The College Hill Independent —Vol 46 Issue 2

Masthead*

MANAGING EDITORS

Zachary Braner

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Ella Spungen

WEEK IN REVIEW

Karlos Bautista

Morgan Varnado

ARTS

Kian Braulik

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

EPHEMERA

Ayça Ülgen

Livia Weiner

FEATURES

Madeline Canfield

Jane Wang

LITERARY

Ryan Chuang

Evan Donnachie

Anabelle Johnston

METRO

Mark Buckley

Jack Doughty

Rose Houglet

Sacha Sloan

SCIENCE + TECH

Eric Guo

Angela Qian

Katherine Xiong

WORLD

Everest Maya-Tudor

Lily Seltz

X

Claire Chasse

DEAR INDY

Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD

Sofia Barnett

Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Sage Jennings

Anabelle Johnston

Corinne Leong

Isaac McKenna

Sacha Sloan

Jane Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Tanvi Anand

Cecilia Barron

Graciela Bautista

Mariana Fajnzylber

Saraphina Forman

Keelin Gaughan

Sarah Goldman

Jonathan Green

Sarah Holloway

Anushka Kataruka

Roza Kavak

Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo

Abani Neferkara

Justin Scheer

Julia Vaz

Kathy/Siqi Wang

Madeleine Young

COPY CHIEF

Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Qiaoying Chen

Veronica Dickstein

Eleanor Dushin

Aidan Harbison

Doren Hsiao-Wecksler

Jasmine Li

Rebecca Martin-Welp

Kabir Narayanan

Eleanor Peters

Angelina Rios-Galindo

Taleen Sample

Angela Sha

Jean Wanlass

Michelle Yuan

DEVELOPMENT

COORDINATOR

Angela Lian

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Kian Braulik

Angela Lian

Natalie Mitchell

Chinmayi Rajaram

WEB MANAGER

Isaac McKenna

WEB EDITORS

Hadley Dalton

Arman Deendar

Ash Ma

GAMEMAKERS

Alyscia Batista

Anna Wang

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

COVER COORDINATOR

Zora Gamberg

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Nicole Ban

Brianna Cheng

Ri Choi

Ashley Guo

Kira Held

Xinyu/Sara Hu

Gina Kang

Amy/Youjin Lim

Andrew Liu

Ash Ma

Jaesun Myung

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Floria Tsui

Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Sophie Foulkes

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Lucy Carpenter

Bethenie Carriaga

Julia/Shuo Yun Cheng

Avanee Dalmia

Michelle Ding

Nicholas Edwards

Jameson Enriquez

Lillyanne Fisher

Haimeng Ge

Jacob Gong

Ned Kennedy

Elisa Kim

Sarosh Nadeem

Hannah Park

Luca Suarez

Yanning Sun

Anna Wang

Camilla Watson

Iris Wright

Nor Wu

Celine Yeh

Jane Zhou

MVP

Gina Kang

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

The CollegeHillIndependent 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 selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN THEATRICAL PARODIES

The other day I (actually, literally) woke up from a dream that I was in the writing room for Production Workshop’s Hint!, a parody of Clue, the play based on the movie based on the board game. But in my dream, instead of being in the basement of Sayles Hall we were deep underground, and instead of saying words or funnies, co-director Annie Stein ’24 just sat in a child’s desk chair and screamed.

I think I was dreaming what it must’ve been like in late January, days before Brown reconvened for the spring semester, when Broadway Licensing refused Production Workshop the rights to perform Clue. This happened for no apparent reason besides a contemporaneous regional production running this March and April in Long Island. I caught up with directors Annie and co-director Finn Blomquist Eggerling ’23.5 to talk about the fallout of this rejection: “I was just walking around the streets of New York, like, what am I doing with my life? I felt like my entire identity crumbled because I’d constructed my semester around this dream that I was going to direct this play that was so specific to my childhood and my wants and my desires moving forward as someone who wants to do entertainment long term,” said Finn. In a later email chain they further expanded on the importance of Clue in their life. Growing up in rural Minnesota, Finn found their surroundings “muted and vacant.” They “became obsessed with diving into an ocean of fabulous, glamorous media. I loved Lady Gaga and Alexander McQueen and Clue: the Movie—anything that represented an art and taste that transcended my immediate surroundings. While I have since accepted that Minnesota is integral to my taste and my art, the obsession with severe maximalism remains. It drives the way I create. It’s the reason I want to create. I’m not great with subtlety, but neither was Clue and neither is Hint!”

By the time Annie and Finn found out they couldn’t perform Clue, the cast and crew had planned, practiced, even memorized their lines— Finn described their experience: “Oh, my God. I think it was like a three day grieving process.” Stein responded, “It was like, it’s fine, we’ll do it somehow. It’s fine. Then it was crying, crying, screaming, crying, like, oh my God, how are we going to tell the actors?” But instead of quitting, they dreamt big, writing “Hint!” Ben Rosenn ’23, who plays Mr. Grass in the rewrite, told Indy correspondent Ella Spungen ’23.5 on the steps of Faunce Hall, “Here, I’ll tell you something funny.

I had memorized all of my lines for the original one, so Clue was almost an exercise for Hint!, if that makes sense. I got to really understand what the essence of the play was about before we even sat down to write it.” Resilience in the face of such abrupt change truly does justice to touring pianist Anthony E. Pratt, from whose mind the idea of “Cluedo” (originally “Murder!”; “Clue” in the US) sprung while manufacturing tank components in Birmingham, England during the Second World War. “Cluedo” was first patented in 1947, then made into a movie in 1985 (which was shipped to movie theaters with one of three possible endings, preserving the sacred mystery), then a musical in 1997, and in 2024 perhaps—20th Century Studios willing—a new movie release starring Ryan Reynolds.

Hint!, like the original Clue, stars a troupe of eclectic blackmailees all stage managed by assistant director Zach Susini ’25 who got the job because of his experience herding cats:

Teniayo-Ola Macaulay ’25 as “Mrs. Off White”

Ari Cleveland ’24 as “General Grey Poupon”

Ben Rosenn ’23 as “Mr. Grass”

Iman Husain ’23 as “Madame Merlot”

Masha Breeze ’23 as “Annette”

Lydia Riess ’24 as “Cook”

Callie Rabinovitz ’24 as “Mrs. Pigeon”

Laurel Meshnick ’23 as “Professor Purple”

Calvin Ware ’26 as “Mr. S’Boddy”

Yoni Weil ’24 as “Fernsby”

Sam Colt-Simmonds ’24 as “Unexpected Inspector”

The play begins with Mr. S’Boddy inviting the aforementioned group to his isolated mansion. Once settled, they are handed odd and useless weapons like a kazoo or a vibrator. Somehow S’Boddy is swiftly killed in total darkness. From this point onward, the play proceeds amidst murder and deception as the partiers-turned-suspects try to identify the killer among them. This play feels like 5 a.m., peeing yourself at a sleepover, or a going-toschool-naked dream. It feels like what I imagine highschoolers do at Hampton Inns after Model UN conferences.

The play was written from Wednesday, January 25 to Sunday, January 29 and was rigorously edited, blocked, and rehearsed in the three weeks following. Describing the exhausting writing process, Rosenn said, “we took scenes from the original and we had to change all the lines, so we went through the entire play, we decided what we wanted the

vision for the play to look like, what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to change, and then we divided and we gave each writer a different scene. And kind of remarkably, the style and the voice all did come together, which is the thing I was most surprised about.” For a game which has gone through so many transformations, the essence of “Clue” is almost perfectly preserved because of the commitment of the cast and crew. It even feels more relevant and tangible.

To manage the short turnaround, the masterminds behind Hint! developed a process which Annie and Finn referred to as “making silly theater seriously,” and “being both productive and stupid.” The writers discussed one of the four-day-old characters, General Grey Poupon, saying he is “a George Santos… a testament to masculinity… like… Anna Delvey or Elizabeth Holmes…” This Indy writer’s friend Asa Turok ’24 was brimming with jealousy: “Not having been in the Hint! writer’s room is the greatest regret of my Brown career.”

+++

As much as I loved being allowed to infiltrate the writer’s room, it dawned on me only during rehearsal that I’d been swept into the Spirit of Theatre unawares. Analyzing the scene I’d stumbled into, I realized that the loss of the rights and laborious process of adapting the script had transmuted the Production Workshop Downspace into an alchemical holding chamber of fire and potential. Annie did not scream now but leapt in the air, conjuring her cast to pronounce every consonant and say the word “WHAAAT?!” with seven syllables, while Finn stared at the actors like a cat would a hanging feather toy. Finn and Annie’s collaboration was hot, and I was scared. “We definitely made it a little bit more raunchy, a little bit more contemporary,” said Rosenn. The Spirit of Theatre did its bidding and plucked me out of mundane reality. For several distinct seconds, unaware of myself, I laughed, I screamed—I dissolved into the serious silliness of the script dreamt up in five days coming to life in front of me. Come see the dream in action February 23-5!

PURSE POWER MEETS PEOPLE POWER

An interview with GLO President Sherena Razek and Organizing Coordinator Beckett Warzer

This past Wednesday, February 15, the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO)—Brown graduate workers’ anti-racist, feminist labor union— engaged in the first of a series of bargaining sessions with the Brown University administration. As GLO seeks to secure various expansions to its existing 2020 contract through their platform of accessibility, compensation, and equity, the College Hill Independent spoke with President Sherena Razek and Organizing Coordinator Beckett Warzer about Brown’s reluctance to engage in ‘open bargaining’ with the union’s rank and file membership. As an organizing-based union, GLO models its approach to negotiations after the strategies of similar groups across the country: demanding that sessions be open for all grad workers to attend rather than only the bargaining committee’s leadership.

Amid a national surge of university labor organizing, including the emergence of the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization (TALO)

secure livelihood: comprehensive insurance policies, extended childcare subsidies, accessible working environments, and, notably, protections from discrimination and harassment through impartial grievance procedures.

GLO aspires, through the advancement of their contract, to hold the University and its multi-billion-dollar-endowed corporate structure accountable. Made to invest in the well-being of graduate workers, GLO envisions a university restrained in its capacity to expand, both in space and fiscal power, within the City of Providence.

The Indy: Brown seems opposed to open bargaining sessions with GLO. They’ve claimed, per your account, that it “doesn’t contribute to a ‘collegial collaborative problem-solving spirit’’’—but you succeeded in getting open bargaining during last year’s raise negotiations. What strategies did you all use to get Brown to agree?

Beckett Warzer: They didn’t want to but we showed up to every bargaining session. The message was: there’s no negotiating about us without us. Eventually, they had to concede.

prestigious reputation—they don’t respect us.

Of course, people get upset when you hear from the boss’s mouth how little they actually think about us. So, you know, the boss can be a really good agitator for members.

BW: I think we will be able to have productive conversations with them as a full group. There shouldn’t be any resistance if they don’t have anything to hide. That’s the thing. We’re also there trying to negotiate.

At the bargaining table, there’s an illusion of equality—but that’s just not the case. We are workers at this institution. They’re a multibillion-dollar-endowed corporation. We need that worker power and collective action to get our demands met.

SR: A lot of organizing-oriented unions use open bargaining, and it’s not going to be a protest. Yet. Grads will be silently observing. Our bargaining committee will be the ones who are speaking and negotiating. But grads deserve to be there, witness what’s going on, be clued in, involved, and engaged in this process, because we’re all going to be so deeply impacted by the outcome of these negotiations.

The Indy: The recognition of grad student workers as laborers who sustain the university seems to threaten the administration and corporation. Why do you see value in being recognized as laborers of the university?

BW: The university loves to split our status into student vs. worker. They try to emphasize that we are ultimately students, because that’s the label that benefits them. And that has been really disempowering to us. We’re the ones who are teaching classes, grading, running experiments, producing knowledge, working in labs, producing research on COVID-19. Our labor makes the university run. It makes sense that they want to undermine our status as workers, because that benefits them, but ultimately we are the workforce of the university.

at Brown, the mobilization of campus workers complicates the University’s accumulation of wealth. Brown touted the protection of its assets as a paramount goal in fiscal year 2022; it should instead recognize and invest in the labor that sustains Brown as an institution.

Following in-depth interviews with almost 300 card-carrying members, GLO has published a platform advocating for Brown to provide its workers with the conditions of a robust and

Sherena Razek: This year, the precedent has been set. [Last year,] it was over Zoom, and this year will be in person, which will be different. They claimed that with open bargaining, conversations weren’t as productive. Brown likes to position itself as this benevolent institution that has these higher education missions and values, but when it comes to the workers who actually fulfill those missions, who contribute to that

SR: It’s also important to take into consideration the broader labor drive that’s happening on this campus. Undergraduate teaching assistants in computer science have been fed up with their working conditions. They’ve been overworked, running that department on very little compensation. They’ve exhausted every avenue that exists for students to appeal to the university and have come to us to help support them in taking a different approach through labor power, collective action. They realize that’s the only real way to get Brown to move and to see our demands met.

[Brown] likes to pretend to listen to us. But as a union—and I think this is sort of where the discomfort comes from in terms of open bargaining—they don’t actually want us in large numbers, making them hear and move on our demands. I think that is the threat of higher-ed labor around the country. There’s a lot of momentum in this movement.

Making Discrimination Grievable

The Indy: Can you walk us through different organizing efforts and encounters with the University that have happened the past few years? You both mentioned violations of your rights as a product of the imposed ‘student worker’ label. Can you both speak to what those violations were?

SR: Graduate labor organizing at Brown really started almost a decade ago, when Brown unilaterally decided to revoke sixth-year funding. All of a sudden, there were graduate students in their fifth year, like I am, who were like, ‘I don’t have an income or a program to look to in the next year, that has just been taken from me.’ The university loves to cite austerity measures and cry poor as they sit on their endowment. So grads took action. Things started as grassroots organizing. But having an official election and union representing grad workers really changed the terrain of power within the university. With all this, we’ve tried to retain those grassroots organizing models for action, because that’s where our power comes from. Do we have a contract? Yes. Do we have legal protections? Yes—but what it really comes down to is collective action. In terms of what the struggle has been over: for one, our wage [was] not livable. Only since unionizing has this really changed. So far, we’ve won better protections—we won 75 percent coverage for dependents’ health care, and that’s better than what we had before! However, we need 100 percent. Along with this, we’ve won a grievance procedure. We didn’t have that before. Without it, if something happened—if you faced sexual harassment, discrimination, all these horrible things that we like to think don’t happen, but that we know for a fact do—you were supposed to go to Brown and exclaim, ‘Brown has violated me, I have faced harassment here, I face discrimination here.’ And then you are looking to the institution that has perpetrated those acts against you to also be the arbiter of the outcome and serving justice. That’s not fair. Brown can’t be the perpetrator, the judge, and the jury.

BW: One of the things that we’re really trying to focus on in our upcoming contract negotiations is making discrimination grievable [providing a process by which to file a formal complaint]. There have been a lot of instances, not only with our campaigns in the fall involving grads who were unfairly dismissed from their programs, but ongoing things, where academic discipline is being used as a vehicle for faculty or other supervisors to discriminate against people. Right now, they can’t become formal grievances because they’re not protected in our contract. There are repeated histories of faculty and other supervisors discriminating broadly against grads of color or international grads. We need these offenses to be provable and grievable with the university. This must happen through third party arbitration, not adjudicated by Brown.

SR: We deserve job security. What Brown is doing right now is basically firing grads, or dismissing them from their programs, under the guise of academic issues—and trying to keep the union out of those conversations so that we’re unable to officially advocate for and protect grads who are facing devastating situations. It’s not fair to invest so much time into a program like this—that’s paid so poorly but dangles a light at the end of the tunnel of your PhD or master’s degree—when they can just arbitrarily take that away from us. That’s not fair. Our health care, our visa status are dependent on the work that we do here, our income. And we deserve to have some security in that.

Protections for Brown/Trinity MFA

The Indy: Could you also speak to the efforts of the Brown/Trinity MFA graduate workers to join GLO’s union?

BW: If anyone needs a union on this campus, it’s them. All workers need a union, but the conditions of that program are deeply unjust. It’s essentially a for-profit program. They are paid, but the amount is almost a joke; it’s from nothing to, I think, at most, $12,000 a year, which is nowhere even near livable. A lot of them are living off loans or credit card debt in order to pay rent and buy groceries.

Not only that, but the work expectations of that program are higher than almost any other program that I’ve heard about at Brown. These actors and directors are working, like, six days a week, 12-hour days. It’s really too much and creates a toxic work environment. Then, if you have a medical issue, or if your mental health is deteriorating because you’re in this highly toxic work environment, there have been many instances where grads’ medical leave is denied, especially in that program.

The graduate school or the department love to point fingers at each other as a way to avoid responsibility for it. They say that, you know, this is a program where you can’t take a leave of absence and come back because the cohort is so important or something like that. But grads need to be able to take medical leave. That’s not something that is negotiable.

community in the surrounding area. In solidarity with the working class of Providence, we want to pressure Brown to pay its fair share.

BW: Because we are a collective of organized workers, we can be in solidarity with other workers, not only in Providence but all over. It really is about holding Brown accountable to the city of Providence in regards to its investments of the endowment. In 2021, for instance, GLO passed a divestment referendum, saying that grads want Brown to divest from companies complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine. It’s important for us to hold Brown accountable not only to paying its workers a living wage, but also to not be funding human rights abuses.

The Indy: Can you speak to the relationship between divestment and reinvestment in the community, whether through voluntary payments or other means? It seems like it would be advantageous for Brown to be able to claim they’re investing in the community without being held to account for where the wealth they’ve accumulated is coming from.

SR: I think this is not something we accomplish in its entirety in this contract campaign. But the more that we can pry away decision-making power from the upper echelons of Brown administrators and the Corporation and put it in the hands of the workers and students who actually comprise the Brown community, the better off we’ll be. Maybe there’s no Ivy League system in the long term of that horizon, right? Maybe the university becomes like a co-op that actually values these higher education missions it purports to.

SR: We’ve heard specifically for the Brown/ Trinity program, but for programs more broadly, that the hiring freeze that took place when COVID-19 first hit added a lot of pressure to already-present cohorts. At that time, Brown assured us that they were putting this freeze on, that they weren’t going to bring new grads to our departments, because they wanted to make sure that they had the means to support the grads who are already here. They made this promise to us, right? And then they expect us to trust them.

Now, they’re citing that hiring freeze as a reason why they can’t allow grads to take medical leave. They promised us that they were doing this for us, to support us, but actually, it has added an additional burden of labor onto grad workers.

Fighting for the Dream

The Indy: Throughout the long arc of the pandemic, Brown has accumulated so much more wealth. I feel like one thing on a lot of people’s minds is Brown’s physical expansion; the campus just seems to be moving out in every direction at a really rapid rate, often in the name of pressures on residential life. How do you all see GLO’s labor organizing relating to restraining Brown’s accumulation? What is GLOs relationship to voluntary payment negotiations and conversations around taxing Brown’s endowment?

SR: We’ve been in support of the PILOT program, payment in lieu of taxes. Because Brown is a nonprofit organization, they don’t have to pay the amount of taxes that a regular corporation would have to pay to the City [of Providence]. So despite the fact that Brown is continuously expanding, buying up land as a huge landowner, they are basically able to evade these taxes. To us, this is theft from the Providence community.

Part of our platform is bargaining for the common good, and that means for the broader Providence community—holding Brown accountable and pressuring it to pay its fair share in taxes. If you look at the state of education in Providence [public] schools, these are terrible conditions. You can see the wealth that Brown is accumulating and pouring into College Hill, and how that is taking away from the schools and

What that looks like, in the short term, is trying to fight on this contract to have components of our platform that are bargaining for the common good, demanding transparency, and taking steps towards more grad worker oversight and decision-making power. There would be no Brown without us. We deserve a say in how things are run.

BW: We’re fighting for the dream, which is a truly democratic worker-run organization.

The Indy: Do you feel that in your organizing you’ve learned anything from other campuses’ graduate union organizing? I’m thinking particularly of the University of California campaign, but are there any other moments of grad labor organizing that inform how you were looking ahead to the session?

BW: Definitely, grad organizing across the U.S. has been inspiring. We can look at what other people have won at their universities, and every time anyone wins something, it pushes the bar a little bit. A win for one is a win for all.

SR: Based on what we see around the U.S., we know that we are only going to win what we fight for. When we’re going to go to the table, Brown is going to say no at first, probably to all of our proposals. Our strength comes from how organized we are, how we can mobilize workers, how we can push Brown so that they can’t say no to these proposals.

To develop our platform, we had hundreds of conversations, one-on-one, with grad workers who have an in-depth understanding of what they’ve been facing and how they’ve been struggling. The platform isn’t devised by 15 grads who are disconnected from the community. It took into consideration all the hundreds of hours that organizers have spent talking to grads—and all of the different disciplines and departments and fields that make up the grad worker community. We have shaped the bargaining platform to reflect those needs.

JACK DOUGHTY B’23 AND ROSE HOUGLET B’23 glow with love for GLO.

“We're fighting for the dream, which is a truly democratic worker-run organization.”

INTERVIEWS WITH

Elisabeth Subrin and “Speculative Biography” FAMOUS

content warning: sexual violence, sexual assault, racism

Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity and precision.

On February 9, 2023, the David Winton Bell Gallery opened The Listening Takes, a multichannel video installation by independent filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin. The triptych features three reenactments of a 1983 Cinéma Cinémas interview with the late French actress Maria Schneider— who is most often reduced to her infamous non-consensual sex scene with Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris. For the immersive thirty-minute runtime, Subrin asks audiences to examine and reexamine Schneider’s discussion of her traumatic experience in the early ’70s through the lens of a reenacted performance.

In the black box, Subrin erects three screens with a series of mirrors on the backs, synthesizing some of her previous visual art techniques and motifs to present Schneider’s experience in the film industry as synecdochal for all women. Subrin’s earlier video artworks Shulie, Sweet Ruin, and Lost Tribes and Promised Lands respectively stage an interview reenactment with Shulamith Firestone, undertake a biographical inquiry into the life of Maria Schneider, and harness a splitscreen projection; The Listening Takes casts three actresses—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—against three surfaces, allowing each performer to riff on Schneider’s mannerisms, affects, and words. Emphasizing in her February 9 artist talk how difference marks The Listening Takes, Subrin purports to avoid portraying Schneider as a singular, essentialized woman through multiracial casting. Multiplicity, as opposed to ‘pure’ recreation, she insists, is a necessary strategy for faithful biographical representation. She elaborates in her interview with The College Hill Independent:

My goal with reenactment is never to present the original work as the work was intended.

I’m interested in the legacy of harm and marginalization Maria speaks of, and continuing to explore these themes through others’ experiences… With reenactment, I see an opportunity to graft an intersectional analysis.

Subrin’s multiracial casting choices and script alterations immediately diverge from the original material. While Issa nearly replicates the original interview, with a strict adherence to the canonical text and close attention to Schneider’s downturned gaze and frustrated intonation, Maïga adds a line about pervasive whiteness in the film industry. Sandoval delivers her interpretation in English, and, notably, walks out at the end of her interview, displaying a degree of agency that Schneider may not have accessed when weighing her own career against her frustration.

Decontextualized, Subrin’s interest in difference may appear to be another hollow promise of diversity, as well as a desire to deify Schneider as a martyr for all women. In her artist statement for The Listening Takes, Subrin emphasizes how important she considers her actresses’ politics: Issa’s pro-Palestianian activism (she made headlines in 2018 when she touted a “Stop the attack

on Gaza” sign on the Cannes red carpet), Maïga’s condemnation of the French film industry’s racism, and Sandoval’s advocacy against trans underrepresentation in the industry. Subrin also insists on mentioning her actresses’ countries of origin (“Manal, born in Lebanon,” reads the program), a choice that underscores her multiracial casting choices with a tint of directorial overcompensation.

“We did not set out to find a Middle Eastern

to commenting on the “few roles that [she] really [wants to] do,” Sandoval reminds us that, for her, there are “few trans roles that [she] really [wants to] do.” Beyond these lines about underrepresentation, though, it’s impossible to glean any pertinent information about black women’s experiences in the French film industry or trans women’s in the Philippine industry. Moreover, Subrin’s obscure nods to her actresses’ ‘activism’ risk landing on deaf ears, not least because The Listening Takes is presented in an American gallery.

Unbeknownst to anyone solely familiar with The Listening Takes, Maïga, along with 16 black French actresses, published a 2018 series of essays on tokenization and underrepresentation in the film industry called Noire n’est pas mon métier. Although her actresses’ histories were essential context for Subrin’s casting [decisions], The Listening Takes includes no such accounts of black women’s or trans women’s traumatic experiences in the film industry. Simply adding “white men” or “trans” to lines about women’s representation instead veers toward essentializing the experiences of its Marias under the banner of Schneider’s monolithic trauma from Tango, calling into question whether The Listening Takes constitutes a hearty speculation, to borrow Subrin’s pedagogical phrase, beyond its source material.

actress, or an African actress, or a Southeast Asian actress,” Subrin explains. “Manal is so Maria, and the fit just felt right. I knew I wanted Aïssa for some time and even more so after her actions at the Césars last year… From the start, I knew I wanted to cast a trans actress, and when Isabel came along, I was also really excited by her work as a director because part of changing the culture is also changing who is behind the camera.”

While Subrin justifies each casting decision, it’s notable that she refuses to restage an interview with a white actress with another white actress. Although it’s difficult to see how her actresses’ political allegiances come to the fore in a performance solely bent on appropriating a highly particular interview, Subrin emphasizes having encouraged her three actresses to reflect upon their own experiences when constructing their character.

“With [The Listening Takes], I see reenactment as a braiding of three fundamental questions: How do I, as Maria, feel about these questions, how does her response reflect how I feel as an actress in the film industry, and how do I feel about how Maria was treated?” Subrin tells the Indy

Subrin explains that she permitted Maïga and Sandoval to alter their performances in ways that might make them truer to black and trans women’s experiences in the contemporary film industry. Variations in the dialogue between reenactments include the change of “white men” and “trans” into Maria’s commentary on the lack of representation for women in the film industry. So, in addition to, “it’s men who have the power in cinema,” from the original interview, Maïga poses, “it’s white men who have the power in cinema.” Secondly, as opposed to just

Of course, Subrin’s interest in Schneider’s interview extends beyond the actress herself. Reenactment recurs across Subrin’s oeuvre as a method to translate the artist’s interest in famous women—usually actresses—into theses on how we imagine and might reimagine women’s, feminist, and urban histories. Through reenactment, she gets at the psychologies inherent to specific historical moments. But in her attempt to parse through Schneider’s particular vulnerabilities, Subrin reproduces the rhetoric of an everywoman, marked by single-word biographical inserts in otherwise personal text.

“My work has always been interested in how women are represented and I see actresses as an avatar for female representation,” she tells the Indy. (Here one might recall Bertolucci’s 2013 confession, “I wanted [Schneider’s] reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” the distinction itself becoming a site of violence.)

Beyond oblique casting choices, Subrin understands how biography as a method produces and reproduces rigidly linear narratives. As alluded to, she frequently describes her work as “speculative biography,” a form of reconstitutive art that leaves space for the negative capability of her subjects. Subrin elucidates: “I use that term [speculative] to emphasize the impossibility of biography and to point to the fact that what we’re doing is imagining someone’s life and filling in the crevices and holes.”

One may wonder how Subrin’s desire to revive the archive intersects with and departs from other forms of historical (re)imagining, such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” as articulated in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.” In discussing the ubiquity of Venus—an emblem of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world—in contemporary archives of slavery, Hartman addresses the violent conditions that determine her appearance and dictate her

“My goal with reenactment is never to present the original work as the work was intended. I’m interested in the legacy of harm and marginalization Maria speaks of, and continuing to explore these themes through others’ experiences … With reenactment, I see an opportunity to graft an intersectional analysis.”

FAMOUS WOMEN

silence. However, “critical fabulation” is a means of working within and against an intentionally incomplete archive, a form of examining and articulating violence to then generate a “narrative of what might have been or could have been.” As such, Hartman’s work is a powerful assertion of subjunctive becoming that clarifies the entanglement of past and present racial violence. Although Subrin, too, “play[s] with and rearrang[es] the basic elements of the story” and “re-present[s] the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view” in an attempt to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done,” her insistence upon the significance of representation rather than the reality of violence marks a departure from Hartman’s methodology. That race is imagined as an additional vulnerability that can be retroactively applied—even if the intent is to expand the terms of marginalization and demonstrate a continuity that extends to the present—contributes to a sense of ‘colorblindness,’ even as race is explicitly invoked.

Interestingly, rather than recontextualize Schneider’s original interview in The Listening Takes, Subrin fractures this moment across time. Mirrors line the back of each screen, such that the actresses are reflected on one another to produce a cumulative effect. In her artist talk, Subrin describes the process of aging glass for the installation to demonstrate a progression through time and resonance across decades with each screen. “You start getting this idea of a collective unconscious—multiple Marias from different time periods speaking across time to each other,” Subrin tells the Indy. With the mirroring, Subrin insists that it is impossible to behold Schneider’s interview outside of its contemporary political context; in this manner the present is continuously cast back, just as history is overdetermined by its interpretation from different vantage points. Schneider’s revitalization on-screen screams the failures of the past, the film industry’s ignorance in the face of sexual violence only punctuated by our distance from both Schneider and any tangible pursuit of liberation.

In this manner, The Listening Takes reenactment multiplies the effects of a film like Shulie, one of Subrin’s earliest works, in which actress Kim Soss recreates a Shulamith Firestone documentary made by four Northwestern students in 1967. Shulie emphasizes the capacity of reenactment to squish the viewer into an uncanny point of view; the film simultaneously

begs us to consider the legacy of its subject’s feminism and that feminism’s future. Writing at the time of Shulie’s release in 1997, reviewer Kate Haug considers that reenactment in the film exposes the distance between the seemingly more radical roots of Second Wave feminism and its moderate legacies in the 1980s. New York Times film reviewer Richard Brody echoes Haug’s take when he describes Shulie’s anachronism as a “[graft] of the future onto the past.” With their reflexivity, Subrin’s reenactments expose the deficiencies of progress narratives. Still, it is important to challenge repetition as an equalizing, redemptive force for the violences represented, in The Listening Takes and across Subrin’s oeuvre.

In refusing linear biographies, Subrin often produces novel conclusions about otherwise overlooked histories. One of Subrin’s more recent works, the aforementioned Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, utilizes split-screens to display two scenes of Williamsburg, Brooklyn—one shot on October 13, 2001 and the other seven years later, in 2008. With the latter, Subrin emphasizes differences like a new ornamental aluminum fence, or a soft-serve advert in place of a poster with a target on Osama bin Laden. Her juxtapositions of Williamsburg underscore the nebulous nature of liberal narratives of historical progress, while also calling attention to the nebulous politics of public-facing aesthetics.

It was not until working on her debut feature-length film, A Woman, A Part,

question that became the foundation of her blog of the same title. An interest in how women are represented, and the people on both sides of the camera responsible for that representation, underlies all of her work. However, holding The Listening Takes alongside her other projects, one may wonder: what are the tangible effects of this representation? With such attention to the value of images, might we lose sight of the real violence?

Perhaps the installation’s most enduring offering to this question is its attention to sound. Subrin envisions The Listening Takes as an immersive experience—the footage was also released as a single-channel filmic version Maria Schneider, 1983—that impresses upon its audience an embodied sense of what it means to listen. Standing within the black box, one becomes aware that the speakers are directed at separate screens, such that different iterations of Schneider are in conversation with each other, with the actresses playing her, with the audiences, with themselves. This resuscitation of the past and suspension across space and time, ask the listener not only to behold what may be captured on the stage, but also to hear the “collective unconscious” whose silencing haunts Subrin’s work. The ending of The Listening Takes, however, surrenders this polyphonic soundtrack in favor of a single voice.

Traumatized by her experience with Tango and stymied in her career by subsequent cycles of addiction, Maria Schneider recalls how the

vision acting in Los Angeles. When working on the screenplay, Subrin tells the Indy, she found herself wondering, who cares about actresses?—a

KIAN BRAULIK B’24 and ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 care about actresses.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

The commodification and fetishization of East Asian identity in Heaven by Marc Jacobs

In September of 2020, renowned fashion designer Marc Jacobs announced the creation of Heaven, a new subline of his eponymous label marketed as a “polysexual,” “teen-dream” collection. From its onset, the line was notable for its return to the kitschy, grungy aesthetics of the Y2K era, a fragment of reconciliation between high- and low-end fashion. For Jacobs, who has largely worked in this high-fashion, luxury space, Heaven constituted a break through its complete embrace of street style, its direct-to-consumer production, and its clear attempt to appeal to a younger generation.

It was promoted as, and in many ways was, an appreciation and celebration of the distinctly Japanese influence that this aesthetic impulse emerged from. Many of Heaven’s stylistic markers were drawn from the legendary street style of the 1990s to 2000s Harajuku district in Tokyo, with its garish colors and maximalist textures—much of which was immortalized within the pages of the street fashion magazine FRUiTS. This connection, early in the label’s development, was explicit and direct—photographer Shoichi Aoki, the founder of FRUiTS, shot the label’s first lookbook in 2020. To celebrate the new label in Tokyo, Jacobs’ brand helped to open an archival exhibition that displayed walls upon walls of old copies of FRUiTS alongside the new Heaven collection, bringing this movement’s historical past into the present.

It is undeniable that Heaven drew its aesthetic and its brand from this distinctly Japanese fashion scene, but it did so in a way that seemingly paid reference to and honored its aesthetic lineage, the latest stylistic iteration in a long dialogue between East and West. Y2K fashion movements, for example, happening simultaneously with Harajuku’s heyday, both took inspiration from and, in turn, inspired that scene. Hysteric Glamour, one of the most significant style-setting brands of that era in Japan, founded its entire formal concept upon a mostly (but not entirely) ironic co-option of American culture—baby tees emblazoned with signifiers of American comics, rock musicians, pornstars.

Fast-forward a little under two years, and Heaven has announced its newest collection—a collaboration with legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. Its featured item: a $325 wool/nylon hybrid sweater (oversized, of course) with the name of Wong’s 1995 film Fallen Angels in yellow text on the front, and a slightly smaller “Marc Jacobs” on the back. Or, even worse: a $75 baby tee, again with “Fallen Angels” written on the front over the top of a signature Marc Jacobs teddy graphic, this time with “by marc jacobs” positioned right under the film title, as if to implicitly assert the mark of a different (white) authorial signature.

What happened here? How did, in the span of three years, a seemingly respectful and intentional association with the Harajuku aesthetic turn into the bare-minimum practice of name-slapping an Asian artist onto a sweater or a t-shirt? What is Wong Kar-wai doing as part of Heaven, considering that the clothes themselves (a black t-shirt with yellow text) have very little to do with either his, or the Harajuku, aesthetic? Why did a thoughtful reference to a past fashion movement turn into logomania, the logo in question now outsourced to a different artist instead of the brand itself?

The short answer is that this is the way the market (and thus the brand) functions. The explicit engagement with the influence of Heaven’s early collections may have manipulated consumers into believing in the good intentions of the brand. Instead, Heaven’s entire existence

is predicated on cashing in on rapid-fire online fashion trends, and with shifting trends comes a shifting brand. But there is something more going on.

A quick glance at the past collaborations that Heaven has churned out reveals a disproportionate number of Asian, almost all East Asian, artists as part of their repertoire: Wong Kar-wai, but also Hideyuki Tanaka, Kiko Mizuhara, and niche artists like @tomikono_wig and Eri Wakiyama. Heaven, of course, is not unique in its centering of East Asian artists—the brand is, rather, part of a rapidly growing trend in which East Asian culture finds itself at the forefront of so many Western artistic and cultural movements. Think of the prevalence of K-Pop and anime culture, or, less obvious, Bong Joon-ho or Japanese city pop.

In Heaven’s case, however, which features an actively curatorial presence, these artists aren’t included just because they are popular or because they fit within the Harajuku aesthetic (most don’t). Rather, these artists appear to be connected primarily by the category of their East Asian identity—they come from diverse fields, and almost all bear little to no relation to Heaven’s apparent Harajuku influence.

tions with figures or brands that largely serve a hyper-specific, but dedicated, niche (cloud rap artist Bladee, designer Kiko Kostadinov, recently)—it’s hard not to look at this disproportionate frequency of Asian-ness as indicative of a similarly disproportionate aestheticization and subsequent commodification of that very same identity. And while this propagation of Asian artists largely appears to be a moment to celebrate—Heaven is platforming (and compensating) artists that otherwise might not get such a public profiling—there remains something nebulous about the whole concept.

In many ways, maybe this could have been expected. Even in past historical eras where blatant racism toward Asian people was more widely accepted than it is today, as Asian populations were looked down on as primitive or unsophisticated, there has always existed a certain visual fascination with these cultures.

Orientalism, the representation of the East by the West as defined by Edward Said, has trafficked above all in aesthetic intrigue, in aesthetic difference. What is fascinating about the orientalized subject, as opposed to other forms of the racial other, is its maintenance of a distinctively privileged (as opposed to disparaged) aesthetic identity. Even as writers historically defined Asian cultures as primitive or inferior to their own, they remained fascinated by their visual representations—captivated by elaborate Japanese palaces or Chinese ceramics, commenting on their precision, their intricacy Literary scholar and cultural theorist Anne Cheng coins the term “ornamentalism” to describe this conflation between the “oriental” and the “ornamental” that she observes within Western culture. She asserts that, historically, Orientalist thinking has always associated Asian cultures with excessive embellishment or decoration, an association that conflates “persons with things”—reducing complex individuals or identities to the objects that they produce.

Heaven’s appropriation of East Asian aesthetics, then, can be understood not as an independent, contemporary development, but instead as the same

ornamentalism—appropriating this stereotypical link between East Asia and embellished representations in order to further consumers’ engagement and attention to their own aesthetic brand image. While Heaven’s clothes do not directly reference traditional East Asian objects or architecture in the way a historically Orientalist representation might, there are nonetheless key connections between the two— Heaven’s use of loud, flashy colors and textures, for example, can be seen as contemporary forms of the embellishment and decorative instinct that Cheng identifies.

Even the Japanese language itself has become associated with its aesthetic appeal— in addition to their clothes, Heaven has sold old Japanese magazines featuring artists like Nobuyoshi Araki, or even old Twin Peaks flyers produced in Japan. The latter has, notably, nothing at all to do with Japan, or Heaven more broadly, save for the presence of the Japanese written language—as if, to Heaven, the complexity or difference of written Japanese characters themselves exemplifies East Asia’s ornamental aesthetic. Continuing a historical tradition, these examples of contemporary ornamentalism suggest a conflation between Heaven’s products and the East Asian identities that they emerge from.

In Asian-American studies scholar Leslie Bow’s recent book Racist Love, she uses the framework of fetishization as a way to further interrogate this relation/conflation between Asian objects and identity—using the term “fetish” in its anthropological sense, where an inanimate object is worshiped as though it has lifelike or animate powers. Bow chooses to target her analysis specifically on what she deems fetish objects—objects that function as “repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to ‘Asianness,’” operating in much the same realm as Heaven’s clothes and designs. This positivity, however, is not benevolent—rather, it is formed in avoidance of a repressed anxiety spurred on through this racial difference.

Bow’s focus on objects, specifically, as the location of this fetishistic content, is notable— she does so because objects, for her, are imbued with a sense of “racial abstraction,” where the real or aesthetic racial stereotype is reduced to metonymic signs, both reductive and exaggerated. To reduce a racial relation to a fetish object is to familiarize it, to push away the complexities of difference into stereotypified safe ground. Bow suggests that the alternative, without the familiarity of fetish objects, is a deep-seated, Freudian

easier to reduce East Asian culture to ‘Harajuku style,’ or the films of Wong Kar-wai, then have to force oneself to come face-to-face with a real Asian person?

While tempting, I am not so sure that this argument entirely works for me—I find it hard to convince myself that such a form of anxiety toward otherness functions actively in the production and reproduction of these vaguely Asian images. Rather, I think this psychoanalytic perspective only works when considering Heaven’s clothes as outwardly tangible objects On the digital interfaces where the bulk of Heaven’s marketing and sales occur, it is hard to conceive of Heaven’s clothes as objects at all. Instead, they seem to be an amalgamation of different aesthetic references—runway shows, magazine spreads, Pinterest boards—concentrated into coherent, commodifiable, images of clothes.

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One way of understanding the difference between Heaven’s clothes and strictly material objects is that what Heaven produces transcends the corporeal, entering into the hazy realm of images and “commodities.”

In Karl Marx’s foundational theory of commodity fetishism, under market capitalism, what is “mystical” about the commodity is ultimately that it seems to take on economic and social agency of its own, disguising the real labor relationship underpinning the production and circulation of these commodities.

In the era of fashion collaborations, products take on a greater life than ever before. What defines many a piece of designer clothing, for example, is not the labor that went into the making of it, but the relationship between designers who have their names embroidered on the front. These clothes combine formulated, separate aesthetic principles, each of which seems invested with a life and power of its own. Labor, moreover, is less visible than ever. The luxury market is no longer demarcated by the precision and quality of manufacture, or the use of rare and expensive raw materials—instead, it is sublimated into a network of esoteric associations and names. These clothes are not valued for their function as objects, but instead for their social-cultural value.

Marx’s concept is transferred into perhaps a more timely formulation in French theorist Guy Debord’s polemical fourth thesis in The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Debord’s claim, which evolves out of Marx’s fetishism (spectacle = capitalism, images = commodities), suggests that the commodity form has morphed into that of images, of sequences of representations circulating meaninglessly, creating a distance between images and their referents. Above all, the purpose of the spectacle is to turn active participants of society toward passive acceptance of this mode of circulation—to the advantage of those in power who control the mechanisms

The spectacle, then, becomes what sublimates those anxiety- and terror-induced desires that Bow suggests exist—they remain hidden because rather than circulate fetish objects, brands like Heaven largely spread fetish images. The rapid-fire popularity of Heaven did not come from individual possession—that is to say, from people actually buying

the clothes—rather, it came from the feeling of collective possession of a property from the dissemination of images of the clothes. To see or to circulate the aesthetic, is to aspire to it—to become a part of it, to possess it, without actually owning it. This collective possession, when placed in the context of Heaven’s co-opting of East Asian images, suggests a shared belief in the stereotypes of ornamentalism—and thus reinforces the legibility of the spectacle.

Here, it becomes quite debatable as to what extent these referential images actually represent Asian culture when diffused into the broader scheme of this nebulous spectacle. It is much easier to circulate (and mediate, manage, or sublimate) Asian identity by re-framing its expression in the form of an image, by forcing it to participate in an inherently exploitative and reductive terrain. It also presents the possibility of a rift between real Asian identity and the myriad ways in which it is represented—the terms of identity have shifted away from reality.

In 1970, film theorist Laura Mulvey and activist Margarita Jimenez declared, maybe prematurely, that “the spectacle is vulnerable,” speaking about a largely successful feminist demonstration against that year’s Miss World competition in which they threw flour bombs at the stage, literally obscuring the competition’s visual presence. They suggested that despite the intricacies of the Miss World organization, they were able to break through the spectacle, which, they claimed, “isn’t prepared for anything other than passive spectators.”

Today, such a polemic feels, at best, hollow. The subsequent development of the internet and social media has changed the way in which images circulate so drastically that it is hard to imagine being anything but a passive spectator— to define oneself in opposition, or in concert to what you see online (the result is the same). Mulvey and Jimenez’s form of protest at Miss World is entirely unfeasible when an aesthetic is as broad-ranging as Heaven’s. There are no flour bombs that can affect the dissemination

“It is much easier to circulate (and mediate, man age, or sublimate) Asian identity by re-framing its expression in the form of an image, by forcing it to participate in an inherently exploitative and reductive terrain.”

of Heaven’s images—there is no place, even, to begin throwing them.

Case in point: While doing research for this article, I came across a piece on Entrepeneur. com titled “Why South Korea is the God of Culture Marketing.” The article argues that South Korea’s successful merging of Western & Korean influences in their cultural exports made it a “masterclass for every brand that desires to be both culturally relevant and economically potent”—and here’s how you can do it, too!

Debord comments that the spectacle is not limited to an instrument of the ruling establishment—say, the media—but that even debate around the spectacle is organized within the spectacle itself. It’s hard to look at an article like this one and not feel a sense of futility regarding the whole thing—the impossibility of a successful refusal of this image-centric commodification of Asian-ness when these very ideas are propagated and celebrated in the same breath, when an entire nation becomes indistinguishable from the way that they present themselves.

Even when cracks in the armor emerge, there remains a built-in, sinking feeling of hopelessness. The announcement of Heaven’s Wong Kar-wai collaboration, while initially met with excitement, turned rapidly to a general discontent with the collection, largely based on the sentiment that these pieces were overpriced and hardly contained any original design. But while such a sentiment is legitimate, I’m not convinced as to how effective it is in creating real change. Rather, the sentiment is aimed largely toward the design (an image) rather than the structure imposing these images upon consumers. How does one revolt against a spectacle when the only option we seem to have (this article, for example) is to answer it with new images, new objects, new referents until infinity? Where is the future in this?

At the beginning of this article, I presented the idea that Heaven’s initial collection operated as a continuation of a sort of respectful, historical/ stylistic dialogue between East and West, merely the latest term in an ongoing sequence of inspiration and evolution. It was rather the recent collections, which have dispensed with that original Harajuku influence and now just feature artists based on their identity, that highlight how Heaven commodifies and fetishizes East Asian-ness.

This frame of thought requires a bit more nuance. Because while, undeniably, the more recent collections are more explicit, one can’t help but feel as if the very same concepts continue to apply to the original one—Heaven’s clothes have always, by concept, played up the ornamentalism and embellishment of their design, and have thus always been an object of the various forms of fetishization contained within that structure.

The problem with suggesting Heaven as a mere continuation of a dialogue is that it is impossible to separate ornamentalism—or any form of aesthetic appropriation, for that matter—from its greater context. Marc Jacobs’ appropriation of Harajuku style, especially in the light of its economic profitability, necessarily plays into the historical aesthetic appropriations of Orientalism (and ornamentalism), and the imbalance of power and influence present within those frameworks. Rather than function in the same way as Hysteric Glamour’s ironic use of American iconography, Heaven (in all its collections) instead replicates, in a new age, those very same historical legacies—this time, disguising their true form as part of the contemporary spectacle.

The entire project/brand of Heaven, moreover, was designed intentionally to participate and profit off of this spectacle. Heaven was a way for Jacobs’ brand to profit by appealing to a younger generation—a generation that operates and disseminates their ‘style’ primarily within the image-centric realm of the internet. The

spectacle is a mode that allows for the implicit usage of objectification and fetishization, all ideas that can be put in service of money-making—a way to harness these otherwise publicly unacceptable forms of reduction.

Any sort of solution, then, or a way forward, to combat Heaven’s strategic appropriation, must work within—or refuse—this spectacle, and the myriad ways in which it manifests itself. Part of that spectacle, perhaps, is the strictly dichotomizing form of East and West, which I admit to perhaps sticking too close to. Said’s original work on Orientalism, too, dealt solely with a form of spectacle—he analyzes ways in which representations (images or texts) portrayed a distorted perspective of Asia.

I like, instead, how Cheng treats it—she asserts that her definition of ornamentalism “gives us an unprecedented opportunity to reconceptualize the very notion of ‘racial embodiment,’” to “work through that intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing.” To combat the spectacle, it is perhaps worth embracing a new form of “objectification”—a way of navigating the inextricability of identity, object, and image that is not mediated by histories of appropriation, if such a thing exists. Perhaps the path out of the spectacle is to first take up, in paradox, the objectified identity.

DANIEL ZHENG B’25 desires to be both culturally relevant and economically potent.

Jacquard and

Night is the time to imagine and transform. With the communion of embellishment and paint, themes of wistful melancholy and sinister adornment emerge. Traditions of craft and the history of painting are set at the same stakes through non-hierarchical means of making. My work functions as a lullaby that keeps the viewer stirring awake. The song is in minor key, the moon is dead, and memory is as bitter as it is sweet.

Emily Faith Holtzman R’23 “Let’s Play House (and ride away from home)”

acrylic paint on crochet and canvas

WHEN WE LIVE AS ONE

Evaluating modes of collective consciousness as we inhabit a shared home.

Laying the Foundation

I can see it in a scrawl of images. Their details are potentially particular yet also universalized, washed of specificity, spanning out from the ever-lengthening annals of a memory that is in part my own experience and in part transmitted, taken from contexts beyond my own life. A group of inseparable friends, all young girls, clawing their way through the pangs of adolescence under the male gaze; extended family and friends encircling a full dinner table as they celebrate a hallowed festival that binds ancestry to the contemporary; a collection of apartments or houses arrayed into a neighborhood, the shops down the block, grocery stores to feed us and parks to play in, all these edifices and their inhabitants packed together to create the components of a community. Fill in the absent details and each generic grouping becomes your own, another snapshot of the fluid self melding seamlessly into the collective body.

Our gatherings are tangible evidence that we do not each live a singular existence. We read ourselves as inextricable members of mystical wholes, the self seen refracted through a multiplying lens. A person admittedly prone to obsessions, I am obsessed with collective identity. Its stark and unambiguous contours in some circumstances, its rippling, amorphous shape in others. The way it posits each individual as occupying a shared perceptual space: a form of processing the world that supposedly aligns us with others “like” us, allowing us to transcend our one body and mind. I am a being within continuous multitudes. I am never merely one person.

Collective identity can be difficult to define.

Melucci, it existed in relation to social movements, as “an interactive and shared definition” of a united body and its goals for taking political action. Yet the term has assumed a broader meaning. We can evoke a litany of identity categories by which people enter into collectives: ones grounded in ethnicity, race, nation, gender, sexuality, class, culture, ideology, industry, geography, generation. In an American milieu notoriously steeped in the credo of individualism, commitment to our collective identities can enable both a reckoning with systems of power and a rejection of compulsions to assimilate. This is how I typically conceive of and appreciate collectivity, as a mutual recognition among those linked by common pasts and concerted futures. Collectivity operates as something of an affect—an intuitive, ambiguous register of feeling, a palpable invisible state that wafts through shared spaces, in which all members of the group understand emotively that their lives are converging with sociological significance. Collectivity speaks to us with and without words: in the languages of familial pasts, in the literatures of cultural presents, but also in the appearance of a familiar face, the façades of a famous neighborhood, in the delicate mechanisms of a never-to-be-forgotten ritual. Perhaps, then, we can call collectivity a form of consciousness.

Collective consciousness feels pleasant when articulated this way. But when I discovered it, careening through the pretty pages of a novel, I found it to be one of those frustratingly common things: a concept both exceptionally compelling and troubled, unsettling.

It sits at the helm of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House—published to great acclaim last spring as a companion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. In Egan’s rendering of today’s America, the digital era has engineered a new corporate exploit to eternalize and publicize the human mind. Anyone (who pays) has the capacity to download the entire vault of their memories, thoughts, and senses into a technicolor cube, and, for those who so desire, upload them to a shared archive known as the Collective Consciousness. Anyone who “externalizes” their consciousness to the Collective receives free rein to view the digitized perceptions of others who have done the same.

faction, opposed on ideological grounds, hides from this ubiqui-

lective consciousness expandsliteral. In a way, by seeing into

those who elect to record their becomes an imminent lure. It is an opportunity to transcend the harsh silo of the skull, to mineences for one’s own curiosity, ultimately subsuming ourselves and each other into a conglomerate human living project. It is incredible: terrifying, impossible one character describes it, “The collective is like gravity: almost no one can withstand it. In the end, they give it everything. And

then the collective is that much more omniscient.”

It is through this omniscience that I would like to crack open the question of collective consciousness. Let us understand collective consciousness as a state of heightened group sentience, in which members of a group experience some sort of mutually-influencing interiority that generates a shared awareness of a concurrent exterior. In other words, a group of people experience a set of the same events in the outside world, and certain conditions lead those people to perceive these events through a shared vantage. Collective consciousness may elides individuals into a joint plane of seeing. With this framework, Egan’s warning of “omniscience” implies a model of group thinking in which the collective processes the world in an absolute, united manner. I approach such a phenomenon with skepticism toward this absolute and excitement toward this unity. The Candy House treats the omniscience of the collective as an endeavor that is frightening if unbridled (in its techno-capitalist example) yet generative if transformed into a model that is artistic. The book concludes with an alternative model of collective consciousness—that of the book itself, a work of fiction that weaves a network of interlinked characters and illuminates their interiorities side by side, for every reader to experience as a whole.

If Egan provides us with two possibilities, what other models of collective consciousness can we identify—and evaluate—in our present world, where the capacity to literally view inside each other’s minds remains an unactuated fiction? Is collective consciousness real—or better yet, is it desirable? Does its omniscience forebode an invasive attempt to universalize, to flatten the field of difference, or can it foster an empathetic striving toward unity?

I posed these questions to other members of the Indy community—what better way to grapple with collective consciousness than by engaging a collective consciousness? We each took up a model and reflected in conversation.

Staging the Scaffolds Fiction

My practical take: collective consciousness is not so much about accessing another’s interiority in a real, transcendent-of-bodies-and-mental-barriers way, like they do in The Candy House, but rather about developing a deep and intense empathy. This is an empathy of pain, need, and satisfaction. It is a treaty contingent on an agreement to see the ‘other’ as oneself. In search of access to this hyper-empathy, maybe we don’t have to look too much further than the local bookshelf. Open your nearest piece of fiction and flip to the first page; willfully enter into the contract of mutual trust made between narrator and reader. We are taking on a suspension of disbelief. Think of ‘disbelief’ as it is used often nowadays—to deny, to invalidate, to claim one reality as priority over another. But

to enter a novel is to suspend the disbelief that comes with not being able to see something for yourself. You agree, instead, to see the world encased within the story, through only what the narrator tells you, the narrator’s eyes that naturally shape the trappings of the universe one way or another, if only based on the moments they observe and the moments they elide. This is empathy, to enter a world that is not your own and to believe in it, connect with it, derive joy and pain from the joy and pain experienced in narrative. This kind of empathy, perhaps, is even deeper than that you might feel for people you physically know—you cannot access the interiority of other people, even if you feel that you understand them. In fiction, however, interiority is laid bare. The subjectivity of worldbuilding is impossible to avoid, the thought process that slowly carves out the silhouette of someone you come to know. Someone who is not you, but could be you, who lives in a world you come to see as yours. Then your own real, interior world, I think, becomes larger for it. Inside one head, you hold multiple realities; you house your own collective. –JW

Pictures and Memory

How do we connect to our individual and shared histories? When we look at a photograph, how do we mediate the real past and the accessible present, given that the “real” experience of the past exists out of frame?

When we see old photos—Mom as a young girl, Dad in college—on film, or grainy digital—we become uncertain, and caught by the sudden recognition that we don’t even know how much we don’t know. How many nights did she stay up late to finish her dissertation? Did he fight with his landlord, or dream of moving away? These people represent our knowable origins— how we inhabit cross-generational collectives— yet remain, distinctly, unknowable. The past is basically impossible to ingest, even when it feels like we’re looking right at it.

Today, photo-sharing apps and modern technology allow us to amass a hugely detailed personal record, as well as participate in a kind of omniscience produced by the recording and sharing of many perspectives of one event. These technologies offer the promise of successful ingestion of the past. They propose that closing the gaps in our personal and collective histories leads to a closer understanding of our pasts. But in every record of history, however well-recorded, there is potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error, even—especially—if that history is our own. When accessing our histories, there is not only the problem of the relative gap in the record—which can potentially be closed with a closer record—but also the absolute gap that cannot be mediated between the past and the present. Thus, just because we have the ability to keep an unprecedentedly close record of our lives doesn’t actually mean we will have any more epistemic certainty about ourselves and our pasts. The cross-generational collectives that create us constantly challenge us to reckon with these gaps. When I look at old photos, I’m also reminded that even though the passage of time makes it imperfect, this kind of collectivity is just as powerfully real. –AQ

Mass Protest

Imagine a sea of people, flooding concrete streets with the liquid mass of bodies who move in unison. There are megaphones, and there are speakers rotating through, and there are people passing out water and snacks and voter registration cards, caring for one another, observant of those around them while attentive to the organized motion, the central focus of the crowd, everyone looking in the same direction. And there is yelling, total yelling, prophetic yelling.

What we see here is the precursor to the ballot box, everyone marching toward that eventual queue of voters made methodical by bureaucracy, but here we protestors eschew

composure, proclaim the unvarnished, as all that yelling churns a collective story out of the fray of individuals.

I am not suggesting that each rally speaker, each chant leader, each active attendee shares a uniform ideological vantage or an equal proximity to the injustice at hand. To suggest a universal plane of understanding the politics would be to dress the protest in the very subjects it exists to decry, to drench the movement in whiteness or heteropatriarchy or capitalism once again. Each person arrives at the protest with a distinct combination of identities; we each come here pulled along by the hand of a unique lived experience. But when I posit the presence of a collective consciousness in justice-oriented politics, I am looking at the crowd and I am thinking of the way speech moves us, the protestors, into the shared space of the social story. Each of us is engaged in the process of conveying a series of inextricable stories that coalesce, stories about the way the state governs now and the way we could transform it yet. With those coalescent stories, a numerical mass may become a thinking collective.

I am articulating collective consciousness as a pure form of engaged democracy. One in which democracy manifests as an intangible affective space, where a collective perception of grief, grievance, and hope is transmitted between each of our unmelded bodies. Though each of us remains tethered to our individual voting patterns, nuanced beliefs, histories, and identity-based experiences, we share in the affective sense that we are creating authentic democracy by moving together, rising together, seeing what we call one another to see. Our ‘selves’ may be too heterogeneous for a blanket politics, but outside of us roams something seeing and breathing, a sentience of our collective creation. –MC

A Non-human Collective

There was a pottery teacher at my high school who once got in serious trouble for pushing a student who made a bad joke about his Lenin poster into a wall. Before he quit, he gathered a group of us on stools and handed out packets of articles about the communal life of trees. I was introduced to an idea that has become almost mythological for the environmental left—the “Wood Wide Web.” Underground fungal networks tie the roots of trees together, passing not just nutrients but valuable information between them. Forests were not vertical arenas, trees writhing upward to claim their share of sunlight, but cooperative enterprises. Fellow trees spread warnings about threats through the fungal network, and send resources to struggling neighbors. There were arguments in the packet that these networks could preserve patterns of activity as memories, potentially going back millennia, that evolve into forest-wide behavior resembling cognition. It was a model of decentralized, harmonious, collaborative co-existence that could, if you chose, be called conscious. To the teacher, in a class full of already-individualized American teens, it must have been a parting attempt to put forth an alternative. Somebody mentioned that the 400 printed pages in these packets must have cost a few trees; he laughed and did not push them into a wall.

The “Wood Wide Web” thesis, once the basis of books, TED talks, and much eco-ethical thinking, died recently. A series of experiments in 2019 examining the networks closely found that the fungi act less like volunteer bucket brigades than canny day-traders, bargaining for portions of everything they pass along. The trend of novels like

The Candy House composed of indirectly-related stories from different perspectives attempts, in part, to imagine de-centralized forms of collective consciousness. With Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory (2018), that trend reached its zenith, and the interwoven logic of trees became for the first time a best-selling paper-mill of a premise. Now it looks kind of naïve.

The search for honorable life in nature goes on: Lacy M. Johnson, in an article on slime molds included in the Best American Science and Nature of Writing of 2022, writes that this startlingly smart organism, which nevertheless has no central nervous system or clearly-separate individuals, “has so much to teach us.” The note of surrender is undeniable. If we cannot look to nature to prove that we are for each other, will we do it ourselves? –ZB

Inhabiting the House

Maybe that is exactly how we can move forward. By doing it ourselves. Living in this home together. Just as one of us said in the scaffolding— we house our own collective. Because within the multiplicity of human subjectivity, as we each inhabit something greater than our individual perceptions, the perceptions of all those people circling around us move inward and inhabit us. We have come together to lay the groundwork for our cognitive commune, and in staging the scaffolding, we realized that beyond the fiction of The Candy House, the collective consciousness is already liveable for us, if we are careful and caring enough to look for it. We find collective consciousness when we embrace the great, boundless belief that other people’s depths coexist with our own, in a way that makes each of us more real. We find it when we occupy the gaps between our presents and our pasts, because the shared memories which situate us within a collective past may never be fully knowable, and yet they are the vital backstories that gave us our lives. We find it when we experience the emotional narrative of a mass rising up, aligning individual stories into an imperative to see what another sees. We find it when we look beyond our own humanity toward other ecological examples and encounter both the wonder of inspiration and the disappointment of imperfection. That imperfection will remain constant. But so will that inspiration, that compulsion to try and fill those gaps with our capacious joinedness.

We, this tiny word, bears the answer to our search for a real life, everyday model of collective consciousness. Lurking behind this plural pronoun is a series of vibrant and irreducible individuals, who can never be fully subsumed into a smooth, consistent collective. Still each one chooses to stand behind those two letters that make one word because we understand the power—and often, the truth—of a conscious we. After all our rigorous thinking, we are left here compelled by the omniscience of a pronoun. ‘We’ sees into all of our minds at once. ‘We’ brings us into a single existence while only existing as long as we are many. We are the house in which we are living.

TEXT ANGELA QIAN & ZACHARY BRANER DESIGN GINA KANG

FISHER

COUNTING THE CAREWORN

This and the other pull-out quotes in this article are from Principles of Economics (9th edition) by Gregory N Mankiw.

Every year, approximately 700 students take Brown University’s introductory economics course. This class, like similar college classes across the country, has used the Principles of Economics textbook quoted above and later in this piece for more than a decade. From the very start of thousands of students’ economics education, care work, including childcare, elder care, household care, etc., is enforced as merely an inconvenience. Pedagogy and practice in neoclassical economics, the foundation of liberal capitalist systems, blatantly belittle care work while reinforcing gender constructions. Care and domestic work, or household management, is ironically undervalued in a field (economics) named after the Greek word for “household management.”

What is care?

Economist Nancy Folbre defines the care economy as a “site of production, development and maintenance of human capabilities.” Such work can entail different tasks depending on cultural and socioeconomic context, such as cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes; providing healthcare and psychosocial support; reproductive labor, childcare, and eldercare; shopping for groceries and household needs; keeping living spaces clean and maintained; protecting the sanitation and hygiene of household members; traveling long distances to collect water, food, firewood for the family; and managing household savings and finances.

Unpaid care and domestic work, performed

in most households around the world, is never counted in chief macroeconomic indicators like GDP, despite GDP being the measure of all goods and services produced in a country in a given unit of time. This results in labor markets biased toward those who have no care responsibilities or who can delegate them to others— family members who are forced or convinced to assume such responsibilities, or, increasingly, paid care workers.

Who cares?

Paid care work is compensated in terms of perceived ‘productivity’ and labor value, which are difficult to measure due to the multiple physical, mental, and emotional aspects of such work, typically resulting in the labor being undervalued and undercompensated. Moreover, “productivity” doesn’t encompass the benefits of such services to those who receive them or to the economy as a whole. The outsourcing of care labor relieves its customers from performing their own care responsibilities, allowing them to go to work. Additionally, a babysitter or a parent is not just looking after a child’s physical needs. They are also generating value by contributing to the child’s overall development with returns in education, future earnings, and overall productivity.

Imagine a world where no care tasks were carried out, where everyone was entirely independent from the day they were born to the day they died, responsible for their own care needs. Without this vast unrecognized infrastructure—which nurtures, protects, and cares for us—the entire world would stop in its tracks. In economic language, care work reproduces and sustains the world’s labor force to be fit, productive, and innovative. Care work is essential to sustaining human life.

All around the world, both paid and unpaid care are gendered and racialized. Those who identify as women and girls, or who happen to have ‘feminine’ traits, are often pushed to take on care work to sustain their households. In the U.S., men spend just 63 percent of the time women spend on unpaid care work, per the Institute of Policy Studies. On average, according to time-use data compiled by the International Labour Organization, men’s average contribution to total unpaid care work is 27.5 percent globally. Just 29 percent of men’s total working time (including time spent on all labor or ‘productive’ activities) is spent on unpaid care work. Meanwhile, on average, women around the world spend 65 percent of their working time on unpaid care. Care is gendered in economics, too—in Mankiw’s textbook, each use of the word “women” is followed by words relating to childcare, single motherhood, and/or domestic work.

Those performing care work can be loved ones, household members, community members, or, increasingly, in most regions, professional care providers such as nannies, babysitters, household cooks, home cleaners, and house healthcare aides, working in both formal and informal labor markets. Across most countries and cultures, families who can afford it rely on paid care workers, who often come from communities of color and/or migrant communities. The determination of who provides care has patriarchal, racial, and colonial origins, with much of care labor coming from women who were historically enslaved, colonized, trafficked, or forced to perform their ‘roles’ as wives, daughters, aunties, and sisters. Male care workers are also feminized, racialized, and overall underappreciated in their workplace. In the U.S., women form 91.5 percent of paid domestic workers working for private households, and Black, Hispanic, and AAPI women form around 52.4 percent of this workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute. 35.1 percent of these workers are born outside the U.S., more than half of whom are not U.S. citizens.

“[Explaining gender wage gaps] In particular, women are more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children.”

“Child care provided in day-care centers is part of GDP, whereas child care by parents at home is not.”

Despite being one of the fastest-growing sectors in the U.S. economy, paid care work is increasingly undervalued. Domestic workers earn 25.9 percent less than other wage earners (even after controlling for demographics and education), largely work part-time due to the lack of full-time jobs, are subject to illegal labor practices like wage theft, and are three times more likely to be in poverty. These intersections of race, class, citizenship, and gender contribute to making the domestic care sector one of the most vulnerable workforces in the country.

The outlook on paid care work outside the U.S. is bleak as well. Data often simply doesn’t exist, especially due to the various informal aspects of the industry and the precarity and obscurity of international migration. In OECD countries, 28.5 percent of domestic workers are immigrants. According to the International Labour Organization, nearly one in five domestic workers across the world is an international migrant. Prominent in the existing literature around care are migrant women coming from countries in the Global South to provide care services to wealthy households in the Global North, forming what are known as Global Care Chains. In South Asia, upper-middle class and wealthy households commonly employ part- or full-time paid care workers, mostly internal migrants of marginalized caste identities. These workers, alongside workers from Southeast Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are an integral part of these Global Care Chains, especially to the Middle East and the Global North. As such, care work across the world is an intersectional issue, reinforcing the gendered construction of society across class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and caste.

Economic theory and care

gospel of wealth from the Global North to the South has also transported the gender division of labor via international development policies aimed at poverty reduction. This phenomenon, called the “feminization of poverty” by academic Sylvia Chant, refers to anti-poverty programs frequently designed to target women, claiming that such targeting is the most “effective” way to reduce poverty overall. Several non-profits, using the neoclassical framework of maximizing output and minimizing input, problematically provide aid and services to women in households instead of men, as they believe that women are more likely to dispense the received aid to the entire household, while men might use such aid for individual ends and consumption. Such distribution is more “efficient.” This again pushes the responsibility of poverty reduction for an entire community or country onto these women while distracting from issues of men’s poverty and gender issues.

Care during emergencies

Care work and its centrality to life comes to the forefront when households are in trouble. Even in so-called ‘progressive’ and ‘gender-aware’ countries, a household facing any kind of emergency, be it unemployment or an unplanned pregnancy, often relies on the traditional household caregiver to sacrifice individual goals and desires for continued household ‘stability.’

ly, time. This results in what economist Jayati Ghosh calls “time poverty.” Care workers, paid and unpaid, are deprived of the time needed to engage in personally and socially meaningful activities and relationships, leading to deterioration of physical and mental health and relationships. Families who can afford to do so outsource care work to professional caregivers, while families who cannot must work harder, longer hours. Often, professional caregivers come from low-income communities and spend their day doing labor—paid labor for the families they serve, and free labor for their own families. Meanwhile, women at the top rungs of the capitalist hierarchy (often rich white women in the West) can hire professional care providers, usually migrant women of color, to sustain their households. These wealthy women become ‘inspirations’ to other working women, who are told to “lean in” to girlboss feminism and capitalistic ideals (thanks Sheryl Sandberg).

The idealized “economic man” touted in neoclassical economics maximizes his individual “utility” (economic jargon for happiness) or profit. He consumes and produces more and more using as few inputs as possible (“efficiency”). To do so, he must minimize time spent on care and domestic work, which are rarely accounted for in the first place, so that he has enough time and energy to maximize individual welfare for each hour of the day. His choice to work is dictated only by his “demand for leisure”—for every additional hour he works, all he forsakes is leisure.

Self-interested and alone, he has no external responsibilities to himself, family members, or friends. He reproduces without needing to consider prenatal or postnatal health and recovery. Children can raise themselves or be raised by childcare workers, which he can afford. The only value they hold are as human capital investment opportunities for the next generation. He doesn’t have any aging relatives—if he does, there are eldercare professionals whom he can pay to tend to them. If the economic man chooses to ask for parental benefits or a leave, or any workplace benefits for that matter, he will raise his cost of labor for rational employers, reducing labor demand in the market and lowering his wages and employment options. Caring for others, even close loved ones, is not a priority. At best, it is an inconvenience, a cost to be minimized, instead of the sustaining force and infrastructure of social and economic life.

Hence, neoclassical economics relies on an intensely individualistic construction of society, where only self-interest and productivity have value. Its theory and policies only appreciate the care economy’s value when it serves the efficient delivery of public goods and services. These perspectives dominate economics as a field today, especially among power-holding institutions in the West, heavily influencing policy and corporate decisions on an international level.

The spread of neoliberal ideology and its

During such emergencies, the nature and quantity of care responsibilities, how they are distributed, and the time and effort they require undergo significant changes, often leading to increased labor, vulnerability, and negative coping mechanisms for care providers. Care providers sometimes actively endanger their physical and mental health, often disproportionately dropping out of school and work to perform more care work duties, traveling long distances to provide food and water for family members, and caring for sick family members. Often, such tasks entail exposing themselves to risks like gender-based violence and sexual harassment. The care economy thus becomes a ‘shock absorber’ for entire economies and societies when in crisis.

During both the Ebola crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, in places with a lack of or declining investments in health systems or a breakdown of existing health services, many of the healthcare responsibilities were offloaded onto women, resulting in self-exploitation, increased reliance on family, and outsourcing of care. In fact, a 2019 study found increased psychological trauma for care workers can result from being solely responsible for providing care in a household while risking contracting and spreading the virus, especially to children. From 2020 to 2021, women’s rate of participation in the labor force in the U.S. dropped by 1.7 percent, and even more so for women of color. During the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic workers, especially those of Black immigrant communities, disproportionately faced food insecurity, lack of healthcare access, unemployment, and risk of eviction, but were fearful of seeking government help due to their vulnerable citizenship status.

As we crawl out of a worldwide pandemic and hurtle closer toward repeated climate disasters, increased proportions of the human population are being exposed to humanitarian emergencies, which can impact millions of households at once, pushing millions of care workers into this state of emergency.

Costs of care

That care work has historically gone uncompensated has allowed it to be taken entirely for granted. The hidden infrastructure of care, along with those who provide it, incidentally does not need to be taken care of via legal protections or fair compensation. Meanwhile, imbalances in the labor market push specific individuals and identities into care work while ‘liberating’ others from such work.

Care labor restricts a caregiver’s mobility, social interaction (and thus social capital), access to paid employment, and most important-

Not all care providers have the luxury of outsourcing their care responsibilities. In various places around the world, traditional care providers must stay home to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities, even if paid domestic help is a viable option. Additionally, choosing to go to work instead of providing unpaid care at home, especially to one’s own family members, can result in physical and mental harm, often from other household members, and even in feelings of guilt. After all, caring is also an emotional activity. It is a primary language of love and attachment. Thus, withdrawing care support has significant emotional implications for care providers, which in turn can heavily impact their ability to set their own boundaries. Being socialized into responsibility for an entire household’s well-being can exert significant emotional and mental pressure for the care provider, especially if other household members reinforce such pressure through guilt-tripping, abuse, and, at times, violence.

It is important to emphasize that the social responsibility we have to other individuals in our day-to-day life should be respected, and the needs of those who we love and interact with every day cannot be dismissed for the sake of toxic, individualistic “self-care.” Care labor, although it consumes time and energy, is not a burden. However, our present moral, family, and social values attached to care make it almost impossible for care providers to negotiate fair reduction, redistribution, or rewarding of care work.

Taking care of care

While we cannot overthrow the entire neoliberal system which has constructed these choices and our society, realistically nearing this vision is still possible through reduction, redistribution, and fair compensation of care work. Several attempts have been made by international organizations like Oxfam, UN Women, CARE, ILO, etc., to compute a value of care work as a proportion of the GDP with the support of feminist economists. Oxfam values the contribution of unpaid care work to the global economy at nearly $11 trillion a year, measured just in minimum wages—three times the value of the global tech industry. Several of these organizations and feminist economists like Jayati Ghosh and Nancy Folbre have been advocating for investments in the care economy, including increased public care services, increased compensation for care workers, parental benefits and leave, etc.

What if we envisioned a world centered around care and not production? Caring for loved ones and communities would be equally prioritized as self-care. Governments would invest in social and care infrastructure, and distribution of care work could be equitable, regardless of identity. Choices between individual aspirations and caring for others would not have to be made.

ANUSHKA KATARUKA B’24 wonders why we care about economics.

“The trade-off between labor and leisure lies behind the labor-supply curve.”

DOLL LEE

She sat at the square table—white cloth slung over—stiff as a corpse, with Suzanne to her left and Jack directly across from her. Posture was important to Lee, especially in situations that did not merit her attention. She liked the thought of observing herself perched upright from a third, separate eye. Lee fixed her eyes on her chosen subject, a fresco of swirling moss and black serpent-like creatures on the wall behind Jack. As she stared, one of the watery, rounded strokes transformed itself into an eerie figure with a seahorse tail, so she averted her gaze from the nitty-gritty. Over the past few years, Lee had grown accustomed to four-course dinners of shiny plates and rows of cutlery and dish names most struggled to pronounce (it only struck her recently how many alternative names there were for animal parts—oh, the futility!).

At first, Lee relished the sensation of belonging to this three-person family. Suzanne and Jack were old friends of her parents. Since she began attending the military school just a town over from the city, they had repeatedly insisted on hosting her; what had started as an occasional meal escalated into frequent weekend stays, during which Lee marveled at Suzanne and Jack’s independence from one another, unlike her mother and father who acted as an inseparable unit. Suzanne and Jack were not tied down by inflexible expectations such as nightly dinners together, and while Jack was away on business trips, Suzanne’s self-sufficiency remained undisrupted. Yet romance still existed between the two, and they were bound by real interests, even if they were as simple as their shared Russian lessons or their joint collection of funny tchotchkes. Perhaps due to their extended childlessness, perhaps as a function of higher-order ersatz parenting, this independence was extended to Lee, who sunk comfortably into their doting, but never imposing, attention. They invited her to share her views on the demolition of Robert E. Lee’s statue or the rise of mental illness among her generation, and, in the process, taught her the value of conversation for pure recreation.

Most Sundays, Suzanne would set a breakfast tray that held a mug of coffee, a cinnamon pastry, and a glass vase holding a singular white tulip on Lee’s bedside table in the morning. The first time Suzanne knocked on the guest bedroom door, Lee jolted upright, still uncertain of where she was, what this deep blue room she was swimming in was. Even through her morning haze, she could make out Suzanne’s strawberry blond hair shining softly under the sun rays, the tendrils that framed her spectral white face. Her presence was so light, so non-threatening that Lee felt her body sink back into the bed without an ounce of guilt. This bore no resemblance to her routines at school, where she was abruptly woken up for room inspection, or at home, where she had to partake in her share of the household’s chores, first trimming the lawn and then scrubbing the previous night’s dishes. Here, she was free from the risk of scolding.

Often on a sly mission of playing cupid, Suzanne invited men over to her hosted dinners whom she hoped Lee would find an interest in. To “win them over,” as Suzanne would say, she would help Lee curate a look for the evening. One night, Suzanne lent Lee a vintage Alaïa pleated skirt, and Lee eagerly brought it to her room to try on. Once dressed, she did a petite twirl for Suzanne, who was pleased to see Lee coming out of her shell, leaning down to give the beaming young woman a kiss on the cheek: “Oh, Lee! You look lovelier in it than I ever did!”

Raised to be punctual, Lee would sometimes find herself waiting for tardy Suzanne. With the door to her bedroom ajar, she would watch with fascination as Suzanne reached her final stage of getting ready: picking a brooch from her collection. She habitually donned a gold leaf brooch on her left breast that Lee could not help but stare

at each time, and each time, she swore the jewels got larger and heavier in size. She wondered how such a tender part of the body could support such weight.

During her last stay, Suzanne had taken Lee out to shop. As Lee stood inside the dressing room, Suzanne handed her a gown that she had taken off the boutique’s rack. Just as Lee had squirmed her way into the dress, popping her head out of the sequined cloth, Suzanne barged in, appearing behind her in the mirror.

“May I?” Resting her hands on Lee’s shoulders, Suzanne gestured to the zipper along Lee’s back. Her close proximity brought Lee some discomfort, but she nodded anyway. Suzanne then proceeded with her swift hands of care. Nonetheless, after a few fruitless tugs, Suzanne gave up and made a tsking sound under her breath.

“Lee, dear... I don’t think you fit into this. How can it be? This is a size 36.”

“Hmm, that’s too bad. It’s okay, Suzanne, I don’t really like wearing tight things anyway. It’s beautiful, though.”

“Let me just say, men do find a woman more attractive when she wears something that accentuates her assets, that hugs her figure! Trust me, there’s no need to hide, you can just shed a couple pounds.” Her voice edged on condescension.

“Erm, I guess. But I think this is just my body, I don’t know...” She searched for more words. None came.

“And Lee? I’m only saying this because I’ve come to care about you immensely, but I need you to put yourself out there, you know, with those boys that come over. If you don’t put in the work to not be shy, they’re not going to notice you.”

“Oh, right,” Lee felt herself blush. “Well, I don’t know, none of them really appeal to me. But—oh—yes, I know. I can do better.”

“Yes, sweetie.”

+++

As time went on, Lee’s eyes gradually adjusted to Suzanne’s closet, brimming with garish, gauzy fabrics. She wondered if Suzanne valued anything, her spending habits madly unbridled and her burn rate excessively wasteful. Each engagement of Suzanne’s appeared to be a diversion, a method of filling time in the company of others. On multiple occasions, Lee had spied Suzanne meticulously planning a social function or task to complete in her calendar for nearly every hour. When someone had to cancel a plan, Suzanne would violently cross out the event and replace it with another to the point that innumerable red scribbles pervaded each day, dispensable names and signs. It seemed as if Suzanne had to run herself completely dry so as not to have to confront a hollowness: a hamster on a wheel who only knew to run, spinning toward nothing.

+++

At dinner, Lee observed Jack and Suzanne under the restaurant’s warm tinged light. Jack wore a perpetual look of disgust, lips fish-like and cheeks pudgy. His countenance provoked a deeply unsettling feeling, as though something black and wet could crawl right out of his pouty mouth at any moment. As for Suzanne, Lee could see that the hairdresser’s heat had oppressed her blond tresses until they had lost all their natural buoyancy, with nothing but bristly sheaves of hay now falling from her head. She had a withered air about her, semi-absent as she jotted down notes for her upcoming interview with Town & Country. Lee’s reproachful gaze was interrupted by a rather loud clap from the waiter towering over her, amplified by the restaurant’s hollow dome-shell.

“...Good evening and welcome to The Vine.

I don’t believe I see any familiar faces here, so I will just give you a brief introduction to our restaurant and its origins. We are a farm-to-table institution, so most of our raw ingredients are imported fresh from the Land of Volcanoes. We only serve warm chestnut water, which is highly effective in flushing out one’s sinuses and aids in digestion. Personally, I swear by this as a cure for those who are particularly prone to gastritis, superior to any other drugstore find...”

As he spoke, Lee felt as if she was trapped in molasses, each limb halfway between relaxed and oppressed. She had always been sensitive to air flow—its fluctuating temperatures and humidities—and had noted the spacious room’s excellent circulation. It was remarkably situated so as to attain such a level of feng shui, yet she found herself beset by a feeling of unbearable stuffiness.

“Tonight’s set menu consists of six courses accompanied by a flight of digestifs. Your meal will begin with a star-shaped honey oyster that has been suffused with lilac dye and dipped in an aromatic Uygher spice, second comes the brittle black tar bean—don’t be afraid of its color! Third is a leafy medley of mesclun and pickled cacti, whose uniquely non-poisonous hyacinth flowers hail from our very own flower garden. The fourth is my personal favorite, featuring the bellies of freshwater otters bathed in a thick Japanese sake marinade. The fifth brings in a pasta dish of 87 beet-dyed noodles, each peppered with royal gramma scales and yellow salt. And finally, the sixth is a light sphere of fermented mint injected with basil and rosemary, to cleanse your palate and let those emulsions of flavors sweetly dissipate on your tongue.”

Once he was done speaking, Suzanne and Jack simply nodded with finality, indicating they understood and that he could now leave. Lee winced on the waiter’s behalf as he went to each of them, asking, out of breath, if they would prefer sparkling water. Jack waved the man away and snapped a curt no. Lee shook her head in a low, subdued manner, and Suzanne didn’t bother to look up from her phone. The waiter slipped away.

“Oh, Jack, doesn’t Lee’s makeup look darling? I brought her to see Misha in the salon today. Just a tad bit of contour does wonders!”

Jack studied Lee for a brief moment, then replied in the most detached manner:

“Ah, mm-hm, yes, dear. It sure does seem like you two have been spending a lot of time together while I’ve been away! I pray, please don’t whisk her away from me, Lee!” Jack wagged an index finger at her and laughed, but lately, Lee hadn’t really found his jokes funny anymore. Her performing abilities, already weak to begin with, were increasingly being tested. She resorted to a sheepish nod.

By the time they were served the fourth course, Lee had named a plethora of things about Jack that annoyed her. Between each phrase, he would pause, gliding his tongue along his side gums. That same unsettling feeling crept in as Jack looked on with cold eyes boring right through her. Stuffing his face with the freshwater otters, he chewed with his mouth open, his jaws loose, the thick tail trapped between his even thicker lips. Lee could hear Jack’s teeth work as they ground against the otters’ pure, solid fat. Even though Suzanne would berate Lee for the occasional mindless open-mouthed chew, she didn’t make a single remark about Jack’s noises. Suzanne, on the other hand, had cut her otter portion into perfectly equal pieces. After a couple of chews and an unconvincing “yum!” she put her fork and knife down and left the uneaten meat on her plate. Inhaling too deeply at the wrong moment, Lee felt the fishy stench attack her nostrils, stinging and shriveling up her airways. Jack neglected to wipe the dish’s brown residue off the creases of his lips, so Lee was forced to look upon his dribbling sake mouth

and glacial eyes. Trying to stay unaffected, Lee limited her air intake to reduce the nausea that loomed over her.

With the extraordinarily drawn-out wait times, moments of silence grew. During these intervals, Jack’s stomach emitted these prolonged, subdued groans. Lee could hear his stomach clenching to suppress these sounds, to no avail. Noticing that others could hear, Jack had compulsively been ejaculating new subjects into the conversation for the sake of his bodily dignity.

“Mark and I checked out the Cascade Club the other day. It’s pretty new, on the Upper West Side...more like between Broadway and Amsterdam. You can’t miss it—it has a stunning façade, very art nouveau, yes, very fresh for that neighborhood.” Lee curled her toes inside the patent leather shoes from Suzanne that squished her bunions.

“Mm... If I am going to go all the way to the West Side, I’d much rather frequent RBS. Their facilities are clean and classic. They don’t have any of those terrible frou-frou women, or God forbid, those tasteless members that have only gotten in because they’re sleeping with Pal Malone or Skeeter Dillard,” accompanied by a crinkling of the nose from Suzanne.

“Aha, Suz! You have a point there. Say, it’s been well over an hour since that sleepy waiter came by...?” Jack glanced down at his watch, which, as Lee had carefully noted, he had been doing for the past 40 minutes. By now, his belly was audibly angry and indignant, refusing to be snubbed.

Jack eventually called over the waiter, ready to blast. She braced herself for Jack’s explosion.

“Listen here, I’m going to say this very nicely, we’ve been waiting here for an hour for the next course. Can you explain why it’s taking so long?”

“Of course, sir, I understand completely. And I do apologize—the kitchen is exceptionally busy tonight.” At this response, Jack clenched his jaw and sharply sucked in the air through his gritted teeth.

“Right, but you don’t in fact seem to understand. I’m fucking ravenous. My stomach is pissing me and all of the other guests off,” Jack banged a fist on his protruding belly. The waiter remained unruffled by this unsolicited gesture.

“Ah, yes... May I interest you in a complimentary glass of our locally-sourced red wine while you wait? You’re in luck, because we also have an array of fresh cardamom-infused bao buns. Chef’s secret special.” The waiter cupped his left hand to his mouth for this last part with a whisper.

Jack took this skittish remark as an insult, and the menace in his voice began to seep out:

“That’s rich. You know, I’ve been waiting for you guys to prove yourselves, but I just can’t anymore. What the HELL is up with these PLAY FOODS you’re serving me?! I’m PAYING for your SERVICE and your LABOR and this is NOT up to par.” Lee waited for Suzanne to interrupt—say something, do something to shut Jack up—even a stern look would have brought her

some comfort. Nonetheless, Suzanne sat there unstirred with hands calmly crossed over on the table and vacant eyes looking on.

“I’ve been to Scorelli’s Cavern, Flora, and Le Moustique—all SECOND-TIER restaurants, mind you—and they’re ASTRONOMICALLY better. I mean, I read about this place through MICHELIN!” The yolky whites of his eyes bulged out of their translucent sockets and his face pulsated with boiling blood.

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Most people enjoy our playful, experimental atmosphere.”

“—YOU! Damn it!! I’ve had ENOUGH!!!”

“...Again, I am sorry. We have a lot of guests to serve tonight. Your dishes will be out soon.”

out, do not worry, sweetie.” He remained crouched over, clutching his stomach as if in pain. Frankly, Lee was confused—what was this circus show she was witnessing? They had manufactured their own reasons to be upset, ruining what could have been a pleasant night. With Jack’s furrowed brows and Suzanne’s docile eyes, both suddenly looked pitiful to her. Even if she had not been an active participant in the hostility toward the waiter, she still shared a table with the tantrum-throwing adults. Knowing Suzanne found it unattractive for a lady to be defensive, how on earth was Lee to sit there, nose up in the air? Her weak complicity up to this point made her shiver. As her breathing became shallow and her head dizzy, she gripped tighter onto the table. She was compelled to act before the possibility of being misunderstood exceeded her capacity to at least feign the illusion that she had control.

On a whim, rather desperate, she knocked over the fragola digestif, so that the liquor sloshed out of the glass, reddening the white and streaming down into her lap.

“...Suzanne? I’m sorry, but erm, I think it’s that time of the month. I’m afraid I’ve bled everywhere. I have to leave.” Not waiting for a reply, Lee rose to her feet, gave a salute to the two mouths, and scrambled out of the restaurant.

As she exited The Vine onto Park Avenue, she let out a sigh and started walking uptown. The wind whipped around and the shadows of the branches of trees trembled on the concrete. The black sky protected her; she felt a part of this bowl of movement, safe on the smooth pavement. Tonight felt like a rectification of all the previous occasions in which she had felt the same sense of oppression, yet had not outwardly reacted. For her, nothing was worse than inconsistency in character.

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, JUST ADMIT THAT YOUR KITCHEN IS MEDIOCRE! NO MORE OF THE GAMES!” Lee scrunched up her eyes as Jack’s shrieking rang in her eardrums. The veins in his forehead swelled as if they wanted to escape his furious folds of skin. The red spectacle was aglow for all neighboring tables.

As the waiter hurriedly left the table to get the manager, Lee and Suzanne sat in painful silence until the tension died down a bit. Jack took three great inhales and exhales, his hot breath reaching Lee’s cheeks. Suzanne outstretched her arm to place her hand on his, which he immediately slapped away. She nodded tenderly, placating him with a “we’ll have it sorted

At times, it overwhelmed her to think about how once others imposed their perceptions upon her, these singular identities would then fuse into monoliths, representative of her whole. She grasped how malleable she could be in the eyes of others and it was precisely the lack of control she had over this inevitable occurrence that frightened her. Suzanne had fed this fear, and Lee had in turn almost let herself be swallowed up. As she sauntered on, relaxing her shoulders and unclenching her fists, she understood the precarity of her projections and believed that through her release from Suzanne, she was closer to shedding her weak and childish self. And so despite it being well into the night, and despite the fraught nature of being a young woman out alone at such an hour, Lee carried on with her strides and impregnated herself with her own self-imagined sufficiency.

ANAÏS B‘24 is currently looking for potential sugar parents.

Zoe Mikic´ R’23 “Unsent Letters” Nylon mesh, thread, tissue paper, rainwater I’ve been considering the envelope as a form that simultaneously protects and exposes the content inside. I offer these letters to be read but never received by the one they were for.

Presents:

All GoodThings MustCometo an INDIE

Love? That’s so Issue 1. This week, every beautiful and happy thing has come crashing down. Which is totally fine! I personally am doing really well. It was my idea, you know. Unless you heard that it was mutual, in which case it was mutual. And honestly, I’m better off now! Just yesterday I checked off some things that had been on my to-do list for a while, like “shower.” Really, it was good timing for things to end when they did—my “Happy Valentine’s Day baby I love you” Instagram story had literally just expired, so it made perfect sense.

Though I am doing awesomely, I know that a lot of my readers have been struggling. Just like coming up with a good pun for the title of a weekly column, breaking up is hard to do. And the ordeal of finally saying “the end” is hardly the end of the ordeal. After the breakup itself, there’s still the tears, the archetypal eating-ice-cream-straight-fromthe-pint, the inability to visit certain emotionally

My best friend and I went through a breakup at the same time, and both were the result of our partners moving away. I’m still good friends with my ex and am doing alright, but my best friend is *devastated* about her breakup. I want to be there for her, but I’m scared she’s comparing my situa tion with hers, and I don’t want to make her feel worse. How can I be there for her in the best way?

Dear My Best Friend’s Breakup,

Yeah, this one is tough. How do you com fort someone who got a 77 on the test when you got a 98? The empathy route doesn’t work this time around. Maybe the two points you lost really stung, but you sound like a jerk if you try to make it seem like your experience of losing two points grants you the understanding of what it feels like to lose 23. The best strategy in that hypothetical situation is the best strategy in your actual situation, too. When you’re listening to someone rant about getting a C+, no matter how bad you want to qui etly, humbly mention that you, hm, actually didn’t do so bad, you keep quiet, you nod, and you listen to them lament about how the third short essay question was impossible, even if you personally knocked the third short essay question out of the park so hard that the professor drew a little smiley face in the margin.

In the same way, your best bet for being there for your friend is to be a good listener. In fact, you’re in the perfect position to be exactly that. You have been through something similar, but less intense, so you’re well-equipped to understand what your friend is saying without it affecting you too much. And even if you’re worried you might not be getting it right, you can always ask her what she needs. If anything, she’ll be comforted by having a best friend who tries their best to be supportive and considerate, even if you can’t do it perfectly all the time. Okay—I just have to say it—I got a perfect score on my last paper. Whew. I was holding that in for this whole answer. Sorry.

Dear Indie,

After a short stint in what some would call a situationship with someone I really cared for, I find myself still quite sad, even months after its ending. I can’t figure out if this lingering melancholy is one of three things: (1) I miss them, (2) I miss how that relationship made me feel, or (3) some future nostalgia (thank you Dua) for what I thought the relationship could have become. How can I parse through these feelings and maybe even not be down about someone who doesn’t really care about me?

Love, Sticky Situationship

It sucks that your situationship sank, and I’m sorry. I can see that you’re fumbling your way through a lot of confusing feelings, which makes sense—confusion is one of the trademark qualities of a situationship. Is this casual? Is this serious? I don’t know! Are we friends with benefits? Are we in love but just not saying it? I don’t know! Should I text you? Should you text me? I don’t know, and now we haven’t communicated in two and a half weeks! One of my friends sent me a TikTok about how situationships mess with your dopamine, um, output. It has something to do with risk and reward? Because in the up-and-down weirdness of an unstable relationship, the rare good moments feel especially…good. Okay, so I’m not an expert in neuroscience and I can’t find the TikTok anymore, but what I can tell you is this: your brain chemicals have been working I wish I could shrink down to the size of a tiny molecule and be inserted into your brain where I could fight the chemicals with my fists, but I can’t. Don’t worry, though—you don’t have to battle them alone. It might help you to talk through those dopamine-high situationship moments with a friend. Recounting the details to someone who can approach things objectively might help you start to hear them objectively, too, and then you can ask yourself: was this a moment of real connection, or just a moment of dopamine-spiking validation or attention?

This strategy might help you work through the confus ing situationship fallout and get a little closer to closure, but there’s one catch: it doesn’t guarantee that you won’t feel sad anymore. And that’s okay! It’s always hard when things end, even weird, dopamine-ma nipulating things. You can analyze your feelings, but make sure you remember to feel them, too. If you want, you can borrow my archetypal ice cream pint.*

*But leave a little bit for me.

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Every Saturday in February @12PM: National #FiveFreedmen Book Club Reparations Educational Series

For Black History Month this year, the SoliDarity Community Engagement Group, an organization that supports efforts to educate, empower, and uplift the community, is hosting weekly Zoom calls for people to learn about reparations and how descendants of chattel slavery can become a protected class as “American Freedmen.” Sign up for the free online series here: tinyurl.com/Reparations-Educational-Series

Location: Virtual, over Zoom

Wednesday 2/22 @12:30PM: Discussing Economic Equity Issues in Rhode Island

The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rhode Island College is honoring Black History Month by hosting a discussion with Weayonnoh Nelson-Davies, the executive director at The Economic Progress Institute. This discussion will center around economic equity and justice issues affecting communities of color and low- and modest- income–earning folks. This event is open to all; no registration required!

Location: Rhode Island College, Alger Hall, Room 110, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue Providence, RI 02908

Thursday 2/23 @6-7:30PM: How to Achieve Racial Justice through Organizational Transformation Conversation

Come join this conversation organized by the Black Lives Matter Rhode Island PAC about achieving racial justice in the community. The event features a multitude of prominent Black leaders from state agencies and non-profit organizations. The event is free and does not require registration!

Location: The Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906

Friday 2/24 @8-10AM: State of Black Businesses in Rhode Island | Legislative Breakfast

In Rhode Island, data continues to show that Black-owned businesses experience discrimination, particularly in the process of receiving state contracts. The Rhode Island Black Business Association will be hosting a conversation over breakfast on the impact this has on the state economy, and how we can support economic equity for Black business owners. Register your attendance for free via Eventbrite at tinyurl.com/ legislative-breakfast.

Location: Farm Fresh Rhode Island, 10 Sims Avenue Providence, RI 02909

Monday 2/27 @3:30-5:30PM: The 1619 Project Film Screening

Join Providence Student Union, a high-school, youth-led coalition aimed at promoting student power, for a screening of The 1619 Project. The film, referring to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ leading essay aimed at “reframing the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” was adapted as a longform collection, book, and curriculum for which Jones was ultimately awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Location: 769 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02903

Monday 2/27 @6PM: Justice Circle for Women of Color & Nonbinary People of Color in RI

Join SISTA Fire RI, an organization focused on building collective power with and by women of color for social, economic, and political transformation. The Justice Circle is the organization’s monthly membership meeting open to women of color and nonbinary people of color living in Rhode Island. Dinner will also be provided. Register at bit.ly/ FebruaryJC2023.

Location: Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad Street, Providence, RI 02907

Thursday 3/2 @4:30PM: Making Climate Policy: The Inflation Reduction Act with Leah Stokes

Leah Stokes is the author of the award-winning book Short Circuiting Policy, which examines the role of fossil fuel companies in promoting climate denial and slowing the transition to clean energy. Stokes, as a climate and energy policy expert, will be leading this event alongside the Climate Solutions Lab to discuss the production of the Inflation Reduction Act. Registration is not required, but you can read more about the event here: tinyurl.com/the-inflation-reduction-act

Location: Stephen Robert ‘62 Hall, 280 Brook St, Providence, RI 02906

Arts

Every Second Tuesday of the Month @ 7:30-9:30PM: UpRiseHer’s Feminist Book Club

Join UpRiseHer, an organization aimed at empowering women, for their Feminist Book Club, which meets every second Tuesday of the month. Sign up to attend here: tinyurl.com/upriseher-bookclub

Location: UpRiseHer, 335 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906

Saturday 2/18 @8:30PM: Shade Range

Attend this celebration for trans and queer POC performers. Tickets can be bought in advance for $15 or at the door for $20 and at this link: tinyurl.com/shade-range.

Location: Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, RI 02903

Wednesday 2/22 @6-8PM: Clothing Swap

Bring your unneeded clothes and accessories—in good & clean condition—and swap for new items! All the leftovers will be donated to a local non-profit organization. Tickets range from $8-12 depending on what you are able to pay, and can be bought here: tinyurl.com/ February-clothing-swap.

Location: The Nest, 1155 Westminster Street #Unit 220, Providence, RI 02909

Monday 2/27 @7-10PM: OUTSPOKEN! PVD @ KIN

Attend this Black History Month limited edition event hosted by Outspoken, a poetry series situated in Providence. Lawrence and Loso will be the two showcased poets of the evening, and the event will include food, drinks, vendors, and music. Tickets are $20 if purchased before the 27th, and $25 the day of the event. Tickets can be purchased at: tinyurl. com/BHM-Outspoken.

Location: Kin Southern Table + Bar 71 Washington Street Providence, RI 02903

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 a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

+ Friday 2/17 @7-12PM: Community Court Debt Fundraiser

DARE PVD (Direct Action for Rights & Equality Providence) is celebrating one year of their Community Court Debt Fund, in which they’ve distributed back over 90 percent of the funds they’ve raised. Help support DARE in their efforts to support community members in paying off their debt—dinner, dessert, and dancing available—by attending this event and donating whatever amount you can. You can reserve your ticket and donate money here: tinyurl.com/ year-2-fundraiser

Location: Union Station Brewery, 36 Exchange Terrace, Providence, RI 02903

+ Help #ShutDownWyatt Activists Beat Charges!

Donate at https://gofund.me/e775d6c8

In May 2022, four activists with the #ShutDownWyatt campaign—where supporters advocated for the shutdown of the Wyatt Detention Center, a prison in Central Falls, RI—were arrested in Georgia. The Wyatt Detention Center is known for its cruel conditions, such as in the case of Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese detainee who died while in the custody of immigration officials in 2008 after repeatedly making known to prison officials his pain and illness. Their court process begins next month, and donations will aid in their legal and travel expenses.

+ Amenity Aid Rhode Island

Donate at amenityaid.org/donate-money

Amenity Aid works to provide hygiene resources to marginalized communities and low-income people in need. On top of serving individuals, Amenity Aid partners with local shelters, food pantries, anti-domestic-violence organizations, and other community groups that support underserved communities to distribute hygiene resources.

+ Project LETS Providence COVID-19 Relief Fund

Donate at projectlets.org/covid19

Project Let’s Erase The Stigma (LETS) is working in coalition with various grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to support marginalized groups in our community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. All donations will directly help individuals, children, and families meet their basic needs.

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass

Support sex workers statewide. Priority is given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted by the pandemic. Recently with the cold weather, there have been several workers who are presently unhoused, and any aid will help them find shelter. Ocean State A$$ is also currently unable to accept many requests for aid due to underfunding, so support will allow for both their ongoing support and waitlisted workers to reach their funding goals.

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!