyers Guild and Muslim Legal Fund of America have also written letters supporting the legality of divestment at Brown, with the MLFA calling the signatories’ legal threats “baseless.” Pivoting Professor Kellner’s argument about academic freedom, Ash told the committee that if “the mere threat of a lawsuit is allowed to restrict the activities of our university,” it would represent “a deep sacrifice on the principles of academic freedom.”

Concerns about academic freedom also featured prominently in the anti-divestment presentation and written proposal. Students argued that if the University divests, it could “chill” campus discourse about Israel and Palestine. Echoing President Christina Paxson’s assertion that “Brown’s endowment is not a political instrument to be used to express views on complex social and political issues,” the group added that divestment would constitute a political evaluation that falls beyond the scope of ACURM’s charge.

( TEXT CAMERON LEO & LILY SELTZ DESIGN ANAÏS REISS ILLUSTRATION ALENA ZHANG & MINGJIA LI )

“ACURM’s not supposed to take a stance on a political issue. And what I think is really clear in this conversation here is that there are a lot of opinions on this political issue, right? But divestment clearly supports only one of these political opinions. It stakes itself in one side, and ACURM is not supposed to do that according to its guidelines,” one of the students stated in the forum.

Though ACURM’s guidelines caution against “partisan activities” and prohibit any action that “advances a position on social or political questions unrelated to the investment or expenditure of University financial resources under consideration,” by no means do they categorically prohibit recommendations that convey a political stance. ACURM’s predecessor, ACCRIP, has a well-documented history of making recommendations on contested political issues.

The anti-divestment presenters rejected comparisons to Brown’s divestment from South Africa, arguing that there was a global consensus present in that case that is lacking now. “Such false moral equivalencies fundamentally contradict Brown’s values of creating an environment that promotes dialogue and scholarship,” one said.

The presenters argued that investment in programs that promote peaceful dialogue both on campus and in the Middle East would be a more meaningful tool for social impact than divestment. Speakers mentioned supporting “companies that are helping to rebuild Gaza” and developing “programs to further health, education, and job training in Gaza and the West Bank.” One also suggested that Brown “somehow [create] a trip to Israel and the West Bank and Gaza to see what’s happening and learn together on both sides.”

In their presentation and written proposal, the BDC reminded ACURM, and the Brown community, that “we’re in the midst of a genocide.” Until Brown divests—even if it also invests in “rebuilding Gaza”—the university will remain complicit in the destruction of schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure in the strip, and in producing the conditions that make the provision

of basic humanitarian aid, let alone Brownsponsored trip to the region, unfathomable.

Following the BDC presentation and the Indy’s acquisition of a written proposal outlining the opposing students’ “Case Against Divestment,” the Indy reached out to BDC members to understand what “academic freedom” means to them—and to hear their responses to some of the opposing group’s claims.

Ash reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to open dialogue. “We believe deeply in the right of people who disagree to say they disagree,” they said. But Ash reminded us that BDC has a “really broad democratic mandate” from the Brown community in its push for divestment—harkening back to Nepal’s assertion, during the September 4 forum, that “disagreement cannot be a justification for inaction.”

Arman Deendar B’25, a BDC member and an organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine, elaborated on the role of conversation and dialogue in leftist movements. They mentioned the teachins and other efforts at political education that student groups and academic departments have made available to the community since October 7. “Central to all organizing is conversation,” they said. “It’s talking to your community members. It’s engaging people in the quote-unquote ‘battle of ideas.’” Arguing against the frequent characterization of progressive leftism as tending to stifle speech, Deendar continued: “It’s actually about approaching a forum where dialogue can happen.”

As the BDC attempts to make its advocacy for Palestine part of the public conversation, it faces an increasingly repressive environment—both at Brown and nationally. Deendar and Ash both expressed frustration at the narrowness of Kellner’s line of questioning after the BDC presentation. “We talk about academic freedom, [but] why aren’t we talking about… new draconian protest policies that bar protest and weaponize the bureaucracy… to further repress students?” wondered Deendar. At Brown, the administration made a push in the spring to clarify and reinforce existing policies on Protest/ Demonstration, Posting, and Greens Usage. Its

April 4 announcement of “updates” to these policies came on the heels of several months of campus-wide protest, and to Ash, that timing was intentional. “These rules are only mentioned in situations that convenience the institution,” they said. “They are not blanket applied; they are not evenly enforced.”

Ash widened the scope even further. “We’ve seen over the past year rapid restrictions on student activity, on professor activity, not just at Brown but at institutions across the country that… profess these noble ideas of free inquiry and have rapidly flipped the switch toward a much more restrictive perspective.” In an investigation by The Intercept, over a dozen professors testified to their employment being imperiled and even terminated over pro-Palestine speech. Anita Levy, a senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors, told The Intercept that she has processed an uptick in cases related to dismissal and reappointment violations in the months following October 7. She testified to the uneven application of faculty discipline: “Of the cases that we’ve opened, none of them have been related to pro-Israel speech. All of them have been in support of the Palestinian cause.”

Ash warned that restrictions on pro-Palestine speech would have a “deep chilling effect” on protest and dialogue in general (the anti-divestment proposal had used similar language in warning of the consequences of divestment). While pro-Palestine activism is, with particular regularity, “the target of limitations on free speech,” they said, it won’t stop there: “With each incursion on the regular understanding of protests and free speech on this issue, we understand that those same applications of the rules will be applied to political engagement across the board on any topic.”

Ash pointed to “a growing alliance between many college administrations and far right politicians who have been engaged in book banning, restrictions of libraries, the destruction of DEI departments….” For them and for Deendar, any conversation about academic freedom must extend far beyond the question of who might or might not receive out-of-state funding for their PhD.

Any and all conversations about academic freedom and Palestine become farcical without acknowledging the fact that Gaza itself no longer has

an academy. The BDC frequently repeats the fact that “there are no universities left in Gaza.” Israel destroyed the last remaining university in the strip on January 17, 2024, and even five months ago it had already damaged or obliterated 80% of Gaza’s schools. In April, a group of United Nations experts cited this reality in warning of a possible “scholasticide” in Gaza: “an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian educational system.”

“Brown touts itself as a purveyor of global intellectual exchange, knowledge production,” said Deendar. “So for Brown to be invested in a literal scholasticide is the biggest signaling of the paradox of academic freedom… you’re invested in the destruction of higher education across the world.”

Deendar and Ash argue that maintaining the status quo—in which Brown’s endowment funds remain entangled with the devastation of Palestinian schools, homes, and lives—is not conducive to academic freedom, whether in Gaza or here at Brown. “The university has a choice in front of it to either invest or divest,” said Ash. “The act of non-divestment cannot be understood as neutral… that is a perpetual, continued declaration.”

Quick to denounce Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Christina Paxson has still, to date, not directly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza. “She is clearly the arbiter of the language and the kinds of discourses that happen at the university,” says Deendar. Deendar and Ash recognize that passivity and omission go just as far in setting the parameters for the free exchange of ideas as anything else that Brown’s administration might do. Far from having the “chilling” effect that student opponents of divestment warn of, a “yes” vote from ACURM, and the corporation, might begin to lay the groundwork for a world in which rigorous, free debate about the best route to peace, equality, and justice in historic Palestine feels truly sensible and possible.

“Right now, Brown is invested in genocide,” said Deendar. “How can we even begin to talk about bigger things than what that is, if we don’t correct [those] harms?”

CAMERON LEO B’25 and LILY SELTZ B’25 for divestment and a ceasefire now.

Islamic University of Gaza.

Al-Azhar University.

Israa University.

Lost in Translation

Gender, Queerness, and Cantonese Opera

c I’ve had the privilege of growing up around Cantonese opera all my life. For most of these years, I wrote it off as boring and dreaded Grandma’s visits (which inevitably included her loud vocal warmups at the break of dawn). At the first Cantonese opera concert I attended, I was looking for ways to escape within the first fifteen minutes. The singing was far too high-pitched, and the lyrics were entirely unintelligible. As I left the show, I watched hoards of Cantonese aunties swarm Grandma and the rest of the performers for photos. What could be so beautiful about something so boring?, I wondered. Despite growing up in Canada, thousands of miles away from where Cantonese opera originated, opera continued to make unwelcome appearances in my life: car rides with Grandma’s opera friends, pit stops at the opera club to drop off food, and the endless barrage of photos and videos of Grandma’s performances in the family group chat.

When I began to discover my queerness, I grew further from Cantonese opera and the way it enforced the gender binary. Men were offered deep and powerful singing parts that emphasized their fierce masculinity, while women were given parts so high their voices cracked, making them appear fragile or weak. At my grandmother’s concerts, the outfits were elegant at best, mainly consisting of conventional suits and dresses. There were no embroidered leather boots or flamboyant cheongsams in the show, and concerts stretched long into the evenings. For these reasons, younger generations rarely gravitated towards opera the way their grandparents did, so aging seniors populated both the audience and the stage. Their children and grandchildren didn’t need the opera to rediscover cultural community — they had either already assimilated into Canadian culture or had become friends with the thousands of other Cantonese families that had immigrated in the 90s and 2000s — so opera became a secondary aspect of life, an annual event everyone would go to out of respect for their elders. Because I felt no connection to the opera I saw on stage, I listened to strictly queer Western artists as a way to validate my queerness, hoping that I would somehow compartmentalize my gender and racial identities into separate versions of myself. Like many traditionally conservative grandparents, Grandma

avoided discussing queerness with the same steadfastness as my aversion to opera concerts. It was uncomfortable and controversial, so we simply chose to never talk about it. I took on the same quiet complacency with Cantonese opera, refusing to listen to it or find something to like about it.

My aversion to Cantonese opera persisted until I started to accept my queerness and my heritage as coexistent aspects of my identity rather than opposing forces. I started to question if the opera I saw at my grandmother’s concerts, which was largely hosted and attended by conservative Chinese seniors, reflected what all Cantonese operas were like. As I dove deeper into the past traditions of Cantonese opera, I discovered its rich history of genderbending and defying societal norms. I learned that similar to Greek and British theater, men frequently played women, not only by dressing in traditionally feminine costumes but also by embracing femininity in their acting style and singing higher-pitched parts. The opposite was true as well; in the Ming and Qing dynasties, where interactions between men and women were strictly limited, there were many all-female opera troupes alongside all-male ones, allowing women to embody the roles of male characters. The flamboyant costumes and elaborate makeup of professional opera troupes resembled the ones I saw at drag shows, and I sat in wonder watching performers maneuver their seven-foot-long sleeves while simultaneously practicing martial arts and acting.

As my grandmother’s opera club re-emerged from its pandemic hiatus and approached its 90th anniversary, their concerts began to emulate more elaborate and traditional opera performances. Their latest one featured the folktale Butterfly Lovers, where a woman named Zhu Yingtai takes on the appearance of a man so she can get an education. At school, Zhu and Liang Shanbo, a male student, fall in love with one another. Although Zhu is typically heralded as a feminist icon, the legend can be interpreted through queer and trans lenses alongside feminist ones. Zhu subverts notions of what it means to be a woman, and Zhu’s fluidity in gender expression challenges the validity of the gender binary itself. Female-to-male crossdressing is not an uncommon trope in Chinese literature; characters like Hua Mulan (of Disney fame) and Zhu Yingtai dress in drag as a means to gain social

( TEXT ANGE YEUNG DESIGN JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )

status. Interestingly, Liang’s character is typically played by a woman, adding an additional level of genderbending to the opera. The fluidity of both Zhu and Liang’s genders reveals the fragility of Western patriarchy and heteronormativity. In the same way, automatically classifying these stories as “queer” also analyzes these pieces through a strictly Western lens. Many of the words used to describe Western conceptions of gender fluidity in Mandarin and Cantonese can be demeaning. For instance, the word for someone who genderbends is 人妖 (rényāo), whose literal translation is something along the lines of “human monster” or “human demon.” While reclaiming Chinese folktales and operas as examples of queer expression can be validating, the Western notions of queerness don’t fully reflect the conceptions of gender and sexuality of ancient China, making this reclamation equally complicating. Like language, these gender ontologies cannot be simply translated. +++

For some fans, the androgyny and crossdressing present in Cantonese operas is what makes them appealing in the first place. In her research on performing androgyny, Priscilla Tse studies the large swaths of female fans that gravitate towards female opera performers who play the role of male characters. While they typically wear masculine clothing, heavy makeup to mask their features, and even beards, many fans note they prefer when these actors ignore the formalities and appear more androgynous. it was replaced by an even more severe policy known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese people from immigrating to Canada altogether. While these policies were intended to keep “Canada white forever” and empower anti-Asian groups like the Asiatic Exclusion League, traveling Cantonese opera troupes were some of the few Chinese individuals still permitted to enter Canada at the time. Many of these opera troupes “visited” Canada with the excuse of an upcoming performance, but members stayed in the country long after their tours ended. As opera performers were able to dodge bans and fines since they arrived under the guise of a touring performer, they were able to settle in Canada, accumulate wealth, and sponsor their families to move once the Exclusion Act was lifted. Furthermore, Cantonese opera was critical in showcasing Chinese culture to wider audiences and fostering more

acceptance of Chinese immigrants. Adorned in vibrant regalia, Cantonese opera performers paraded through downtown Vancouver, attempting to shift the perspectives of white audiences on the sidelines and facilitate acceptance. Using existing costumes and decorations, seamstresses and opera houses worked tirelessly to present a more palatable and opulent reflection of Chinese society, hoping to alleviate racist sentiments created by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Over the decades, Cantonese opera has been used to push for social change and create unity in an environment that actively opposed the culture it came from. To many Chinese immigrants, opera became a means of survival: a way to immigrate, a place to gather, and an instrument to fight against discrimination.

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Learning to love opera has been more of a process of forgiveness and apologies than a process of loving. I am still unlearning a decade of assumptions and resentment, but I am growing to uncover the beauty of opera. These days, I make a point to go to at least one opera show per year. It’s incredible that from a room nestled in between a paint conglomerate and an auto shop, a five-hour show of singing and acting comes to life on a stage. The performers may move slowly, but each subtle change in posture or positioning carries a deeper intention that can only be translated through movement. The audience does not derive meaning from any specific, singular part of opera; rather, the experience is the amalgamation of all the show’s different parts—makeup, costumes, lyrics, tone, acting, and movement—that

make it uniquely beautiful and important for the people who watch and perform it.

When I was younger, I wanted Cantonese opera to be queer by showcasing queer relationships and queer joy. It doesn’t always do that, and it doesn’t always try. Still, Cantonese opera manages to be queer in the sense that its existence alone challenges societal norms, whether that be xenophobia, racial biases, or heteronormativity. I don’t

expect Grandma to ever wrap her head around my gender and sexuality, but I can at least find comfort in the fact that historically and currently, gender and sexuality have not always been binary. There have been queer and trans Cantonese people that have been loved because of the way they identified, not just in spite of it. And I am still learning to forgive that kid who was confused and thirteen, who stored their identities away in separate boxes like books, because the process of loving someone who doesn’t understand themselves is not easy. I can hope, though, that one day I will finally learn how.

ANGE YEUNG B‘28 is still waiting for that opera concert to end.

Genocide Bajram

Death, Life and the ‘Other’ in Sarajevo

( TEXT HISHAM AWARTANI DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON ILLUSTRATION ANNA FISCHLER )

c The phrase “life during genocide” seems paradoxical on the surface. How can daily life continue in the face of so much death, destruction, and desolation? How can one survive when there is an ongoing and concerted effort to wipe them off the face of the earth? Yet, life must go on; until the last house is leveled, the last family name wiped off the register, the last gravestone defaced by shrapnel, those who have survived must continue living. A sip of hot coffee from the findžan and wafting cigarette smoke constitutes the most basic resistance to genocide: the resolution to live another day. Otherwise, you are simply playing into the hands of those erasing your people.

These are a few of the ideas that Semezdin Mehmedinović explores in "Sarajevo Blues," a collection of essays, vignettes, and poems detailing his life during the siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. The book is a small one: 4x6 inches, 122 pages long—a relic of the printing paper shortage during the four year siege against Bosnia’s capital. Mehmedinović is featured on the cover, his gaunt face sporting a sullen expression as he leans on a wall pockmarked by shrapnel and debris.

For Mehmedinović, life during genocide is characterized by banal absurdity. The world has been turned on its head, teetering on the brink of destruction, but preserving its own perverse logic. This is not to say that such a world lacks meaning. On the contrary, Mehmedinović rejects moral relativism, having seen what he describes as the collapse of the postmodern literary Yugoslav world under the weight of nationalism and death.

In Sarajevo Blues, we see life continue, but with its own internal set of customs rooted in the grenade, the sniper, and survival. Just as life’s meaning has been altered by its proximity to death, death too loses its trappings due to its constant, oppressing presence. Death becomes yet another facet of life. In this way, both life and death are reshaped by genocide. There also exists the figure of the “other,” dually represented by the Četnik carrying out the genocide and the foreign journalist observing it from a distance. Both are disconnected from the suffering in different ways. One is perpetuating this absurd reality, while the other is amusing themself in it. For Mehmedinović, however, “death outside Sarajevo does not exist.” His perspective suggests that in Sarajevo, where death is omnipresent, life is dominated by survival, and death itself loses its usual significance. Outside Sarajevo, death feels almost nonexistent in comparison.

LIVING AND SURVIVAL

In order to continue in the midst of a genocide, living is morphed to accommodate its saturation

with death, reaching an equilibrium that appears absurd from the outside. Describing a street scene in downtown Sarajevo, where cars with blown-out windows cautiously drive over smoldering trolley cables and pedestrians gingerly step over shards of glass, Mehmedinović remarks, “the glass on the street is less an example of ‘a shattered image of reality’ than the wide, light-brown bands of packing tape that ‘whole’ panes of glass are held together within Sarajevo” (p. 68). The absurdity lies not in the destruction in and of itself, but rather in the navigation of those who survive it. Those who do are engulfed in a numb acceptance of the state of affairs, which Mehmedinović terms a “consciousness of disappearance,” wherein “things get no worse than they are” (p. 68). Therefore, it is no wonder that despite the threat of Četnik snipers in the street, a friend named Bokun states: “This is my last cigarette. It wants the respect it deserves. And I can only give it that on the street” (p. 42), nor that Mehmedinović mentions that smokers have dropped the habit of licking their cigarettes in order for them to last longer. “The daily rituals are dead, just like the yearly ones. Who, in December, will print a calendar for 1993?” (p. 62) This is not to say that more tragedies cannot occur, but rather that the state of being where tragedies are considered exceptional has itself been destroyed. Describing a friend who did not notice that he was hit by shrapnel, Mehmedinović observes

that “to feel the pain, you have to assume consciousness of it” (p. 46). The privilege of pain cannot be afforded by those living through genocide; there is no time to process, only to survive. So many of the constructs that constitute “normal” life have been dissipated by the ever-present, primordial shadow of death. Mehmedinović writes: “There isn’t a single pane of glass left in our windows / and there’s just no way to get rid / of the lagging flies” (p. 70). All this produces a life which Mehmedinović describes as Kafkaesque: a poet builds a bunker out of the works of Tito, Marx, and Engels to protect himself from falling shells (p. 75), a mother warns her son to get indoors because it is “grenading outside” (p. 52), and the rain forms cisterns in the craters left by grenades in the asphalt. The war has upended nature itself to fashion new laws of genocide, where men wear newspapers on their heads as they run

“across the street, scared of a sniper’s bullet” (p. 74), where artillery is just another meteorological phenomenon, where burning buildings conjure up the face of Radovan Karadžić in their smoke (p. 20).

Surviving today implies the prospect of waking up tomorrow. Mehmedinović explores this concept specifically through the lives of children. What can be said for the future of a child who has only known this absurdly unjust way of living? “What kind of curriculum will be put in place for kids ripped apart by shrapnel as sharp as razors?” (p. 54). In a genocide, children learn that their very existence is a crime, a crime that carries the brutality of capital punishment. A child in a bomb shelter sharpens his pencil on a steel shard to draw his comic book. He “asks if he’s a Muslim and upon getting a positive answer says ‘I don’t want to be expelled’” (p. 50). This child lives in a world where “borders begin and end at his name.” There is no telling how he will adjust to a world after genocide, that is if he ever even gets to see it. Mehmedinović remarks, “I think about how their blocked consciousnesses is not a reaction to the images of war, but nature preparing them for long years of battle” (p. 54). To a generation of children whose daily lives are marred by the absurdity of genocide, “normalcy” will make as little sense to them as a life under siege makes to us.

DEATH

Just as the preponderance of death in times of genocide upends life itself, the ubiquity of the white shroud of the martyr changes how people interact with death. People “experience everything more normally. People died then too, only death is more stripped down these days: the lore accompanying death is a lot less eerie” (p. 89). Death during genocide simply becomes a benign aspect of life rather than a tragic one: “Every day you hear about someone you know who has been killed” (p. 68). Mehmedinović observes that death is so ubiquitous that it gets woven into the very rhythm of life itself when “the cigarette I am now smoking was wrapped in a paper confirming someone’s death” (p. 89). A man in the water line, upon filling his canister, “hurries to the end of the street and gets hit by a grenade. All that’s left of him is a bloody trail on the pavement that seems like sap but is easier to clean.” Indeed, shortly after, the rain washes all traces of him away and it is “as if nothing in the street changed, except that everyone got a bit quieter.”

On the news, shelling in the downtown and snipers in action when “only a few have been killed or wounded” is deemed a “relatively calm day,” for “in Sarajevo, the issue is a surplus of death” (p. 29).

This is not to say that during a genocide, people simply roll over and accept their fate. At a martyr’s funeral, immersed in the Arabic murmur of his religion, Mehmedinović laments, “I feel the presence of God in everything…Now everything in me resists death: as my tongue passes over my teeth I can sense the taste of a woman’s lipstick” (p. 34). Even in the midst of the ultimate redemption, Mehmedinović is determined not only to survive and resist death, but to live. The public’s matter-of-fact attitude toward death is not a sign of callousness or a lack of care; people simply cannot afford to be affected. The Imam of the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, Efendi Spahić, informs Mehmedinović that: “there are neither major nor minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for

“Alifakovac” by Semezdin Mehmedinovic

which every heart is too small. Those kinds cannot fit in the heart” (p. 39). Existence itself has become a tragedy; in a genocide, the sentence of death for the simple crime of being hangs over the head of all. Those who survive know that it is only because their turn has yet to come. Nevertheless, there are moments where certain symmetries in death betray the absurdity of the situation at hand. Mehmedinović relays the story of picking up two martyrs from the same stop a year apart, each time being met in the hospital by the same medical team in the same room, only to find out the two men were father and son (p. 77). Additionally, no matter how abstract and ubiquitous the concept of death becomes, it still retains its impact when immediate. Mehmedinović struggles to square his own personal grief for his father’s death “in another city under siege” with the apathy he feels towards death in Sarajevo: “I’m shaken by a death that has taken place far from here, and I’m quenched by the death in this city that only fills me with a dull sense of dread” (p. 2).

A superfluity of death will never make death easier, only killing more mundane.

THE “OTHER”

In the equation of genocide, the “other” is an essential component, and one of two faces—the perpetrator and the observer. The stability of their lives contrasts with the existence of those whose lives are in constant flux and provides the inherent contradiction of the situation. Mehmedinović explores the dual aspect of the “other” through the figure of the Četnik perpetrating the genocide against him, and the Western journalist observing

them do so. To the Četnik, carrying out genocide simply becomes a fact of life, part of their daily routine. Mehmedinović watches a woman in a Četnik position “put an air mattress down by the trench to sun herself in a bathing suit. She lies like that for hours. Then she gets up, goes to the rocket launcher, pulls the catch and lets a shell fly at random toward the city” (p. 26). To those committing the genocide, the victims only exist to be objects of violence, a violence which they utilize to affirm their own sense of being. “The ultimate proclamation of existence is a soldier’s signature on the casing of a shell.” It is a statement of “this is me and by my being I will destroy other lives” (p. 54). Mehmedinović denies violence as being inherent to the people carrying out the genocide against him, remarking, “I don’t think a single nation exists that wouldn’t crucify Christ” (p. 23). Genocide is shown to be the result of supremacist exclusionary ideology rather than intrinsic to nations themselves. The premise that violence is necessary to survive is in fact fundamental to these ideologies: the genocide that is being carried out is seen as the only way for this nation to survive. The second “other” is the interloper—the Western journalist. This “other” is fascinated by the absurdity of life under genocide, taking it as a confirmation of their own superior normality. When discussing the “monkeys with Nikons” Mehmedinović remarks that “if a bullet hit me they’d get a shot worth so much more than my life.” For both the journalist and the Četnik, “death is a job for all of them” (p. 74). Even though the journalist is not holding a rifle, they contribute to the Četnik’s erasure of the genocide victim’s humanity, even when lamenting upon the tragedy. “It doesn’t matter that these people have names: TV translates them into its cool language, the naked image” (p. 83). The absurdity in which the victim is trapped is an object of curiosity and exoticism to the “other.” Mehmedinović

relates how the death certificate-wrapped packs of cigarettes have become a souvenir for foreigners. In the end, only the victim of genocide can utter what Mehmedinović dubs, “the last word.”

Having lived in Sarajevo for the entirety of the siege, Mehmedinović immigrated to the United States after the war’s conclusion. Peace had brought another overturning of the rules that had governed the residents of Sarajevo for four years, and people could finally afford to succumb to the “exhaustion of collective survival” (p. 118). An independent Bosnian state was established, albeit a divided one whose wounds were never truly healed. The people of Sarajevo were suddenly thrust into normalcy and out of the global limelight. The absurd life of survival had finally collapsed, leaving them to cope with all the loss and destruction they endured. When the shelling of Sarajevo stops and the sniper fire ceases, rubble goes from a fact of life to an obtrusive eye-sore. As the Četnik artillerymen leave the Old Jewish Cemetery, the sanctity of death regains its impact. Nonetheless, Mehmedinović’s work survives as a record of that collective survival, the determination to live and resist erasure, for “the only thing worse than expulsion is losing the memory of expulsion” (p. 51). When genocide becomes spoken of in the passive voice, the words of those who lived through it become all the more valuable.

HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 secretly wishes he was from the Balkans.

Lobotomy Chic

Femininity, Media, and Dissociating on The Internet

c mask over the camera. She holds what looks like a crystal wand. Her gloves are hot pink, and her eyeshadow is blue and silver. “There’s some negativity over there,” she whispers as she moves the wand towards your left eye.

You swipe up.

In an anatomical cross-section diagram of the human head, a long, pointed needle has been driven through the eyelid and into the brain. “My next piercing !!!!” the overlaid text reads.

You swipe up.

Under a barrage of digital glitter and fluorescent pink hearts, a fluffy brown dog wags his tail and barks. “I hate this world,” a childlike voice says. Rainbow captions float in, letter by letter. “Someone give me a fucking lobotomy or some shit.”

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In the past four years, the lobotomy has experienced an unprecedented revival in the consciousness of young women online. Its discourse is a meta-ironic and nihilistic counter to modern feminism, assuming the form of viral videos and memes in which women half-jokingly express their desire to be lobotomized, review their lobotomies (which they proclaim to have gotten from Claire’s), or lament that they were not alive 80 years ago, when women could and did get lobotomized. More than 50,000 people were lobotomized in the United States alone, most of them between 1949 and 1952. Results varied widely and could be devastating, even fatal. A 1951 study found that, at a time when a majority of the institutionalized population was male, nearly 60% of lobotomy patients were women. The widespread fame and “success” of the lobotomy was contingent on its ability to enforce societal norms of gender, and its digital resurgence is a generation’s troubling response to the crises of their time.

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In the early 20th century, treatment methods for mental illness in the US were severely limited. State psychiatric institutions were overcrowded, mental health research was underdeveloped, and psychopharmaceuticals had yet to appear on the market. Initially conceived by Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz in 1935, the prefrontal lobotomy—or “leucotomy,” as Moniz christened it—promised a potential miracle cure for severe mental illness. Symptoms that made a patient eligible included hallucinations, paranoia, and suicidal ideation—characteristics of what we would now call schizophrenia. Holes would be drilled into the patient’s skull. Ethanol would be injected into the frontal lobe. Finally, sections of brain matter in between the prefrontal cortex (responsible for complex cognitive functions) and the other parts of the brain would be cored with hollow needles. The underlying idea was that it was fixed neural pathways in the brain that caused “certain morbid

( TEXT AUDREY HE DESIGN KAY KIM ILLUSTRATION LILY YANAGIMOTO )

psychic states.” According to Moniz, by severing these pathways, mental illness could be cured. He had no empirical evidence to support his idea. Nevertheless, after his first 20 operations, which he deemed successes, Moniz published his results.

His work caught the eye of American neurologist Walter Freeman. In 1936, Freeman and James W. Watts, a neurosurgeon, performed the first lobotomy in the US. The patient was Alice Hood Hammatt, a 63-year-old housewife. Following operations on Hammatt and two others, Freeman and Watts contacted a writer at the Washington Evening Star about their work, and in November of that year, the Star ran the article. It included an interview with Hammatt, who was described as “high-strung, emotional and easily fatigued, a meticulous housekeeper”:

Doctor: “Do you have any of your old fears?”

Patient: ”No.”

D: ”What were you afraid of?”

P: ”I don’t know. I seem to forget.”

D: ”Do you remember being upset when you came here?”

P: ”Yes, I was quite upset, wasn’t I?

D: ”What was it all about?”

P: ”I don’t know. I seem to have forgotten. It doesn’t seem important now.”

Other patients “stopped sulking” and became “active and carefree”. One unnamed woman was described as transforming from a state of “profound melancholy, quarrelsomeness, and complaining” to “one of contented happiness,” and said that she “felt physically many years younger.”

The crystal wand inches close.

“There’s some negativity over there…”

Freeman and Watts concluded their article with a word of warning:

“We wish to emphasize also that indiscriminate use of the procedure could result in vast harm. Prefrontal lobotomy should at present be reserved for a small group of specially selected cases in which conservative methods of treatment have not yielded satisfactory results… Moreover, every patient probably loses something by this operation, some spontaneity, some sparkle, some flavor of the personaity, if it may be so described.”

Yet as news of the lobotomy spread, the procedure was increasingly marketed as an infallible cure-all for mental illness. This drew criticism from Freeman and Watts’ medical colleagues, who

viewed such publicity as tantamount to advertisement and essentially unethical. Psychiatrist Adolf Meyer warned against the possibility of the public being “drawn into any unwarranted expectations.” Physician Morris Fishbein wrote that there was “no excuse” to praise the procedure to the public. What they were worried about was precisely what happened: the media would glorify and ultimately misrepresent the possibilities of the lobotomy. “From problems to their families and nuisances to themselves, [many] have been transformed into useful members of society,” a 1941 Saturday Evening Post multi-page feature on the lobotomy extolled. “A world that once seemed the abode of misery, cruelty and hate is now radiant with sunshine and kindness to them.”

When young women today post about “live laugh lobotomy,” they promote the same idealistic vision of the procedure that the Star presents. Both the media then and today participate in the perpetuation of a shared mythos. As Jenell Johnson discusses in her book American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History, when an argument’s audience shifts from scientists to the general public, its rhetoric shifts from being about fact to being about moral value. With limited space and financial pressure, journalists are incentivized to sensationalize. Describing the world of the lobotomized patient as “radiant with sunshine and kindness” has much the same effect making a pink and rainbow TikTok about wanting a lobotomy has: it draws you in. It keeps you reading, looking, liking. It makes you desire something more.

Freeman sought to simplify the lobotomy so that it could be done on more patients more effectively. In 1946, he performed the first transorbital lobotomy on Sallie Ionesco, a 29-year-old housewife. In contrast to the prefrontal lobotomy, in which holes must be drilled into the skull, the transorbital lobotomy accessed the brain through the eye socket. The doctor would hammer an ice pick through the thin bone above the patient’s eye into the prefrontal cortex. He would then wiggle the ice pick around to sever the connections between the cortex and the rest of the brain. No surgical skill was required, and the entire procedure could take less than 10 minutes. The simplicity of the transorbital lobotomy meant that it could be done in an outpatient setting, on patients whose symptoms were relatively mild. By 1951, an estimated 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the US, on patients complaining of everything from headaches to upset stomachs. Nearly 60% of these patients were women.

Rationale for the lobotomy—what kinds of symptoms merited one, and what kinds of results signified a successful one—was distinctly gendered. Behavior that defied societal norms of gender performance was taken by doctors as a sign of psychiatric illness that required surgical intervention. Joel Braslow’s review of lobotomy cases in California’s Stockton Hospital from 1947 to 1954 found that 85% of the lobotomized patients were women, despite the fact that the majority of patients in the hospital were men. In one case, a woman in a screening interview with her physician expresses ambivalence about taking care of her children.

Doctor: Was it necessary for you to work? Wouldn’t it have been better for you to stay home and look after the children?

Patient: It might have been better.

D: Why didn’t you?

P: I intend to do better.

D: It is strange behavior. First you don’t stay with the children but go to work; now you are not with them [but] you want to be with them. It was her uncertainty about being a housewife that justified her lobotomy. Women were supposed to be content staying at home; career ambition was believed to be innately masculine. Notably, the same

symptoms that signified a successful operation for women—passivity, complacency, and docility—signified a failed one for men. One 1950 Scientific American article presented two similar case studies, both of lobotomized men. The first, a skilled mechanic, had “resigned himself to being a routine worker.” The second, a clergyman, became unemployed with “poor initiative,” dependent on his wife to “decide everything.” These are framed as disastrous results, sufficient for “considerable concern” about the lobotomy. A 1947 report on the “unfolding of what gives promise as a medical miracle” at the Western Washington State Hospital, on the other hand, describes a woman brought in in a straitjacket, “clawing and scratching at hospital attendants.” After her lobotomy, when asked if she wanted to leave the hospital, she replied, “that’s up to the staff and I never debate with the staff.”

This discrepancy in rhetoric became most clear when public opinion began to turn against the lobotomy. During his ascent to fame, Freeman actively courted media attention to promote his procedure. Failed operations were rarely publicized, and longterm effects could not be studied because the surgery was still relatively new. But in the 1950s, the tide began to shift. Objecting to the technique of the transorbital lobotomy, Watts broke from Freeman in 1950. The media became increasingly critical, often relying on case studies of lobotomized men in order to support their argument. Men became “amiable idiots” and “useless drones,” their personalities tainted with “terrible streaks of childishness.” Contrast this with Freeman’s description of one of his female patients: she has “lost a certain reserve or dignity which will make her a pleasanter companion to get along with.”

The release of chlorpromazine, the first commercial antipsychotic drug, in 1954 would usher in a new era of psychopharmaceutical treatment for mental illness. In 1967, Freeman performed his last lobotomy on housewife Helen Mortensen, who would die during the procedure from a brain hemorrhage. My next piercing !!! +++

Given the fraught, gendered history of the lobotomy, what do young women really want when they say they want a lobotomy? Freeman and Watts described the procedure as a “surgically enacted childhood.” In the current political and social climate—where the right to abortion is restricted in a majority of states, where crises of mental health are exacerbated by pressures of beauty and body image on social media, and where economic anxieties plague those entering a tightening job market—the prospect of severing one’s brain and returning to a state of childlike ignorance is understandably appealing. It is no coincidence that the popular memes of the lobotomy trend draw on motifs of childhood and young adolescence. Claire’s, with its round purple font, where you probably went to get your ears pierced when you were in middle school. Girlish bows and little dogs. A woman giving you an ASMR lobotomy, caressing your face in an almost maternal manner. Lobotomy-core is part of a wider trend of young women embracing traditional ideals of femininity. Recent trending aesthetics such as bimbo-core and coquette, as well as the popular phrases ‘girl math,’ ‘girl dinner,’ and ‘I’m just a girl’ are all variations on an old theme: women as unintelligent, materialistic, and emotional, caring only for spending money and looking good. The growing fascination with so-called ‘tradwives,’ or traditional housewives, similarly demonstrates the increasing appeal of a womanhood defined by a known set of rules and responsibilities. Hannah Neeleman, better known by her social media name Ballerina Farm, has been declared by one Sunday Times article as “queen of the ‘trad wives.’”

To an audience of 10 million followers on Instagram and 9.7 million on TikTok, Neeleman portrays a life of bucolic homesteading. She posts videos of herself milking the sheep and cows, cooking, and

baking from her home, a 328-acre farm in rural Utah where she lives with her husband Daniel, the heir to a commercial airline fortune, and her eight young children. Nara Smith, another influencer with this aesthetic, has gained over 8 million followers on TikTok in this year alone. With her luxury outfits, model husband, and pristine kitchen in which she makes everything from roast dinner to Takis from scratch, Smith, like Neeleman, presents a glowing vision of gender idyll cushioned by material wealth.

These aesthetics are the antithesis to the ‘girlboss’ ethos of the millennials, which preached feminist liberation through capitalism. For a generation which came of age during the 2008 Great Recession, ‘girl-bossing’ promised young women financial success if they knew how to play by the right rules. Ultimately, it was an aspirational and largely unattainable ethos. The economic crisis facing young people today, primarily marked by skyrocketing costs of living, has resulted in widespread feelings of cynicism and resignation: the Gallup Economic Confidence Index has been negative nearly every single month since March 2020. The pandemic recession has disproportionately affected women. Between February and April 2020, employment fell by 18.1% among women and 14.2% among men. I hate this world. Someone give me a fucking lobotomy or some shit.

Young women are also particularly affected because they are cognizant of a time, however fantastical, when women were seemingly shielded from such financial anxiety. The rhetoric of lobotomy discourse invokes a historical mirage of feminine leisure and conflates the loss of agency with the attainment of peace, relaxation, and happiness.

In this context, the emotional blunting and cognitive regression enacted by the lobotomy seems almost like a real cure. The expression of the desire for one is an expression of pain that derives from profound disillusionment and exhaustion with the current political economy. At its heart, underneath the tongue-in-cheek humor, it is a pressing indictment of a reality hostile to young women.

AUDREY HE B’27 is swiping up… and swiping up again.

Eliminate the

LUMP

A Conversation with Hannah Landecker

c We first encountered Hannah Landecker’s work at a talk she gave last semester here at Brown, titled “Emulsifiers, Gums and Clouding Agents: from the Mouthfeel of Capitalism to the Gelation of the Present.” We were struck by the provocative title, but were further drawn in by the mixing of disciplines, concepts, and modes of thought in the lecture. Her method, as she put it that day, sought to use the “emulsifier to tether otherwise immiscible disciplines to one another, seeing if we can’t keep our philosophy and our health policy in mixed suspension for a while; talk salad dressing and the Anthropocene in the same breath…”

Nothing seems to emphasize the ethos for Metabolics this volume better—to not only see if we can emulsify together salad dressing and critical theory, but to suggest that it’s something we must, or perhaps are responsible, to do. How else does one think critically about what we eat, to analyze and interrogate the cultural and political facets of our food, without taking the tools of critique and mapping them onto the plate?

Combing through her larger body of work, one notices a perceptive focus on the politics and entanglements of not only what we eat but also the mechanisms that drive it, like the food of our food or the ecologies involved in all acts of food consumption. In her work, we see a general framework that is both attentive to the specificity—and yet spirals well beyond simplicity—of that all-too-familiar act of cramming something into the mouth.

Landecker’s work has taught us to not just think about the politics of eating as a static framework under the conditions of capital, but rather as a historically-constructed system on the brink of change amidst developments in the metabolic sciences. Landecker offers something more like an archaeology of eating, one that intertwines with scientific research to suggest that we are currently within both a moment of crisis in our eating habits and an opportunity to develop new ones. She writes, “The angel of history has developed a diabetic ulcer; the office tower of biopolitics stands empty, its laborers disconsolately scrolling newsfeeds as they work from home; risk society has come down with a fungal infection it can’t shake.”

For our first article of the semester, she graciously agreed to speak with us and offer some thoughts not only on the processing and texture of food but also traditional foodways, metabolic sciences, ecology, and more. We hope that this conversation might serve as an example of the kind of interlaced and emulsified thinking we hope to offer in this volume and beyond.

+++

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Indy: Tell us about how you got interested in the things that you research: what

was your training, and how did you get into this kind of interdisciplinary practice?

( TEXT DANIEL ZHENG & IZZY ROTH-DISHY DESIGN RACHEL SHIN ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY )

Hannah Landecker: Sure! I grew up in Canada and I did my undergraduate degree at UBC. I had always been interested in both literature and science. I studied cell and developmental biology. But I took the same number—or more—of writing and English classes. I tried to double major in biology and English (that was back in a previous century!) but the University said that there was no useful complementarity between biology and English. I have probably spent the rest of my career trying to prove them wrong.

I then did a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, but I have always occupied both modes of thought. I’ve always been interested in the way that our biological, evolutionary, and genetic lives are profoundly shaped by society, and vice versa: the way that we think about ourselves, our possibilities, or our world, is profoundly shaped by the language, stories, and the visual culture of science.

Indy: We first encountered your work while doing some research into microcinematography. We were interested in the question of scale in your work—dealing with the micro structures of cells but also the macro constructions of waste systems, global agriculture and agro-capitalism. How do you see the interactions of the minute and the systemic in your research?

HL: I’ve always been interested in cells. But I see it as a bigger story of the way in which humans have a relationship to living matter, and cells are a really important operational unit for that. Getting them to live in big vats and scaling up their minute productions to the scale of mass production is really characteristic of how humans began to live differently in relation to cells early in the 20th century.

I’m very interested in this locus of power. There’s lots of language in critical theory around power and biopower and all of those things. But I think it perhaps has not encompassed as much as it could, how much state, corporate, and social power resides in the ability to have control over, or harness, metabolic power. For example, the mass production of enzymes to harness their catalytic power to transform things

from one mode to another is one of the threads through 20th-century industry, but also science and molecular science, that I’m really interested in.

So it’s that sort of intersection, right? Of knowing about working at the level of the scale of the cell with microscopes, or the molecular tools that were developed to understand cells, but also really leaning into getting those cells to live in ways that they just wouldn’t in nature, to get them to live within industry, to industrialize metabolism. And we often talk about industrializing food production or industrializing animals or industrializing the diet. But I think this industrialization of metabolism through the control of cellular and subcellular life is a really fundamental aspect both of basic science, but also of this industrial history, and therefore of our broader society.

+++

Indy: As a section titled “Metabolics,” we’re really interested in the centralization of the concept of metabolism in your work. It’s not just a scientific concept, but also a philosophical or theoretical one. How do you reckon with the intersections or the differences between these different ways of treating metabolics in your work?

HL: Well, I guess the first thing to say is that I think the concept of metabolism is actively changing. We are living in a time where people trace the biochemical interconversions of matter in ways in which there’s really a big stake for everybody. It’s no longer just a question of well, should you as an individual eat this, will you personally feel better if you eat this—rather it’s a planetary question. So I think the return to an interest in metabolism is a broader thing than just that word—it’s tied to that kind of awakening of people through the language of the Anthropocene, or the metrics of climate change, to metabolics as one mode of comprehension of planetary systems. You can measure stuff with a metabolic framework, but it also has these existential aspects, they’re not separable.

So metabolism is intrinsically a systemic word, because it doesn’t just refer to what’s happening inside an organism. It refers to how an organism interacts constantly with its environment. But also there’s no getting around the fact that organisms and metabolisms are codependent and are always in relation to one another. The waste product of one organism is often the food of another. For example, nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live on the roots of plants live in this relationship of metabolic exchange. That’s then very consequential for the whole ecosystem that they’re in. So that’s the second thing to say: a lot of people are becoming interested in this concept again, in ways that are both empirical and theoretical and are very much historically specific to our time.

At the most abstract level, for me metabolism is not just about the history of biology, or people who called themselves metabolic scientists. I see it as a productive framework for asking new historical questions about classic themes of continuity and change, and about how science and technology can sometimes remake its own object. By understanding and manipulating metabolism at mass scale, the problems of metabolism in terms of human health or the environment have been transformed.

Indy: One of the things that really struck us was your study of industry trade magazines of processed foods, and the attention to texture in the context of industrial processes. Part of that project seemed to really emphasize adjectives on how food was changing rather than just saying something vague like “industrialization.” There was this kind of attention to textures, words like emulsification, thickening, mouthfeel. What specifically was so important about texture as a driving force behind these changes?

HL: So let me tell you a little bit about the project just to give your readers some context. My research team looked at technical changes in ingredients, foods, and processing agents by gathering advertisements from industrial trade magazines from the 1950s to the present. The larger motivation of the project was to ask: what have we done? How have we gotten here in terms of the food world that we live in? And where did some of these things, that we take for granted as part of the ordinary landscape that really didn’t exist a hundred years ago, come from?

To me, it was really important to see how upstream manufacturers of these processing agents were advertising to food manufacturers. These magazines were not for the general consumer, they were for the people making processed foods. There were some things about appearance like color or flavor, which are of course important. But I was really struck by how much technological effort, how much advertising, how much harnessing of biology was being brought to bear on viscosity, how quickly things flow—on particle size and homogeneity, which had a lot to do with how products would feel in the mouth.

One thing that’s really revealing about the advertisements is that you realize you might have thought: if they’re working on the texture of the marshmallow or whatever, it’s because that’s what people want or like. They want to make the most desirable thing for people. So I kind of went into it with a naive sense that these things were being created because of consumer desire, that they were being pulled into existence because people wanted them.

But after looking at thousands of these ads, I realized how important flowability, homogeneity, all of these things were to the processing itself. In a piece of classic economic history, Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, he really emphasizes that to have something like continuous process manufacturing where you have machines that work in sequence all at once, at high volume and at high speed (which is the basis of mass production), things have to flow.

So the importance of viscosity, flowability, and mixing to the production process itself is paramount: things like emulsifiers are first and foremost lubricants of mass production. Maybe then the company that makes something with that emulsifier, takes five versions of it to the end consumer focus group and says: which one do you like the most? But they’re already formatting the choice, and the choice, therefore, is formatted by the exigencies of processing itself. You need antioxidants, so that things stay liquid and don’t go rancid. You need emulsifiers, but then you need stabilizers to stabilize the emulsions. You need thickeners, or you need things that thin. You need things that prevent bubbles or make bubbles. This kind of intense work on the texture or thickness, or viscosity of things, is so integral to the production of processing, not just to the production of a

processed food. And so it’s this step, this interim step that really has captured my attention empirically.

And I also think that it’s something that is happening in ways that are not necessarily hidden secretively from consumers, yet it is not something people think about. This kind of information is hidden in plain sight. Not everyone likes to spend their days reading back issues of Chemical Week from 1976 (although I can highly recommend it).

All the same, the logic of processing is just not something that is obvious to us at all at the end of the process, when we go into the supermarket, and we see these shelves of things that look to be highly differentiated from one another. If you were instead to sort grocery store products by their emulsifier content instead of by “cereal” and “yogurt” or whatever, everything would be on the same shelf.

The project aims to get at this kind of subsurface ontology that is generated within the world of processing. That is, for me, the question of texture. You know, it’s not just the texture of food. These manipulations of viscosity and surfaces come to inhabit the very concept of fluffiness or stability or smoothness. How textural aesthetics (and this is very different than a sort of visual marketdriven aesthetic) are generated at this crossing point of understanding how molecules work and interact with each other, with the exigencies of mass production, with the kind of time structure of distribution networks, and with the economics of all of that, is a really interesting question.

Indy: Maybe this is a stretch. I feel like if I’m scrolling on Instagram or something, you hear people say things like, I really want my food to be bouncy or smooth. I want it to have a certain texture. Of course, many of these textures (I’m thinking of like…a cornstarch slurry) have existed well before these modes of processing. But at the same time, I’m curious if we’ve almost internalized this relationship between texture and a sort of version of comfort food.

HL: Well I don’t want to make it be more than it is, you know, like some kind of huge conspiracy theory that we were all being brainwashed to expect everything to be completely homogenous and last for suspiciously long periods of time.

Rather, I’d like to unsettle the sense of why things are the way they are, or what you think is desirable, or what you really like to have in your mouth. The apparent given-ness of food is

something that I think is useful to unsettle, to ask questions about. If that then provokes people to go and and really think about the specificity and the craft and artistry of different kinds of food traditions, then that is a great thing to do and to think about.

At the same time, I want to be careful to indicate that the textural manipulation of food and their relation to cultures and aesthetics of eating goes well beyond the question of industrial processing. The first and most widely used emulsifier is egg, right? And there’s nothing wrong with using eggs to emulsify things. The world would be worse off without mayonnaise. For sure. And of course there are all kinds of traditional uses of microorganisms. For example, in yogurts, or kimchi, the traditional use of the microbial cultures as a preservative and a flavor modulator also changes the texture of the food, because the microbes are busy digesting it in their own ways. So I don’t want to suggest that these processing actions are totally artificial and totally apart from the ways that people have handled food in the past, or thought about food, or had food traditions.

Yet traditional modes of making kimchi and the introduction of polysorbate 80 are totally different. Polysorbate 80 is used to ensure that every single jar of some product has exactly the same texture, no matter where you buy it in the world, no matter at what time you use it. The difference is that substances used for the manipulation of texture at the scale of mass production operate as agents of uniformity in ways that I think traditional food cultures have not. +++

Indy: We read an article you wrote for Noema magazine, where you talk about how we should think more about the intentionality of the food we

consume. We were really interested in the point where you suggested that this framework of food without agency reflected a capitalist logic, where the capitalist class was the brain, the laborers the guts. But if we take this logic of eating from our economic structure, how can we think about food with agency or as a conversation given that we remain under this larger framework? In a basic sense, can this way we think about food really be changed in a significant way within our current times?

HL: Well, the first step is simply the most basic one, which is to say, the way we think about food is historically and culturally specific. It contains all kinds of elements of social organization. In the article I was referring to a medical illustration by Fritz Kahn from 1926 that depicted the human body as a factory. It depicts a hierarchical logic that your brain is up there telling you everything. And it’s in total control of everything that happens in your body, because it’s the information processing center, it’s where all the sensory information goes, and it just tells the rest of the body what to do.The rest of the organs and tissues do their jobs like good working class body parts. That is a very, culturally, socially, and historically particular view. Saying, “this is where it comes from” is the first step to unsettling such narratives and maybe getting people to think otherwise. Yes we remain within systems of capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we are irrevocably stuck with believing in executive and housekeeping functions, or whatever other unfortunate hierarchies the twentieth century left us.

I’m really interested in the way in which contemporary sciences can give us resources to come up with alternative stories. If the first step is to say that concepts are historically produced and could have been otherwise, then the second step is to interrogate cultural and scientific resources for thinking outside these constraints. A lot of work in health science or biomedicine is concerned with metabolic disorders due to a rise in conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome and food allergies. In part because these

conditions are not satisfactorily understood in terms of the body as factory—and in part because treating the body as a factory might have had a causal role in producing those conditions in the first place—there’s a lot of innovation and thinking beyond the tired old input-output theories of calories and building blocks.

So yes, I do think the way we think about food can and will change fundamentally, and not just because of health discourses. To return to what I said before about interest in metabolism being allied with awareness of planetary environmental issues, how we think about food is also caught up in this shift in terms of people being aware of the climate and biodiversity impacts of agriculture. If food is part of an ecology, then eating is an ecological act. You eat a bean from a plant that lives in symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, you’re eating a thing but you’re also eating a set of relations. This is a really different way to perceive the relationship of humans to food. So I like to think this way rather than seeing the eater as having all the agency and the eaten disappearing completely. Thus the project about processing: at this point in history, if eating is a conversation, then we really need to be asking who is dominating that conversation? Who’s involved in the terms of debate?

I think that it’s really healthy to unsettle things that seem to be given, but also to look for the alternatives and the ways in which they might reorient not just the way that you think about what you eat, but eating and food in social and environmental contexts. Maybe this is a good way to think about the overlap but the difference between talking about food and talking about metabolism, as they are not synonymous. Metabolism refers to the sum of energetic and material relations in and between organisms; it encompasses the cycles of oxygen and carbon dioxide and the metal reactivities powering some enzymes; it’s about nutrients but also toxicants. Understanding food as just one part of this system of relations helps us get past the “is it good for you?” functionalism of so much of today’s health optimization claptrap and start to think more expansively, both practically and theoretically.

DANIEL ZHENG B’25 and IZZY ROTH-DISHY B’25 need more fiber.

three poems

Scabies or Something Underneath

c To the earthworms and earwigs, flattened to petal your crystalized crown

Collected for fishing bait

You, nightcrawler, you

How your flush sears aglow the unsown seams of your skin

You claim you’re a horse (and I’m a cat?)

I never see a stallion at night

How they laze sleepily upon the hay

Visage nosily upturned, silently probing Venus’ cloud-riddled haze

‘Til the black swaddles the reddish of your barn

Unlike the jostling jades I breathe only your cosmic breath

TEXT LILY ELLMAN DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA ILLUSTRATION JESSICA RUAN

)

A Puncture or Two

To Revolve1 a Soul: A First-Soul POV

She peers over the “!” with the masculine vigor that we are used to, No typical “?” typifying her as herself this time, Grazing the “-” with an affective distance, Stomping on the “ .” in a lust for satisfaction, She returns to the “?” this time clawing at its additive embrace “,” as the governance of text, sits down beside her.

She splits(,)

What a gaping ghostwriter, she notes, Sound-boarding every choice of her other half, Enclosing us in an invisible, impenetrable, Umbilical accordance with her convictions, Strengthening us as disciples, partners, children; We do not want to bleed out of her lines. We long for the nourishment of her stomp, peer, graze, and return, Her and the all-encompassing textual tango Of which we feign the middlemen.

LILY ELLMAN B’27 is a one-issue voguer.

Twirled around, topsy-turny

the soul-swaying glob grabs you by your scruff with a gummy clamp-down.

Spittle dribbling from the ends of her

The friction statically slighting your fur:

I take a gander at you, this guy, grandfather, the beheld, amidst my disorienting dance, dwindling in the distance, this supposedly rectified rose: The old man solemnly submits to its gumminess, lounging in the grandmotherly shotgun? Pistol? Rifle? Revolver.

Can a revolver be grandmotherly? This cannot be. Then again, maybe the glob clocks me, her thick face following my fingers to the clamper, not the denture kind, the one that consumes the bullets. Maybe I traipse the trigger as her finger tip-toes the token thought.

In any event, I warn you of the gummy graze:

The twisting rubber chair,

Inflaming the office cubicle of a spiteful soul,

The low-quality fashion brand, reinstating the revolution of “revolve,”

As shoppers spit out in their 2-star reviews.

I hope the grandmother/militant/onlinetroller revolves me, one of these days.

c This zine was made using materials from the Joe and Lillian Shapiro Collection of Laundry Ephemera at the John Hay Library. The Shapiros ran Lundermac, a coin-operated laundry company whose headquarters became the primary storage place for all of the material (which then overflowed into their home in Newton, MA) prior to its arrival at the Hay. They had started the collection in the 1980s, given the family business, and continued to amass items until their respective deaths in the early 2010s. While this zine is somewhat of a silly exercise, laundry as a topic is rife with questions of labor, gender and race, all of which appear as threads throughout the materials in the collection. The zine is meant to be cut on the red dashed line and folded on the dotted lines.

IZZY ROTH-DISHY B’25 is feeling sudsy.

Bonjour Indy

Indie’s not at all jealous of your summer. I promise.

Indie had wished for a Euro summer or something of the sort, but it was decided by forces unbeknownst to her that she learn to live with the silence of an empty city; and thus Prov Summer was born. People have made many a critique of Providence over the years; too small, too colonial, too post-colonial, and why is there a 2D Warner Brothers studio-style building Downtown?

And fair. Except not really.

Welcome back, everyone. I think it’s important to remind ourselves why we’re here (and happy about it—at least some of the time), and so, in addition to my superb relationship advice—answering the inquiries that seemingly dominate the psyche of this late summer season— I’ve decided to grant you all the fortune of hearing ten lessons from my Prov Summer.

1) Cohabitating your home — in this case, an esteemed Ivy League campus— with grotesquely ambitious high schoolers is a great way to awaken your possessive personality type.

2) Beach parking isn’t free on the East Coast!!!! (that classic place where colonists established an independent nation to evade taxes…)

3) Visiting Newport on the Fourth of July can inspire feelings akin to that time you ended up on someone’s Snap story in 8th grade but you didn’t have Snapchat so you didn’t know exactly why and you had to track down three different people to piece together the whole story, and even then it’s still vague and you are left feeling fundamentally changed but unable to articulate why.

4) Visiting India Point Park for the Fourth of July does the opposite in that it inspires a deep love for your local community and how beautiful Providence really is.

5) Walking a block down to Angell Street to avoid the Meeting Street steps and subsequent 45-degree incline is optimal once it surpasses 90 degrees outside.

6) Dopamine detoxing by walking around Providence no headphones, no stimulation, only thought for 2+ hours has the same health benefits as a yearly Goop subscription. 7) Campus is bird city! Cardinals, Blue Jays, Loons, to name a few. 8) Virginia Slims aren’t that good… 9) But shitty sangria made with Ratty fruit is.

10) Walking six blocks in a thunderous downpour to catch a matinee at the Avon is totally chill, mildly enjoyable, and simultaneously the best way to be the most damp you’ve ever been. In other words: totally worth it.

Dear Second Roomate, Once Removed,

Consider yourself lucky.

This campus is so painfully small that if you weren’t into your friend’s ex-roommate it’d be your lab partner, or barista, or next-door neighbor, or across-the-hall neighbor. If I’m being honest, a friend’s ex-roommate is probably the best and safest degree of separation that you’re going to find in this place.

Furthermore, what a fantastic opportunity.

Everyone should experience a Prov Summer. There are few better ways to reevaluate yourself, your purpose, and your values away from all the noise. The future will come, the world awaits, etc. etc., but little can amount to sitting in an empty, early morning Patriot’s Court, waiting for nothing in particular. And besides, it brings much-needed peace of mind to someone like yours truly, who must then inherit the burden of my treasured readers’ problems—though fret not, I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Still thinking about a particularly painful situationship à la Batuman’s The Idiot (older international math prodigy with communication issues—but it mostly took place on Snapchat, not email) and am still hung up about it. Not because he was particularly interesting (he told me he liked the Barbie movie but that I couldn’t tell “the boys,” and midway through he got a pretty awful buzzcut), but because we never actually had an honest conversation. Should I reach out to get closure?

Seeking affirmation, The Idiot

Dear Idiot,

It’s completely understandable that you’d want to reach out. Never having an honest conversation maintains a certain mystery and intrigue, but it also allows you to fill in the gaps, and before you know it you’re reminiscing fondly on a person and relationship that doesn’t and didn’t exist. In all kindness, are you sure he even wants to hear from you, or are you just feeding him some form of validation that won’t be reciprocated? And I guess I’m just stuck on the whole fan of the Barbie movie but too embarrassed to let his friends know part. I mean, if he had said he’s really into the 1992 environmental conservation masterpiece Ferngully, I would get it. ‘Cause then everyone’s like, what’s that? Why is there a talking bat and why does that evil oil monster keep singing jazzy tunes? But it’s not, it’s the Barbie movie, the blockbuster of that year. This lapse in judgment gives me the impression that he should maybe grow up a little! That, and the use of Snapchat. Which, Idiot, is advice I’d extend to you as well. We are a real country, with real phones—use the numbers they come with. The urge to reach out for closure, a mission I’ve set out on in the past, usually stems from two places: 1) The desire to get back with them, or 2) The desire to see if they want to get back with you. Real closure comes from the self. It comes over time, slowly, painfully, until one day you see them and you realize you’re no longer bothered, and then it’s the past and you’re in the present. Let yourself feel a mild nostalgia, and then let it wash over you like a fine mist. Call your mom instead, or your childhood best friend. Email your concentration advisor. And for the love of God, delete Snapchat. And watch Ferngully (1992); you won’t regret it.

Do you know how much you learn about someone by living with them? Imagine all the valuable intel your friend has that you now have access to. Like, do they leave the room without shoes? Do they wash their sheets? What decor did they decide was apt enough to represent them and their space— or, terrifyingly so, do they have no decor at all?? Use this opportunity to gain the information you need—maybe your friend will know their favorite time to hit the Ratty so you can ‘bump’ into them oh-so-ironically— knowing everything at your disposal never hurts. Conversely, the ex-roommate might make you privy to information you never wanted to know about your friend. What if you find out that they can’t study without listening to Selected Ambient Works 85-92 out loud? Or that they often mutter half-constructed stand-up bits while furiously scratching at a legal pad? Some things are meant to be separated: church and state, your childhood best friend’s parents, the buttermilk left over in the butter you’ve made so that it doesn’t go rancid. You and your friend’s ex-roommate?

What’s the protocol for moving in on a friend’s ex-roommate?

Is it morally objectionable, or has the obligation to not pursue them ended now that they aren’t really connected? Bad idea?

Second Roommate, Once Removed

The jury is still out, but you’ll be hearing no objections from Indie—only best wishes.

The Bulletin 9/13/2024

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Friday 09/13-09/20

Location: Various locations throughout Rhode Island DESIGN WEEK RI

Beginning Friday 09/13, the annual DESIGN WEEK RI is back again to showcase Rhode Island designers and designs through a week-long series of events such as studio tours, panels, and hands-on activities. Look forward to a community quilting event, talks about cast iron cookware and hip hop visuals, park(ing) day, and more! Check out Design X RI’s calendar for more details.

Sunday 09/15 @10AM-3PM

Location: 195 District Park, Downtown Providence, Providence, RI 02903

Providence Flea

Providence Flea has been held every Sunday this summer, so don’t miss out on the last flea market event. With over 75+ vendors featuring vintage clothing, art made by local artists, baked goods, community nonprofits, and more, come support local small businesses at the last market this summer!

Tuesday 09/17 @3PM-6PM

Location: 450 Clinton Street, Providence, RI 02895

Woonsocket Farmers Market Outdoor Music Series

If you’re looking for an entertaining and relaxing night with music, look no further! Woonsocket Farmers Market is partnering up with the Rhode Island Council on the Arts to hold a special outdoor music series, featuring a wide variety of music and artists. Tori Jae, known for her signature contralto sound and multilingual pop/rock fusion, will be performing her songs. Come enjoy some community music in a relaxed atmosphere!

Friday 09/13-09/14

Location: Churchill House, 155 Angell St, Providence, RI 02906

The Trauma of Activism: The Black Freedom Struggle Held at Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reasons Theatre, come join a free two-day symposium featuring a series of moderated conversations on the civil rights movement, current activists, and mental health professionals to address historical Black trauma and resilience. Featured panelists include David Dennis Sr., Muriel Tillinghast, members of Sista Fire, and many more. Although there is free admission, be sure to register for tickets for either Friday or Saturday.

Arts

Saturday 09/14 @1PM-5PM

Location:Mt. Pleasant Library MakerSpace, 315 Academy Avenue, Providence, RI 02908

Introduction to Tufting

( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & GABI YUAN

DESIGN ANDREW LIU )

Lucky for you, Haus is holding open studios every Thursday. Open to all different styles of dance and ages, this session will practice not only multidisciplinary performance art but also provide ways to engage with the community through cultural preservation. This is a free event, so come join Haus and AS220 now!

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Volunteer for LitArts RI’s Readathon Event

Help plan for an adult readathon in early 2025! If you are interested in helping out and have skills in graphic design, fundraising, event planning, or photography, this may be a good fit for you! The link to the volunteer form can be found on their Instagram @litartsri, or at https://forms.gle/sa6KXHySk2ViDTvu5.

Join Binch Press, a print and design studio centering queer people and people of color, and Queer.Archive.Work., a nonprofit publishing studio and residency, for their second open library hours this Sunday! A different studio member hosts every week, and all are welcome to drop by to browse the library collections, hang out, and be in community.

Wednesday 09/18 @6PM-7:30PM

Location: Mt. Pleasant Library, 315 Academy Ave, Providence, RI 02908

A Day in the Life: R&B Music Performance & Presentation

The Rhode Island Rhythm & Blues Preservation Society is holding a presentation on the heritage, legacy, and historical connections of R&B music in the evolution of American popular music. Parts of the presentation include R&B’s evolution, popular songs of the R&B era, and experiences recalled by a local Rhode Island R&B musician. Sign up to join the celebration of Rhythm and Blues in RI! @publicnotprivate.

Every Thursday 09/19 @6PM-9:30PM

Location: AS220 Dance Studio, 95 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903

Open Studios

Interested in dancing with Haus of Glitter Dance Company + AS220?

Every Monday 09/16 @5PM-7:30PM

Location: Knight Memorial Library Main Level, 275 Elmwood Avenue, Providence, RI 02907

Community Vaccine Clinic

Clinica Esperanza/Hope Clinic is hosting a mobile community vaccine clinic at the Knight Memorial Library for adults every Monday. This service is free and open to the public, and no pre-registration is required. Previous vaccine records are helpful, but not required.

Friday 09/20 @10AM-11:30AM

Location: Davis Park Community Garden, located at the corner of Chalkstone Avenue and Oakland Avenue, Providence, RI 02908

Pollinator Meadow Volunteers at Davis Park

If you are interested in cultivating a meadow with native plants, this opportunity might be a great fit for you! Help transform a hillside lawn into a garden habitat with URI Master Gardeners, Davis Park Community Garden, and Mt. Pleasant Library. Meetings are every other Friday morning and Tuesday mornings.

Every Tuesday @3PM-6PM

Location: 1570 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02909

Sojourner House Drop-In Hours

Sojourner House is an organization dedicated to providing relief for survivors of abuse. If you are 18-24 years old who has experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, or human trafficking, stop by these drop-in hours to get connected to resources for rental assistance, sexual health testing, sexual health supplies, and more!