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defendtranswomen · 5 years

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I am too sick to write this article. The act of writing about my injuries is like performing an interpretative dance after breaking nearly every bone in my body. When I sit down to edit this doc, my head starts aching like a capsule full of some corrosive fluid has dissolved and is leaking its contents. The mental haze builds until it becomes difficult to see the text, to form a thesis, to connect parts. They drop onto the page in fragments. This is the difficulty of writing about brain damage.

The last time I was in the New Inquiry, several years ago, I was being interviewed. I was visibly sick. I was in an abusive “community” that had destroyed my health with regular, sustained emotional abuse and neglect. Sleep-deprived, unable to take care of myself, my body was tearing itself apart. I was suicidal from the abuse, and I had an infected jaw that needed treatment.

Years later, I’m talking to my therapist. I told her, when you have PTSD, everything you make is about PTSD. After a few minutes I slid down and curled up on the couch like the shed husk of a cicada. I go to therapy specifically because of the harassment and ostracism from within my field.

This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash.

This is in defense of the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death, those who came looking for safety and found something worse than anything they’d experienced before.

For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.

I was one of these people.

They controlled my housing and access to nearly every resource. I was sexually harassed, had my bathroom use monitored, my crumbling health ignored or used as a tool of control, was constantly yelled at, and was pressured to hurt other trans people and punished severely when I refused.

The cycle of trans kids being used up and then smeared is a systemic, institutionalized practice. It happens in the shelters, in the radical organizations, in the artistic scenes—everywhere they might have a chance of gaining a foothold. It’s like an abusive foster household that constantly kicks kids out then uses their tears and anger at being raped and abused to justify why they had to be kicked out—look at these problem kids. Look at these problematic kids.

Trans fems are especially vulnerable to abuse for the following reasons:

— A lot of us encounter concepts for the first time and have no idea what is “normal” or not.

— We have nowhere else to go. Abuse thrives on scarcity.

— No one cares what happens to us.

This foster cycle relies on amnesia. A lot of people who enter spaces for the first time don’t know those spaces’ history. They may not know that leaders regularly exploit and make sexual advances on new members, or that those members who resisted are no longer around. Spaces self-select for people who will play the game, until the empathic people have been drained out and the only ones who remain are those who have perfectly identified with the agendas and survival of the Space—the pyramid scheme of believers who bring capital and victims to those on top.

My first puberty was a nightmare—faced with the opportunity to make my second one a healthy, healing experience, I was instead abused and broken. The community practiced compulsory BDSM sexuality, which was deeply inappropriate considering it was one of the only visible spaces for trans people interested in making games. I didn’t need that coercion in my life; I needed safety and mentorship.

I spent those years of my early twenties not making connections or gaining valuable socialization that I had missed in my youth, but being exploited and brainwashed in nightmarish isolation. I was scared away from the “inclusive” coding spaces, the “inclusive” conferences and their orbiting alt events, and everything else that people like to pretend is available for trans fems.

Things escalated at the Allied Media Conference of 2013. Unfortunately I was traveling alone. People from the abusive community overheard me asking about safe-space resources in Oakland and became angry that I was seeking to escape their community. I was intimidated in person by someone who had a great deal of social power over me. I had a panic attack and went to the bathroom to dry heave and cry. Shortly afterward, threatening messages began bombarding my Twitter and my phone, and the community began to develop a coordinated political response to my desire to leave. People suddenly stopped talking to me, and I felt the icy net of isolation drawing tight.

This was the only time a conference responded appropriately. AMC apologized, notified their security team to check up on me, and encouraged me to submit a talk next year. I came back and ran a workshop (with two friends for security) and a small amount of healing was possible.

This reintegration was not made anywhere else. I was excluded from the vast majority of game spaces because of what happened to me. Of course, the multimedia nature of AMC meant it had the least stake in preserving the reputation of games and other things that matter more than people.

When I got back home, I was kicked out of my housing. I later learned that the community had been contacting my landlord for months prior to the actual eviction, as well as spreading rumors throughout my field. These seed rumors are a common tactic in those spaces, cultivating a brittle structure around people that can be shattered when necessary.

Living was my sole attempt at innocence.

ATTACK

One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked.

Anyone else getting that award would have been able to just … get that award. But people like me aren’t allowed to just have careers. Feminist culture saw fit to give a pass to every man and every cis woman who got that award, but when a trans fem from a disadvantaged background stepped up, she somehow happened to be the worst. The culture was fine with me as long as I was window-dressing, but daring to excel got me kneecapped.

They spread rumors that I was sending harassing messages to people, even as the messages streamed one-way toward me. They said I controlled a misogynistic mob and was using it to attack people. (I had never been more alone.) I was called a pedophile, a rapist, an abuser (the typical dog whistles used in feminist spaces to evoke the dangerous tranny stereotype invading ur bathrooms.) Even when the rumors were debunked, even with a history of co-habitating respectfully with partners and a history of being a respectful tenant, the damage was never repaired. The purpose was to keep firing until I was gone, until every possible bad thing had been said about me.

The reputation game was used to paint a vulnerable, isolated trans girl, too scared to leave her room most days, as having power which she did not have—power which my abusers, veterans of queer and artistic scenes with decades of institutional privilege, did have.

It happened without warning or recourse, without a single attempt at conciliation. Multiple times I had noticed tension building and had asked explicitly for mediation. Each time this was refused. When you’re exiling someone for petty political reasons, it works best when they can’t tell their own story. By privately vocalizing concerns that I was being abused, I became a public target—presenting a false chronology to observers.

Previously their ostracism had been silent, made simple by the fact that no one cared about what happened to trans fems who made games. The fact that my games had inadvertently made me visible meant that the attack had to be devastatingly public, my fake crimes commensurate to the amount of disgust required to repel me. This is the danger of the token system—it elevated me to a level of violent politics I was unprepared for.

Very few people want to defend a target of disposability. I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too.

I was threatened into not defending myself, gaslit into silence, told that people knew “things” about me that were never explained. When I asked how I could do accountability, when I said I would do whatever they wanted, they said that I was “incapable” of accountability, that my crime was unknown and my sentence was permanent. That is the point where the body starts to die.

My attackers were expert pathological liars who had been getting away with it for years—entire fictional realities playing out on their social-media accounts like soap opera. Escaping from abuse is the most certain way to become painted as an abuser, and being an abuser is the most sure way to be believed. You know how movies are realer than reality? How the sound effects and physics become so normalized to us that reality seems flat and fake? Talking about abuse is kind of like that. Abusers know what sounds “real.” They are like expert movie-effects artists. Victims are stuck with boring fake reality.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH

Social media is significant to my story because for a long time it was my only outlet as a disabled individual barred from many physical spaces, and a way to express myself artistically when traditional outlets were closed to me. However, it came with its own set of problems.

When I told another trans person that I had been abused, I was told in response that my follower count on Twitter was higher than hers.

I tried talking to people about my poor health, how I needed to withdraw and have space. After unfollowing most people related to games, a subject which was quickly becoming a trigger, I was told that I was “manipulative” for unfollowing, and my following list on Twitter was scrutinized and brought up as evidence that I still followed certain games people and that I was doing this to hurt people.

I was pressured not to post about certain things I cared about (“crystals,” ”slime”) and not to use my favorite emoticons. I was pressured to join in social-media smearings of other trans people (which I frequently rebelled against, to my detriment) and to RT things I didn’t want to RT.

My twitter was incompatible with the rest of the network because I mainly posted poetry-style tweets that had no connection to anything else. I would be accused of subtweeting or encoding hidden messages into my tweets. People would associate random words in my tweets with some random thing going on in their life that I surely must be commenting on.

Social media became a scientific metric for my abusers, a set of numbers and behaviors to obsess over and divine hidden messages. The games network constantly abraded against my nonparticipation—my desire for a safe, therapeutic online space, not a competitive one.

Feminist practice of declaring privilege and marginalization became a way to collect information about victims: Look at someone’s profile bar for their elemental weaknesses. Being frank about my health problems was never an advantage for me in feminist spaces, only something to be used against me. I was an object, an invalid on a bed that could be infinitely manipulated and extruded through social media to fit the agendas of a thousand bored strangers.

The ethereal potential of the net had become rigidly hierarchized and numbered to the point where I could be managed and controlled as efficiently as if I were in 3-D space.

MOBBING

CALL-OUT CULTURE AS RITUAL DISPOSABILITY

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

When I used to curate games, I was approached by people in that abusive community who pressured me not to cover a game by a trans woman. Their reasoning was blatant jealousy, disguised under the thin, nauseating film of pretext that covers nearly everything people say about trans people.

When I rejected their reasoning and covered the game, the targeting reticule of disposability turned toward me. What can we learn from this? Besides “lofty processes in queer/feminist spaces are nearly always about some embarrassingly petty shit,” it’s about the ritual nature of disposability, which has nothing to do with “deserving” it. Disposability has to happen on a regular basis, like forest fires keeping nature in balance.

So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism.

Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.

If a man does something fucked up, all he has to do is apologize, if that, for feminists to re-embrace him. If a trans fem talks about something fucked up that happened to her, she is told to leave and never come back.

MOBBING

A common punishment for infanticide in the Middle Ages was living burial. This was a feminine-coded punishment, often reserved for women, one that allowed execution without having to actually be there at the moment of death. This line of thought pervades feminine punishment to this day.

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat). Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.

2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.

3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

In ideological spaces, this damage is exacerbated by the fact that the victims are often earnest people who take the ideals to heart and can’t understand why the culture is going contrary to its own messages. They appease, self-incriminate, blame themselves—anything to be a Good Person. They don’t want to fight. Fighting sickens them.

From a report by the Australian House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee: “90 percent of people being bullied make the comment: ‘I just want it to stop.’ They don’t want to go down a formal path, but just want the behaviour to stop.”

Those who participate, even unwittingly, feel compelled to invest in the narrative of victims as monsters in order to protect their self-conception as a good person—group violence creates group culpability. For their ego they trade the career, health, community (and sometimes life) of the victim.

MOBBING AS WITCH HUNTS

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people.

You see this in games and tech spaces where the intense amounts of competition and capital accumulation, both physical and social, are a breeding ground for mobbing. But the popular two-sided discussion of mobbing as carried out in numerous clickbait articles ignores the fact that mobbing goes all the way down—even as white cis women struggle for safety, they participate in the exclusion of others, creating a hierarchy of labor and competition. Because mobbing is a form of capitalist violence, the popular discussion (conducted by those who are intricately entwined with the flow of capital) must omit the nuances of mobbing in favor of a narrative that is about replacing uncool regressive masculine consumerism with liberal feminist consumerism.

When the people who are scapegoated happen to be from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, the culture calls it coincidence, clutching our respectable counterparts to their chest like pearls, a talisman of tokens to ward away reality.

SEXUAL MENACE

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality.

DAMAGE

PTSD AS DISPOSABILITY ALCHEMY

I was, in effect, beaten until I had brain damage, over a long period of time. Unlike some other survivors of trauma, I was unable to heal because I was never separated from the source of the danger. I was never given the chance to vent, to express myself, to tell my side of the story—but I had to keep working, harder than ever, while being constantly exposed to violence.

The pressure on me was not merely to survive but to display no signs of the incredible amounts of damage pouring into me daily. To never display the slightest hint of anger, to never cry, to not argue with people telling me horrible things. Every hint of damage was an excuse to further isolate and demonize me.

The cost of resisting disposability was PTSD. It was catching a lethal amount of negative energy with my body and becoming a poison-processing factory.

My job is wired to give me electric shocks. What do you do when your alternative is homelessness?

“The allostatic load is ‘the wear and tear on the body’ which grows over time when the individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress.”

“Stress hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol in combination with other stress-mediating physiological agents such as increased myocardial workload, decreased smooth muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract, and increased coagulation effects have protective and adaptive benefits in the short term, yet can accelerate pathophysiology when they are overproduced or mismanaged; this kind of stress can cause hypertension and lead to heart disease. Constant or even irregular exposure to these hormones can eventually induce illnesses and weaken the body’s immune system.”

To cover up the abuse and protect the “reputation” of the games industry, it was deemed worthwhile to lower my lifespan, weaken my immune system, and permanently damage my body.

Even if I drink multiple cups of water before bed I wake up with severe dehydration. An interesting side effect of being a trans fem on hormones is that spironolactone (an antiandrogen) is a diuretic, so the dehydrating effects of stress are added to the dehydration of my gender, tipping it over to agonizing extremes, the unspoken tax of pursuing both gender and a career. The amount of water in my body is political.

I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches.

By the end of the day my neck and left arm are aching from nervous tics.

I forget things rapidly. Triggers leave me exhausted or panicking at inconvenient times, sometimes for days or weeks.

My hair fell out in handfuls. I still have a nervous tic of running my hands through my hair to pull out loose strands.

Having PTSD is like breaking a limb and never being able to rely on it as strongly. The sudden weakness of standing on it wrong, suddenly being unable to hold something, a fatigue and spasm of nerves.

It became difficult to diagnose other medical problems because of the all-consuming nature of the symptoms. It became difficult to talk about what happened to my body in general. When my hairdresser asked, the only way to explain the damage was by saying I had been in a car accident.

Attacks on marginalized artists go beyond merely denying them access to networks; they also damage a person’s faculties of expression.

For a long time, PTSD deprived me of the privilege of being a multitemporal being. The space of time I was able to safely think about shrunk to about a minute. Larger projects, the kind most tied to commercial value and to the media coverage apparatus, were difficult for me due to the traumatic potential of expanding my aperture of time.

The diversity-centric system expects more jobs to fix the problem, ignoring how long we’ve been damaged and made unfit for their jobs. They encourage the Strong Woman stereotype because it means taking the damage onto ourselves. We need more than jobs; we need social reintegration.

COMMUNICATION

INABILITY TO SHARE STIGMA

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon feeling a connection to others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma de-humanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

The worst thing is not having other survivors to commiserate with. I can think of people who went through similar situations and were defended, re-integrated. Their stories are paraded through feminist spaces, saturated through social media, and every time I’m exposed to them, I feel less safe, not more. This enhances my feelings of dehumanization: “Why was I not worth protecting in the exact same situation? I must not be human like them”.

I often have the overwhelming physical sensation of having a dead person in my life, someone as close as an identical twin. The sensation is of me being the only one still alive after a terrible accident, lingering like an unshriven thing. The inability to share stigma is even worse than the original act of violation. The greater part of a wound is its inability to heal.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #1

The typical narrative of abuse on social media doesn’t include the problems of the most vulnerable, like how public verbal harassment may only be an ultimately minor part of a trans fem’s exile.

The most skilled abusers know that a good exile is done with pure silence, through the whisper network, by having the person wake up one day and have every second or third person she knows or who practices her profession block her and/or stop talking to her. No one tells her why. She has to painstakingly talk to every friend, every contact, every person she would normally have a cheerful conversation with. The electric shocks of knowing that every simple human interaction you have with a friend or stranger could turn into a nightmare of victim blaming or worse, a cold iciness where they pretend nothing is wrong. Imagine repeating that experience hundreds and hundreds of times, with no way to end it. After the noise, the long years of silence are what kill us.

The backchannels that should be used to protect people from abusers and rapists are instead used to protect abusers and rapists. Any usefulness these channels have is reserved for Real Women. No one warned me about any of the comically large number of predators in my professions. I was considered unrapeable, unabuseable, not worthy of protection. A trans fem can try to talk about her experiences of abuse for years and have no one listen, but the instant one of her abusers smears her, everyone is alert and awake.

One reason it took me so long to talk about my experiences was that I associated being able to speak against abuse with being an abuser. Because every abuser throughout my life was so good at being believed, I thought that being believed was the exclusive domain of abusers.

This is why my first months in therapy were spent convincing me that I wasn’t a sociopath, crazy, abusive, or any of the other terms I had been brainwashed with. Abusers don’t spend years disabled by those thoughts because they don’t care if they hurt other people.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #2

And when verbal harassment does occur, it’s often cloaked in feminist language, making it impossible to fight.

If they call a woman a bitch, people comprehend that as misogyny. But they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place?

When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist.

TRASH ART

When it was really bad, I wrote: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms. Move a single inch and call it a victory. Mold my sexuality toward immobility. Lie here leaking water from my eyes like a statue covered in melting frost. Zero affect. Build like moss grows. Build like crystals harden. Give up. Make your art the merest displacement of molecules at your slightest quiver. Don’t build in spite of the body and fail on their terms, build with the body. Immaculate is boring and impossible. Health based aesthetic.”

Twine, trashzines made of wadded up torn paper because we don’t have the energy to do binding, street recordings done from our bed where we lie immobilized.

Laziness is not laziness, it is many things: avoiding encountering one’s own body, avoiding triggers, avoiding thinking about the future because it’s proven to be unbearable. Slashing the Gordian Knot isn’t a sign of strength; it’s a sign of exhaustion.

Although I’ve fashioned this reflection in a manner that some may find legible, it is not a fair representation of my sickness. Writing these paragraphs has taken constant doses of medicine, fevered breaks, a few existential timeouts, and a complete neglect of my other responsibilities. When I tried in true form to write – in my realest moments of sickness – all that emerged were endless ellipses and countless semi-coherent revelations.

—Alli Yates

With the trashzine, I tore up the pages because I didn’t have the time or energy to bind them. I put them in ziploc bags—trash binding. In this new form they were resistant to the elements and could go interesting places. I hid one in Oakland under a bridge, and posted coordinates online. Someone found it.

When read, they come out of the bag like my thoughts—fragmented, random, nonlinear. If dropped they become part of the trash.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

COMMUNITY IS DISPOSABILITY

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.

—The Broken Teapot, Anonymous

People crave community so badly that it constitutes a kind of linguistic virus. Everything in this world apparently has a community attached to it, no matter how fragmented or varied the reality is. This feels like both wishful thinking in an extremely lonely world (trans fems often have a community-shaped wound a mile wide) and also the necessary lens to convert everything to profit. Queerness is a marketplace. Alt is a marketplace. Buy my feminist butt plugs.

The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.

—Stephen Murphy

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.

Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death.

CURATING QUEERNESS

An entire industry of curation has sprung up to rigidly and sometimes violently police the hierarchy of who is allowed to express themselves as a trans or queer person. The LGBT and queer spheres find it upon themselves to create compilations of the “best” art by trans people, to define what a trans story is and to omit the rest. Endless projects to curate, list, own, publish, control, but so few to offer support and mentorship.

The stories that reflect poorly on alt culture are buried in favor of utopianism that everyone aspires toward but where few live. People feed desperately on this aspiration, creating the ever more elaborate hollow structures of brittle chitin that comprise feminist/queer culture.

To find the things I wanted in queerness, I had to find those who had been exiled from it, those who the name had been torn from.

COMPLAINT AND PURITY

there is nothing “wrong” with a politics of complaint but there are several risks like developing a dependent relationship with “the enemy” politically neutralizing oneself by dumping all of one’s subversive energies into meaningless channels or reifying one’s powerlessness by identifying with it because it makes one virtuous complaint becomes a form of subcultural capital a way to morally purify oneself —Jackie Wang, the tumblrization of everyday life

Popular feminism encodes pain into its regular complaint/click cycle, keeping everyone on the rim of emotional survival. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity.

Lacking true community, the energy spent is not restored. Those with more stability in their life can keep up the cycle of complaint, and those with lower amounts of energy are filtered out, creating culture that glorifies a “strength” not everyone can access.

There is immense pressure on trans people to engage in this form of complaint if they want access to spaces—but we, with our higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, lifelessness, lovelessness, are the most fragile. We are the glass fems of an already delicate genderscape.

Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.

Deleuze wrote, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

ENDING

People talk about feminism and queerness the way you’d apologize for an abusive relationship.

This isn’t for the people who are benefiting from these spaces and have no reason to change. This is for the people who were exiled, the people essays aren’t supposed to be written for. This is to say, you didn’t deserve that. That even tens or hundreds or thousands of people can be wrong, and they often are, no matter how much our socially constructed brains take that as a message to lie down and die. That nothing is too bad, too ridiculous, too bizarre to be real when it comes to making marginalized people disappear.

Ideology is a sick fetish.

RESISTING DISPOSABILITY

— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time.

— Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life.

— Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock.

— Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal.

— Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion.

— Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied.

— “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder

Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models.

— A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other.

— Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.

DREAM

On January 18, 2015, I woke up from a dream. It was early morning, still dark. I felt very sad that the dream wasn’t real. I wrote it down, like I’ve written down all my dreams for the last eight years.

“She was my abuser. She came to my house on the island. I begged her to stop what she had done, to clear my name. She would not. It had been two years of being abused like a child because of her. I turned to walk deeper into the house. I looked back. She had a knife. She stabbed me. It was the happiest dream of my life. Because finally an abuser had done something to me that people would pay attention to. When I woke up my entire spirit was crushed because I had not been stabbed. I felt the weight of all these years of abuse. I wished so badly I had been stabbed.

I pulled the knife out. I wrestled the knife away. I called my friend to come over and help me.

I walked along the beach of the island and saw for the first time how PTSD had numbed and corroded every perception I’d had since that August, this debilitating disease. I finally felt the brightness of the air in my lungs, the color of the sand and the waves. It was so beautiful. I just wanted to experience all the things that had been stolen from me.”

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amateurteacher · 6 years

Text

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A QUEER IN...?

First, a confession: It’s 22:49 in my country and I feel like my body is doing everything it can to separate itself from whatever's inside me. My skin doesn't feel like a skin and it seems like the air is solid under my fingers as I type these words. In the middle of this anxiety attack I remember that tomorrow I have to get up early for my class. I am 21 years old and the youngest professor at the university where I work. That means I still don't know how to handle the fact that my students of tomorrow think that one of the bloodiest massacres in Colombia's history is the fault of the victims because "they should have foreseen it". The college where I work is the most expensive college in the city, which means that many of its students are children of the privilege. Every time they express these violent expressions I can't avoid to see rocks in their hands and feel that if they could know I was a lesbian they would not hesitate to throw them at me, because, in most contexts, the privilege is misogynistic and markedly homophobic. My parents and my sister are sleeping. This silence is not very different from the silence that I usually feel when I am around them and I cannot show myself totally. More than anyone, I'd like to talk to something, and I feel like this blue page is the closest scenario I have to that conversation.

I graduated from literature at my university and I would like to share with you (the something invisible but real, the something timelessly present, the something unknown that takes time to read to another unknown, the something that is something because you cannot be someone when you are all at the same time) how some of the knowledge I learned during that period influenced my reflections on three of my favorite shows: Carmilla, Wynona Earp and Orphan Black. I would love to show you the thre ready-made reflections, but for now I will write my thoughts around Carmilla for as long as I need to take up my usual breathing and be able to sleep more peacefully.

I probably write this for myself but I still hope to find an echo in others "desvelados", which is a rare construction in Spanish that means “the one who lost sleep or can't fall asleep”, or in any fan, who like me, has found company in the stories of these series.

A METHOD OF ANALYSIS

Summarizing the whole theory, my method of literary approach is based on the works of Georg Lukács, Jacques Ranciere and studies on polyphony of Mikhail Bakhtin, from which a conception of literature is derived: literature is NEVER a reflection of reality, but a refraction of voices (many voices) of society (more a painting than a photo). Literature (and perhaps it would be good to already speak in terms of narratives) works in terms of representation. Therefore, I would not agree to use a book as a historical document, but certainly a book would reinterpret the voices of a historical moment in order to, according to the ideological positions of the author, create a version of it. The characteristic of this position is that it does not consider that the key to reading a text is in aesthetics as an artifice, as a manifestation of a style, but that all aesthetics are charged with an ethic (the author writes in a way because only in that way can he express his political bets).

All of the above is reduced to three levels of analysis. In my words:

-"Outside the book", which implies that to understand a book you must know everything about the author's writing context (why could this book only have been written at the time it was written?), the historical context in which the narration takes place, and the current literary situation in terms of literary movements and debates.

-"Inside the book", and I hope you don't misunderstand me, this is very important because we do literature, not sociology. This is the moment to put into practice all the critical tools related to time, characters, repeated thematic points: the architecture with which the story was constructed. The style of the book.

-A new one outside the book? Let's say "Above the book": this is the most interesting moment of the reflection where we try to construct the universe of values that allows the union of the two previous levels. Basically, what was the resulting image of reality, once we put together the pieces of the puzzle that the book proposes

You're probably bored. I think the only way I can explain myself is to "teach a lesson", but this is actually just as exciting for me as a last-minute goal, and I'm starting to feel better. All right, let's see how it goes when I analyze Carmilla.

CARMILLA AND THE UNIVERSAL LOVE

To give a quick example of what the first two levels of analysis would be like, because I want to focus on the last one, the "outside of Carmilla" could refer to a context of the need for good queer representation in the media and, to give a very specific example, a knowledge of how universities work in terms of fraternities (an element that, by the way, is not common in Latin America) The “inside of Carmilla” (and only referring to the digital series and not to the beautiful film) has an obvious aesthetic element that is marked by the presentation of the story from a "webcam" ,that is to say the story in a constant confession mode (usually from Laura- I take the moment to say that Elise Bauman and Natasha Negovanlis are such a gift) and in a single setting (the room-the living room-the library).

So let's move on to "above Carmilla". I won't lie. When I approach a new series I usually do it for its queer representation. It still surprises me, moves me, makes me nervous, all at the same time, to see two women kissing on television. It is a constant reminder of validity. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. But what makes me love a series is that, along with the fangirl that I can develop through a relationship, there is a space for deep reflection on who we are as people.

In Carmilla there are many reflections on this subject. In the first season the questions could be presented as: Is it worth fighting for what we think is right even when all the odds are against us? Should we resign ourselves to the fact that there is a natural world order that is stronger and more powerful than our vain attempts? In the second season the questions revolve around power: can we sacrifice everything around us in order to defend what we believe? Who determines that my cause is the noblest cause? Can I judge the actions of others based on my own scale of values? In the third season this exercise that I have been doing (to separate the reflections linked to love from the other reflections) is more difficult, because if one of the reflections of the second season around love, which I have not intentionally mentioned is should I change what I am for love?, in this last season the question is relativized and expressed as what is it that love causes in people, and when it comes to the issue of loss (Laura in the other dimension, death) how do I survive a lack of love, or why do I have to overcome my fears first to love? (I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the season for the beautiful Hollstein statement, interrupted by the Dean's applause)

Let's move away from all these reflections and focus only on the love between Laura and Carmilla. How do you unite the inside and the outside?

There are two consequences that I find in the presentation from the webcam: first, the world is reduced to the micro-world of, once again, Laura's room, the dean's former apartment and the library. This implies that an implicit pact is created with the characters. We must believe the story they tell us. The world is their world. It is a series without tricks in that sense, and very transparent. Everything that happens outside is only important because of its consequences inside. That is, the work is already "simplified" and what we can see is how what happens outside (the action) changes the characters (the reflection). That is, first conclusion, reality is only important for the kind of person it makes us be.

The second consequence is that as we can only see the immediate context of the characters, there are few characters. However, and to ensure the coherence of the story (that is, to convince us that a true story is being told) these characters were as varied as the outside world can be, and in that sense, and as I explained earlier that these characters are our only contact with the outside world, each of them would be an archetype. Laura is not just Laura, she is the archetype of people who have hope in changing their reality; Carmilla is not just Carmilla, she is the archetype of people excluded from history (because Carmilla's great debate is always in relation to history: should I let it all happen because in the end what happens won't have consequences for my immortal self? Can I overcome my past or will I remember it for all eternity) And… as the only romantic love story (couple love if you want to see it that way) we see in the series is the relationship between Laura and Carmilla, that relationship then comes to be built on an archetype of love. Wait, you mean the relationship between a young girl and a vampire is an archetype of love?!, but how can love between two specific personalities be a model of love?! Well, let's analyze how the series naturalizes love between them as love and period, and not as an expression of love between two women or love between a human and a mythological figure.

The explanation is very simple: the series does not problematize the fact that, for example, Laura is a lesbian, nor that Carmilla is a vampire (the two elements that could characterize this relationship as an "atypical" relationship). In the first case, and this was one of the elements that attracted the fandom from the beginning, we do not have a "coming out" in the series, and in fact, Laura's or Carmilla's sexuality is never a topic, it is not an element that the plot focuses on. It's just like that. It exists. It happens.

Likewise, the characters quickly get used to the existence of the supernatural in the story (except for Perry, and perhaps on another long night we could talk about his case. I mean, is the most reluctant of the situation possessed by a vampire goddess? That should be an important detail) This circumstance, which sometimes surpasses the absurd, does not create an “unreal-fake world”. Why? Because when Laura questioned the reasons why the world "was like this", and when all the characters questioned the same thing, they did not question why the world has vampires, or giant fishes or many dimensions. They questioned why evil or power or corruption exists. That's the world they want to change. It’s that "the weird", "the perverse", the "abnormal” about their lives.

I consider then that the purpose of the series is to analyze love through love between two women. That we forget and that we remember at the same time that they are two women. The love between Laura and Carmilla is a universal love, as an archetype, because it is presented as an expression of the standard and regular love that can be felt. And this, the basic claim to which all non-heterosexual people aspire, is achieved in the series thanks to all these strategies that I hope I have explained.

It's 12:47 pm. It's officially June, the month of pride. I think I should get some rest soon, because I really should get up early. I'm not anxious anymore, but I feel numb. I just want to make one last comment: is the love between Laura and Carmilla an example of perfect love because it is the official representation of love in the series? NO. Not at all. And this is the beauty of it all. We can learn from love through them: their difficulties, their celebrations, their lessons. What makes really transgressor the love between them to my eyes is not the fact of being a queer love but the fact that they decide, in the end, that their love will make them better, and that they will not destroy all if one of them dies. This is the Hollstein revolution. To break all the violent ideas associated with romantic heterosexual love, as an archetype in itself: possessive love, love that cannot be forgotten, love of “if you are not for me you are not for anyone”, “if I failed in love, we must all fail”. I'm not saying that all heterosexual love is like that. I'm talking about the patriarchy's versions of love (another night of explanations). Wow, my conclusion seems to be that Hollstein is, above all, a feminist love. I think I will end this conclusion like this. Nothing could be better than this.

Well, this is my literary reading of Carmilla. I am not an expert on this subject, nor do I want to present my version as the only one, much less the best. I was just looking for an outlet to unite my passions: literature + being a lesbian. I don't know if anyone will read this or if anyone will find it interesting enough to continue the conversation. I just want to thank my Tumblr companies, with whom I have rarely spoken but who are with me now and always in this “struggle for being” in the day to day. This is my way of thanking you for your selfies, your gifs, your jokes, your criticisms of violence. I'm just getting started. I hope to publish my thoughts on Wayhaught and Cophine soon. I hope to sleep.

Feliz junio, my darlings.

PD:

-Sorry if I have grammatical or spelling mistakes. English is not my native language.

- As you can see I am using queer as a spectrum and not as a specific identity. I hope this isn't vague or offensive.

Karla.

@natvanlis

#carmilla #hollstein #lesbian #literature #sleeplees night #creampuffs #laura hollis #carmilla karnstein #thanks for reading #hope you like it #pride month

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rotten-zucchinis · 6 years

Text

On textual intimacy...

I misheard something something said to me a while back-- with amusing consequences [here]-- and it reminded me that most people have probably never considered the idea of textual intimacy. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it.

Before I could write this, I ended up having to write a few other things which are only tangentially related, namely:

the relationship between consent and moral obligation [here]

the consensual and non-commutative nature of friendship [here]

the consensual and commutative nature of intimacy [here]

intimacy within the context of community (including relationships between an individual and a group) and “community ties” [here]

TLDR: Textual intimacy is a particular kind of intimacy that allows for the sharing (and sometimes creation) of certain kinds of very personal texts. Letter-writing is one place where textual intimacy might be relevant-- and my long history as a letter-writer still frames my experience with textual intimacy today. As a child and teenager, letters were the only medium available to me to continue some of my significant relationship (e.g., after a close friend moved away, in the days before internet things). At this point in my life, textual intimacy is a tool in my intimacy toolbox-- it’s one of the ways I do intimacy in some of my relationships.

What is textual intimacy?

Google tells me that other people indeed sometimes use the words “textual intimacy” but mostly in the context of literary criticism as a metaphor for a reader's close relationship with the text. There's also a book by that name about religious identity in autobiographical writing. So, it seems that textual intimacy in the way I mean it is very much something particular to me, or at the very least isn't something people generally seem to be talking about or naming.

As someone who makes sense of my reality by talking and writing—sometimes with others and sometimes with only myself— textual intimacy has been a big part of my life for at least 25 years. It’s not something I often talk about outside of the relationship contexts where it happens, and ironically enough it’s barely something I have the words to express or describe. But it’s also a very important part of how I sometimes relate to people and do intimacy.

Apparently I’m some variety of word-heavy zinester and blogger. I’ve created many texts (e.g., many of them listed [here] and [here] ). But that’s not what I’m talking about when it comes to textual intimacy. Things I write and put online are things that typically aren’t written with a particular person in mind. I might have an idea of my texts’ intended audience, but any relationships I have with that group would be at most a community relationship [explained here]: not a personal one. (So that means, it would be at most a casual community-type of intimacy involved.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that people can’t feel things because of what I (or anyone else) write(s)-- people can have relationships with content that doesn’t involve the content-creators [explanation]. And while I wouldn’t necessarily be okay with everyone reading the stuff I have on my blog and in my zines-- there are in fact certain people in my life I emphatically do not want reading these texts (e.g., family members... among others)-- for the most part, these texts are not “private” and reading them doesn’t require or specifically involve any kind of closeness with me. Having said that, these texts do share aspects of my personal experience which would create a certain type of (unwanted-by-me) proximity should they be read by certain people who have ongoing personal relationships with me offline (like the family members I don’t want reading them!).

Textual intimacy isn’t intimacy achieved via text-based communication. I don’t think any particular kind of communication medium necessarily defines any type of intimacy or how people can be close, even if some media promote certain kinds of sharing or interactions more than others. Since a lot of online communication is via text, there’s a focus on text-based communication (i.e., the impact for intimacy of doing the talking by text-- texting, instant messaging, sharing conversations on social media platforms, etc.). But by-and-large, that’s not directly relevant to what I mean by “textual intimacy”. [1]

In contrast, textual intimacy is the intimacy that permits the sharing (and sometimes creation) of certain kinds of very personal texts. For instance, when I think about the sharing of such texts, these might be texts that I have created for a particular person to read-- sometimes primarily about sharing something about myself and other times more geared toward telling someone something that is specifically (presumably) to be meaningful to them. Alternatively, they might be texts I have created for myself, to figure something out or to express something about myself, my experience, my perspective, and then decide that I want to share one or more of them with someone, so that they can see or understand that part of me.

I’m not an artist. I’m a crafter. I work with words and I work with string. (I don’t claim any particular talent for either but that’s not the point.) But this idea of textual intimacy is a little bit like the intimacy involved in an artist (who has personal artwork) sharing that art with someone in the context of a personal relationships, or creating personally meaningful pieces specifically for someone.

It’s just that people seem to be much more inclined to do that with art of various forms than with words (or only with words that are conventionally “art”-- such as poetry or even fiction). At the same time, I don’t think of my texts as “art”, not even the ones that might hold parts of me.

For the most part, the kinds of texts that might be relevant to textual intimacy aren’t necessarily within the scope of regular daily activities, as they once were. For example, people don’t often [2] write letters and send them through the mail knowing they will take a while to arrive, and any response will be separated not only by time but also by any life events that happen in the meantime.

Often the limitations of any medium are central to its power. In the case of letters, the fact that they are extremely limited in what they can include means that the letter-writer needs to pick a tiny fraction of their experience to write about, and those kinds of choices communicate a lot on their own, about what’s important to someone. If you can only say a few things, what would you say?

While textual intimacy isn’t really about the medium, I think looking at the (lost) art of letter writing is ultimately useful to explain where I’m coming from, because, for me, that’s where this all started.

Letter-writing and textual intimacy

I’m a letter-writer. It’s part of how I build certain types of personal relationships-- including some friendships and some relationships that aren’t really friendships (and which certainly aren’t romantic!) but that I can only really describe as casual QP relationships. It has been for the vast majority of my life.

Over the years, there have been parts of myself that I could only articulate or share in writing, and ways of connecting with people that have only been possible through temporally separated packets of written words. There have also been pieces of writing I have created which represented and held parts of myself-- which I have at times wanted to share with certain people. And there have been things that I have felt that needed to be said and that wouldn’t have “worked” or “come off right” in any other format.

My letter-writing inclination-- the why, the what, the details and personal meaning of that kind of letter-writing, etc.-- is a little bit private in the sense that it’s not something I want to share widely on the internet. And I’m mindful that my description of textual intimacy might not make sense or might not resonate with anyone else’s experience without that information. Even still, the basic concept of letter writing as an avenue for textual intimacy is something I’d like to explore, if for no other reason than I haven’t seen it discussed elsewhere.

I began learning the ways of letter-writing at the age of 8 by necessity when when my then best friend moved an ocean away, in the days long before (most people had access to) things like e-mail or instant messaging. There was no skype, and long distance rates meant no phone calls. We kept in contact for years through letters, on our own without any parental intervention. As teenagers, we didn’t have much in common anymore though-- I was growing up to be queer and she wasn’t-- but we still found ways to connect throughout most of our teen years until external barrier made that impossible (i.e., her new boarding school wouldn’t pass along my letters-- I found out later). There were also other long-distance friendships in my youth.

I’m not a woman, but at that time, I as a girl. And I feel like much of that letter-writing was gendered-- we were girls and those were girl-friendships that were both considered “socially appropriate” as pen pals, and also “not quite socially appropriate” because we carried on with them “too long” and took them “too seriously”. I don’t think anyone ever said that outright, but they were consistently surprised when I still received letters (and sent and received photographs), so I kind of avoided talking about it. (And maybe some perceived “impropriety” had something to do with the school blocking our letters... or maybe it was a disciplinary thing because she was “too rebellious”.)

Nobody else really took those relationships seriously enough. I felt that at the time (e.g., when I was 8 and people didn’t recognise what a big deal it was for her to be moving away), and that seems even more clear to me now in retrospect. But also *because* nobody took our connections seriously enough, I think it didn’t really occur to anyone to smack them down, not even as we got older, for being “too close” as girls (who weren’t talking about boys) and therefore for violating some of the norms of compulsory heterosexuality. Or maybe they just assumed we were talking about boys. (At the same time, I suspect that my always having had *very* strong one-on-one girl-friendships that my family thought were “unusual”... was one of many reasons they never assumed I was straight growing up.)

Carrying on friendships like that when were weren’t involved in each other’s daily lives meant that what we chose to write about was all we had. And that we could talk about whatever we wanted-- whatever was meaningful to us, no matter what was going on in our lives. Since our letters were our only form of interaction, they were an ongoing series of moments over time saying “this is who I am and I want you to know”. My letters held parts of who I was-- parts that I gave to my friends in those moments. (And they were sometimes interspersed with other things too-- this is how I see you and I want you to know.)

I grew up doing that, and I never really stopped. And it became something very well-practiced, very natural to me.

So now it’s one of many tools in my intimacy toolbox, that I use wherever I feel it appropriate.

Letter-writing as a tool in the intimacy toolbox

I’m weird and I’m intense. And (especially when I’m interacting with someone on a personal level), I’m so earnest that it often makes people who dontt know me well uncomfortable-- sometimes because they assume I must have ulterior motives when I don’t. I’ll say things in letters that people don’t usually say. Heck I’ll say things to people faces that people don’t usually say. But how and why I put ideas together isn’t usually what people expect. And especially when what I’m saying is strange, I like to explain why. And letters are good for that. But they’re also something tangible, something that exists beyond the moment of writing-- unlike spoken words which disappear with their very creation.

The things I might want to communicate to someone-- about who I am or how I see them-- are not things I would want to be public knowledge. The vulnerability would be too great. I’m not willing to get personal with most people. For many reasons, there are so many parts of myself that I don’t want just anyone to know or even to know about. However, with a letter, there’s no plausible deniability. It’s there to revisit, as a record of what was said at one particular moment in time, and as something that could easily be shared with others who were not the intended recipient. So it requires a certain level of trust. And that’s part of what I’m invoking with the concept of textual intimacy.

The flip side is also a positive for me though when I’m very close with someone-- the permanence of a letter lets someone re-read it, when ever they want to revisit those words. And sometimes that’s important, not just to remember what they said, but to remember the feelings they invoked and to feel what they still do. And that’s another aspect of textual intimacy.

Another practical thing I like about letters is that function well as offerings and not so well as demands. People get to decide for themselves whether they will read a letter. (And while it’s certainly possible to enact coercive social situations wherein people might not feel like they have a choice, it’s usually pretty easy for people to ignore a letter if they want to-- and if it’s been sent through the mail, a “return to sender” doesn’t even require additional postage.)

Especially because I’m weird and intense, I like to give people the option of if and when they engage with certain things, especially when we are just getting to know each other and I don't necessarily yet have a good sense of what they do and don't want from me, of how much of me they want to know. I mean, it’s unlikely I’ll be giving someone a letter if I don’t have a reason to believe they would be willing to read it, but people typically have control over when, where and how they read letters— not just whether they do. And they can also stop (for a moment or indefinitely) if it’s too much. Consent is always a part of intimacy, and textual intimacy is no exception.

The take home...

There's a kind of intimacy that I can only describe as textual intimacy: it's the intimacy that permits both the sharing and the creation of certain kinds of personal texts. These might be texts that carry parts of the self or things to be said from one person to another— declarations of this is (part of) who I am or this is who I think you are or what I think you need to hear... and I want you to know.

Unlike the intimacy of spoken words which exists in fleeting moments of togetherness, textual intimacy involves sharing something over time and space. The vulnerability involved is different from the vulnerability of conversation, where someone can look away or become distant or change the course of interaction if it's too much or doesn't go as planned. The stakes can be higher for textual intimacy, with words that don't dissipate over time and which can't be changed once they've been given. The trust involved in different too— something given ahead of time, to be respected in good faith later on— unlike other interactions where it plays out in real-time.

That means that textual intimacy involves consenting to sharing something that can't easily or ever be taken back or altered. Superficially, that's no different from other ways of sharing personal information in the sense that even spoken words cannot retroactively be unknown. But on a deeper level, sharing a text is different from sharing spoken words or written (instant) messages because conversation— verbal or written— is always very directly constructed in context, in co-construction with any conversation partners, while more substantive texts are only indirectly co-constructed if they're co-constructed at all with their recipients. And that means the nature of what is being shared is different from what is being shared in conversation. It also means it's, in some sense, a more solitary intimacy— about connection rather than togetherness or closeness.

Textual intimacy has been a significant part of how I connect with people for most of my life. Often— though not exclusively— through letters, it's an important tool in my intimacy toolbox. I don't know if this is something I've spent so much time doing because there are other more conventional things that don't come so naturally to me (e.g., hanging out socially in groups isn't really part of my intimacy toolbox, and it isn't especially conducive to he building of personal relationships for me, or to moving from acquaintance to friend). Regardless though, I feel that textual intimacy occupies a unique space in my life and in my relationships. It's not something that can replace or be replaced by anything else, and it's something that can add dimensions to any existing relationship.

I can't be the only one who sometimes approaches intimacy this way. I'd be interested in other people's perspectives on textual intimacy and their experiences with it. And for people who find this a new idea, I'd encourage some exploration. Is there something you'd like to tell someone but haven't had the chance? Is there a part of you that you can't really articulate? Is there something you want someone to know?

Or maybe you have to be a writer for this to even make any sense. Words are my craft: texts are one of the only thing I have to make sense— of anything. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they're also a powerful way to make connections. For me at least, textual intimacy is very much a thing.

Footnote

[1] Since a lot of online communication is via text, there’s a social focus on text-based communication (i.e., the impact for intimacy of doing the talking by text-- texting, instant messaging, sharing conversations on social media platforms, etc.). There are so many words spilled about how instant messaging and the internet are changing how people do relationships! There’s the panic of “kids today” being “glued to their phones” and how Millenials and Generation Z-ers are [insert negative thing here] because they are doing [insert something about technology that Baby Boomers never did]. There’s the general panic about how technology is ruining relationships and mental health and undermining all possibility for human connection, etc. And in turn, psychologists and such have a lot of say on the topic-- mostly about how particular media and platforms are changing the way people interact and connect with each other, and what some of the consequences might be.

Psychologists are doing things like writing advice columns to help people communicate better by texting (e.g., [here] ) and studying measurable characteristics of relationships and theorising them in terms of thing like the psychological implications of things like anonymity and invisibility (e.g., [example]) in online communication, or theorising reasons why online interactions might lead to people sharing more “intimate” information than they would in face-to-face conversations (e.g., [example]) and ultimately concluding that golly-gee willikers, there can be intimacy in online relationships and relationships that include a lot of online communication (e.g., [source] ) or instant messaging (e.g., [source] )! But what I mean by textual intimacy is something quite different from intimacy achieved via text-based communications.

[2] There are certain contexts where people still write and mail letters as a significant, regular form of communication. For instance, letters are often a major or main form of communication between people who are in prison and those on the outside. However, because of how those letters are treated— being read by guards, risking being seized for any number of reasons or having their content used against the receivers— the relationship between letter-writing and intimacy isn't quite straightforward.

#textual intimacy #intimacy #friendship #letters #ace #arospec #really not sure how to tag this #queued #my ramblings #long post

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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 7 years

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How to Write a (Healthy) Relationship: An Illustrated Guide.

@trappedinfairytales asked:

Hi! Let me start by saying this blog is a god send for more than just writing skills, I even turned on your notifications 😂 Anyway, I apologize if you've already done a post like this, but I was wondering if you could do a post with different kinds of healthy relationships? I feel like it would help, because even though I am a bi girl, I've never been in a relationship so sometimes I don't know where to start 🙈

@magnificentcollectiverebel asked:

Bro bro I'm trying to write a cute lil romance do you have any tips please I didn't realize writing needs so much planning also thank you for all the tips on characters both of my love interests are girls the tips help

Excellent questions!

Now, there has been a request for me to make a post about LGBTQ characters, so I will talk more exclusively about queer relationships then; sufficed to say this post applies to all types of healthy relationships. Even though you could say I’m BI-ased on the matter. (I’ll see myself out.)

In the meantime, here are my personal rules of thumb for writing a ship-worthy romance.

1. Allow opposites to attract (but do it right!)

No, I’m not talking about two characters who have no common ground or core values; I’m talking about two characters whose traits compliment one another.

Maybe one’s analytical and the other’s impulse driven. Maybe one’s a happy ray of sunshine and the other’s a grump. Maybe one’s an idealist and the other’s a realist.

Do you see pattern here? Not only do these proposed pairings balance each other out, but their mutually beneficial to each other: an impulse-driven character will add spontaneity to the life of their analytical partner, while the analytical character will keep the impulsive one from leaping off cliffs; the happy ray of sunshine will brighten up the life of the grump, while the grump will keep the ray of sunshine aware of life’s problems; the realist will keep the idealist weighted in reality while the idealist will help them to get off the ground.

Moreover, as each of them has something the other lacks and needs, it creates a natural magnetism between them.

Just think of it like the old Greek myth, in which mankind was split in two by Zeus and each of them are searching for their other half to become their best selves.

In terms of writing romance, pretend your two characters are two halves of a greater whole, and allow them to complete each other.

2. Create chemistry and attraction (but remember that it does not immediately equal love.)

If I had to pinpoint the source of my frustration with the depictions of attraction in literature, particularly YA romantic novels, I would say it roughly narrows down to the fact that the attraction, as it’s depicted, is largely extremely vapid and hollow.

Two characters that hate each other are not going to have true chemistry or be compatible for a long-term relationship, even if one of them is equipped with excessive depictions of eye-color and can smirk like a champ.

To create true chemistry, the readers have to crave the characters’ interactions; they have to root for them to get together, not role their eyes when they finally do.

So how do you do this? Well, first and foremost, there are different and better ways to convey attraction than the tried and true “cerulean orbs” and obnoxious smirks and whatnot.

First and foremost, save strong, sensual language, like “she leaned in close, and I tasted her breath on mine,” “My heart thudded painfully in my chest as I felt her body press against mine,” et cetera for when your characters are actually in an intense situation. That way, your audience isn’t desensitized to it and are more likely to root for your characters when they finally shack up.

When your characters first meet, keep the language light and playful. Unless you’re doing a modern, queer reenactment of Romeo and Juliet (which sounds pretty awesome, honestly -- so long as the ending is happier) most people aren’t righting sonnets about people they first meet.

Let your POV character check out her prospective partner if you so desire, but press hold on the purple prose.

For instance, instead of something like this:

“Long lashes fluttered like the wings of the butterfly over peridot orbs, a faint gold dusting over the graceful slope of her nose. Red lips as ripe as strawberries glistened in the sun, and a waterfall of gilded hair fell over her slender shoulders.”

Try something more along the lines of this:

“She had striking green eyes framed with long lashes, a smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her hair was a thick mane of unkempt gold, and when she saw me, she smiled. Her lips were plump and strawberry pink.”

If you’ll notice, both passages convey basically the same thing (i.e. that this narrator finds her prospective gal-pal attractive): one is just significantly less pretentious than the other, and in my opinion, a lot more readable.

As the story continues, you’ll likely want to build up the tension as the character’s attraction to one another grows. Maybe your character starts to get butterflies in their stomach whenever their love interest is around, or there’s a tension-filled moment where their skin brushes together. Maybe they’ve found themselves constantly looking at one another’s lips and mouths.

Keep in mind while developing your characters’ chemistry into something greater that contrary to what most YA novels will teach you, attraction isn’t love. Finding one another’s meatsuits aesthetically pleasing isn’t reasonable merit for a long-term commitment. Love, generally speaking, is often just that: it’s a commitment. It takes time to cultivate, and it isn’t fun 100% of the time. But people stick with it anyway, because ideally, the payoff is worth it.

And that’s a good thing. As an author, you get to build up on your character’s relationship, challenge it, make it stronger. And that’s a lot of fucking fun. Plus, you get to write all the cute romantic shit in the times in between.

If you are implying love at first sight (which, sappy bitch I am, I’m a bit of a sucker for) feel free to imply as such, but I’m still inclined to think short, sweet descriptions work best: “Their eyes met, and for a moment, Ishmael could have sworn the earth had come to a stop while the world kept moving.” Or perhaps, “Luna looked at Misery for the first time, and knew right away this was the woman she was going to marry.”

Now keep moving. Too strong language too fast weighs your story down, keeps the reader from relating to it, and detracts from the satisfaction of when your characters finally end up together.

3. Let your characters’ relationship be built on friendship.

The other day, I got lunch with my best friend and her new girlfriend. A year or so ago, she’d gotten out of a really toxic relationship that she’d been in since I’d first known her.

I’d thought she was happy (because at the time, I didn’t have anything else to compare it to) but seeing her with her new girl was like seeing the proverbial sunrise for the first time. (Pardon the floral language. Even I’m not totally exempt from purple prose.)

We laughed, we made jokes, we all checked out the hot waitress together. Overall, it was just like spending time with two close friends -- just, y’know. They happened to be in a romantic relationship with each other. And that, let me tell you, makes all the difference in the world.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: all the sexual attraction in the world will not make up for the lack of a strong basis of mutual respect, affection, and camaraderie.

Sorry to burst your bubble, authors of the mainstream publishing world: even if they kiss in the rain till the cows come home, even if the music swells every time they make contact, even if it’s a love story for the ages, that means your characters actually have to be friends.

So ask yourself these questions:

Do your characters have any shared interests or hobbies?

Do they actively take interest in their partners’ hobbies?

Do they crack each other up, tell each other jokes? Exchange playful jibes that aren’t pointed or hurtful?

Do they do the above more than they fight and bicker?

Would both your characters feel comfortable with their partner seeing them at their most comfortable (e.g. stuffing their faces with Nutella and watching bad reality shows)?

If so, would they join in?

If one partner feels hurt, neglected, or insecure, will the other partner take notice and attempt to comfort and reassure them?

Can they confide in each other?

Do they share the same goals, desires, and core values?

If you answered ‘yes’ to most of these questions, congratulations: your characters’ romance is more akin to Gomez and Morticia than most YA pairings today. And believe me, that’s a good thing.

4. Make sure your characters are more or less equals.

She’s a ridiculously hot, intelligent, accomplished twenty-something. He’s a an out-of-shape manchild in his thirties who makes lots of fart jokes and probably has a neck-beard.

This pairing probably would raise quite a few eyebrows in real life, but it happens so much in movies and TV (particularly comedies) that no one even questions it. Do I really need to remind you that the entertainment industry is largely male dominated?

This doesn’t always equate to characters being equal in conventional attractiveness: movies such as Legally Blond and Hairspray, for example, both have adorable pairings featuring lovely plus-sized/chubby women and thinner, more conventionally attractive men. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil consisted of a satisfying romance between a chubby, kindhearted hillbilly and a thin, conventionally hot girl. Moreover, they don’t leave anything resembling the bad taste in my mouth that the aforementioned Manchild + Hot Girl trope does.

But your characters will need to be more-or-less equals in terms of positive attributes. Even if they differ significantly in conventional attractiveness or status, they’ll probably roughly even in out in terms of intelligence, good manners, kindness, conscientiousness, et cetera.

It’s also best to avoid blaring power imbalances when writing healthy romances. I’m inclined to avoid huge age differences (though there are instances where it can be healthy), and definitely avoid huge age differences where one of the characters is underage.

Basically, if your pairing looks like they could belong in a Woody Allen movie, no dice. (If you think I’m kidding, just look at his fifty-six-year-old self with a nineteen-year-old love interest in Husbands and Wives.)

Differences in wealth and status are also generally be okay, but be conscientious that they can easily become abusive if one person misuses their power (lookin’ at you, 50 Shades.)

Last, and certainly not least, your characters will almost definitely need to be equals in terms of three-dimensionality. No exceptions.

Which brings me to my final point:

5. Give your love interest purpose (outside of being a love interest.)

I’ve talked about this before, but why do you think there’s such a huge following for Kirk and Spock’s romance (besides that one episode where Spock gets super horny and the two of them role around in the sand for twenty minutes), when there are droves of female love interests for both?

Why are Dean and Castiel AO3′s most popular pairing (besides the recurring prevalence of romantic tropes throughout their narrative), when the following for their more canonically established relationships are practically nonexistent?

What about Holmes and Watson (besides the blaring case of queerbaiting in the BBC version, and the fact that Doyle’s Sherlock was rife with gay subtext), or Steve Rogers and Bucky and Barnes (besides the fact that the writers somehow find the possibility of making Steve a Nazi less offensive than having him love a man)?

Internalized misogyny and fetishization of MLM by straight women is sometimes a factor. But considering the popularity of these M/M pairings amongst queer women, I’m inclined to think its simply because these male main characters are simply the most interestingly written in their respective franchises.

It also works the other way: why do you think everyone hates Kara and Mon El’s romance so much? Because Kara is a wonderfully developed, benevolent character (surrounded with equally developed, benevolent characters who would work much better as love interests, I might add) and Mon El is a callous, entitled jerk who only wants to become a hero to woo his prospective girlfriend.

This is also why heterosexual pairings with equally well-developed characters have no problem at all finding followings. Just look at Han and Leia, Mulder and Scully, Booth and Bones, Monica and Chandler -- both characters hold roughly an equal amount of weight in the narrative, so we give a fuck what happens to both of them.

Healthy, well-balanced WLW romances with happy endings are difficult to find in media, but some of my favorite examples of ship-worthy pairings that fit this criteria are Korra and Asami from Legend of Korra, Willow and Kennedy from Buffy (even though I’ll never forgive them for what they did to Tara), Carol and Susan from Friends, and Alana and Margot from Hannibal.

And of course, there’s these lovely ladies from Sense 8.

Bottom line is, make sure both your characters are important; don’t follow the trend of meaningless, forced heterosexual romances in media in which one party could almost invariably be replaced with a sexy lamp or a dildo.

Make the love interest a hero in their own right, and the audience will root for them.

Best of luck, and happy writing! <3

#writing #writing tips #romantic subplots #romance #san junipero #black mirror #parks and recreation #andy and april #carol #destiel #dean winchester #castiel #supernatural #the addams family #gomez and morticia #sense8

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morethanjustmediocremusings · 4 years

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In the Details: A Deeper Look into Euphoria’s Prom Looks

Taylor Abouzeid

California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo

Created in a social climate marked with the upheaval of traditional standards and a call to action sung by today’s ready-to-riot young adults, Euphoria came into a world ridden with daunting social issues. Amidst the reigning chaos of the real world, Euphoria followed the debatably hyper-realistic lives of modern high schoolers. This HBO series was highly regarded for its diverse cast and variety of explored topics. Furthermore, throughout the length of the premiere season, Euphoria retained attention from the press with its highly colorful and expressive use of fashion. To fully understand the weight of these garments, one must first look to the concept creation, then to the habitat through which the ideas were fostered, and finally step into the light of the underlying messages behind layers of mesh shirts and mountains of gender ambiguous dressing. Euphoria used visual clothing cues in their final episode “And Salt the Earth Behind you” to shed light on each character’s fully developed significance and purpose within the show given its highly pertinent cultural context.

Euphoria has come to represent an entire generation. The struggles that the characters face are directly out of pages in our own diaries and journals. Hunter Schafer, who plays Jules in the show, praised the reality of it all saying, “It’s the most current representation of high school” (Nissen, 2019). The current climate of teen life is reflected without the Hollywood glamour that was once acceptable with shows such as 90210 and Gossip Girl. Gone are the days of unrealistic teenage clubbing and drawn-out heartbreak between a jock and a cheerleader. Instead, audiences want to see the poignancy of reality on their screens. In a society that values honesty and vulnerability, Euphoria holds a mirror to our generation’s unique experiences without sugar coating topics of necessary discussion; however, due to the deeply embedded nature of these signals, they could easily be overlooked. By taking a magnifying glass to the distinct looks of the finale, subtle messages can be brought to light and further the identification with its’ viewers. Kenneth Burke believed that rhetoric was aimed at creating identification with an audience rather than aimed at persuading an audience (Kolodziejski, 2019, Pentadic). Furthermore, due to the show’s success, it is easy to assume that many people have come to identify with its messages. It is important to analyze and understand the messages behind these looks because they are representative of an entirety of people, marching to a silent beat of radical self-worth.

Within Euphoria the very real stories of the characters hit home for many viewers. Levinson worked rigorously to diminish any potential glamorization of drug use in the show saying “somewhere around the age of 16, I resigned myself to the idea that drugs could kill me, and there was no reason to fight it,” (Chuba, 2019). He credits this deeply personal connection to the story for the shows unfiltered persona, creating high levels of identification with the viewership. Many viewers have also found his story relatable as one in five teenagers have abused prescription drugs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). According to Burke (1950) identification is defined as a rhetorical process that leads to persuasion. Within the space of the show, it is used to create a sense of common identity between Euphoria’s audience and the accurate portrayal of characters.

The show follows the lives of a group of teenagers navigating the ups and downs of the modern century. To give some background on the show’s main squad, Rue, the main character, is a recovering drug addict, with no intention to stay sober. Jules, a transgender-icon, has just moved from an ambiguous “big city” and is feeling bored with what this small town has to offer her. Kat, a closeted One Direction fangirl-turned sensational fanfiction author, recently had sex for the first time, it was also recorded and leaked to the whole student body. Maddy has been in an on-again off-again relationship with her abusive boyfriend Nate. Cassie is trying to keep her relationship with her college-age boyfriend alive and well. Nate, the typical quarterback character with internalized homophobia stemming from finding out his Dad is gay, is now secretly experimenting with his own sexuality. This wide range of individual character plots allows for a multitude of viewers to find identification within each of their stories.

It is, of course, important to note that the creation of this show was in some part influenced by HBO’s need to stay relevant in the competitive streaming market; I would also like to believe that despite this need for high demand programming, the actions of young adults everywhere sparked a flame in the creative community that further added to the show’s exigence. The current climate directly created a collective of educated and empowered young adults who are tired of being talked over, being told to sit down, or being shamed because “back in my day…” other people had it worse. Students these days are not participating in the same high school experiences as their parents, so in order to find a place to relate, many have turned to the Internet, and the many streaming platforms within it. The HBO-exclusive show, Euphoria, has held this identification role for many young students who have never before seen their identity correctly represented on such mainstream media as the giant outlet of HBO.

With the introduction of new streaming services occurring at radical rates, the need for relevancy remains at the top of many media corporation’s to-do lists. HBO is no different. HBO has been both celebrated and condemned for their raw portrayals of characters. Chen (2019) said, “The show is frighteningly hard to watch—it didn't temper my anxiety one bit all season—but its choice to skid easy definitions around difficult topics is what makes it an important cultural engine of our time.” Although ratings wavered in its early years during the mid to late 1970s, they have maintained steady progression for the last twenty years. In 2011 they were named the most successful network, winning nineteen Emmy Awards in one year alone (Aspden, 2011). The creation of Euphoria specifically came from a need of representation, a public desire to see real reflections of life. The hype for weekly premiers was continuous. The cast posted daily updates and many behind-the-scenes videos to keep the audience engaged. This constant contact between creatives and their fans also helped to maintain the very necessary quality of authenticity that surrounded the show. The season finale, otherwise dubbed “the prom episode,” was no different. Prom in its essence is a highly-gendered, often homophobic, and very public display of tradition, but despite this, for many it marks an anticipated rite of passage. In the prom episode of Euphoria, the queer, gender-ambiguous, and non-traditional characters reconcile this tension; prom became their runway. Dressed to the nines in creative, self-expressing garments, Euphoria’s characters hit the dancefloor with confidence. The episode showed how this generational event has become more accepting and fluid now, more than ever.

The choice to focus on the squad’s prom looks in the last episode allows for a greater opportunity to show character development and emphasize the pungently individual messages hidden in the coattails. Rue, the standout tomboy of the cast, has recently come to accept her budding relationship with her female-presenting best friend, Jules. For Rue’s prom look she wore the makings of a suit, slacks and a black coat, a manifestation of her struggle with feminine expression. But underneath the presumptuous outer shell she adorned her staple converse, one of, if not the only stable things in her life, and a maroon form-fitting, lingerie-inspired slip dress from the closet of the magnificent Jules. Jules stood out in the show as possibly the most comfortable with outwardly expressing her feelings, and her iconic prom look was no let down. A lilac and lavender two-piece crop top and wide-leg pants combo made waves in the sea of traditional prom garments. She also wrapped herself in the pièce de résistance of the night: a dark green, mesh, trench, with the symbol for transgender rights stitched onto the back with ornate black beading. Kat’s bondage and almost masochistic look reflected her growth into a strong woman, while Maddy stayed true to her values of loving yourself in a sexy black sheer halter and fitted skirt combo. Unexpectedly, Cassie was understated, but her more feminine look remained through the champagne gown’s flattering neckline. Nate stayed true to his toxic masculinity and rejected any inkling of creativity; he wore a suit.

In the past there has been a severe push back against “progressive” programming, especially those with highly explicit content. But it is also important to note that these subjects are often not foreign to the audiences participating with the artifact. Sam Levinson, the director, when asked if he was nervous about parental backlash regarding the shows content responded with, “… I feel like this is a debate that goes on constantly throughout time, where people go, ‘Parents are gonna be scared,’ and you go ‘Yeah.’ And young people will be like, ‘Yeah, that’s my life.’ I’m sure certain people will be freaked out by it and other people will relate to it” (Stack, 2019). There has been a very real struggle for liberation of the LGBTQIA+ community, to which Euphoria highlighted a homosexual relationship between its two main characters. Toxic masculinity has come to the forefront of scholarly conversation, to which Euphoria highlighted the mental and physical dangers that the suppression of emotion in boys can have on not only themselves but also the world around them. Toxic relationships have become hot topics in wellness ads, to which Euphoria showed just how serious and sometimes hidden, domestic abuse can be. An acceptance of sex workers is growing amongst younger generations, to which Euphoria explored the world of camming and subjects of porn in general. Trans bodies have come into public discourse, especially regarding the legality of their existence, to which Euphoria cast a trans actress as a lead role and used the platform to spread knowledge of the injustices many people face on a daily basis. The long running war on drugs continues, to which Euphoria used the story of a high school drug addict to bring communities together and create a safe space for all identities to be heard.

I have chosen the visual rhetoric approach to better examine how all elements of the character’s prom looks may have influenced each corresponding character’s final message. Visual rhetoric criticism is aimed at understanding the intersection between rhetoric and visual elements within an artifact (Kolodziejski, 2019, Visual). Albakry & Daimin (2014) state, “analysis of visual rhetoric considers how images work alone and collaborate with other elements to create an argument designed for [a specific] audience” (pp.29). Furthermore, I will be applying the deductive approach to this criticism, meaning I will be using the existing theories and concepts and applying them to elements of the visual artifact. I partly chose this approach because I stand firmly behind its assumptions: the visual is rhetorical, what is not shown can be just as important as what is shown. Lastly, how something is shown is as important as what is shown (Kolodziejski, 2019, Visual).

Within visual rhetoric lies the concept of the semiotic triangle, a figure that shows how an artifact’s referent, sign and reference are all related. Within that, there are three types of signs. Iconic signs are representative of what they point viewers to, such as a photo of an otter being an iconic sign for an actual otter. Indexical signs point to what they represent, like smoke indicating a fire. Lastly, symbolic signs reference an arbitrary relationship, such as the branded Swoosh being a symbol for Nike as a brand (Kolodziejski, 2019, Visual). Euphoria’s prom looks are all indexical signs, meaning they point to what they represent, without directly showcasing the underlying meaning. So, the general semiotic triangle for my artifact would have the referent as the actual look itself, the sign as the nod to what it is representing, and the reference would be the meaning behind it all. As the viewers of Euphoria engage with the show, they rely on their own life experiences to decode the symbols on screen. As articulated by Foss in 1994 “The study of visual imagery from a rhetorical perspective may make contributions beyond providing a richer and more comprehensive understanding of rhetorical processes. In some cases, such study may contribute to the formulation or reconciliation of aesthetic notions…” (pp 213). Through their comprehension of these symbols, the show’s underlying messages are able to speak more powerfully and allow for further resonation between the shows viewers and the characters they are able to identify with.

I have chosen visual rhetoric because it argues that everything shown and not shown has a significant purpose within the artifact. Due to the microscopic lens I have taken to the outfits chosen for the characters, this is most fitting. I have also chosen this method to better excavate the hidden messages of the main characters. Upon first glance I, like many, missed some major hints to character expression and development in the finale. But with the fine-toothed comb I took to these garments, I left no lapel untouched and no bead under-analyzed.

(Rue’s prom look).

For Rue, the exploration of expressing gender fluidity through her clothing choices was present throughout the entire season, but subtle. There was no direct mention of the matter until the season finale. While selecting a very feminine outfit for Rue to wear to prom, Jules expresses concern for possibly altering Rue’s gender presentation. I believe that by staying in the dress for prom, and not changing into something more fitting of her stylistic history, Rue was trying to validate her trust and relationship with Jules. In this scene, Rue had let Jules pick out her prom look and rather than opting for something similar to her previous fashion choices, Jules put her in a tight and sultry, lingerie-inspired, corseted, maroon dress. The color choice of maroon was not only fitting to the color pallet of the show, but was also distinctly similar to the color of Rue’s father’s sweatshirt, which she wears daily after he passes away. This choice I believe was unintentional from Jules, but subconsciously reminds the audience of Rue’s inability to move past that time in her life. Rue also adorned a traditional men’s suit pants and coat. This is the key part in her maintenance of gender fluidity and ambiguity within the outfit. The color choice was subtle and reflective of how natural this “tomboy” style has come to her self-expression. The choice of Converse was also only visibly present for a few moments on screen, but the shoes came to represent so much within Rue’s life. So much so in fact that the actress who played her character, Zendaya, made an Instagram post paying respect to the life they lived in the show with “I’m gonna have to get some new chucks for my personal life… I guess I’ll just have them on standby for season2. Til then Rue Rue” (Zendaya, 2019). Rue initially allowed Jules to change her gender presentation via the use of a frilly dress, but later came to regret the decision, as the dress became representational of their constricting relationship. This outfit represented the fluidity of expression and the intimacy that can be shared through clothing choice.

(Jules’s prom look).

Rue’s romantic counterpart, Jules, quickly became a stand-out character on the show due to her extravagant, stylistic choices within the first few episodes, and her makeup has inspired countless other artists’ renditions of the now iconic looks. For her prom look she wore a silky lilac crop top and similarly silky lavender high-waisted wide-leg pants. To top off the look she also adorned herself with a beautiful, almost floor-length, sheer mesh, forest green, trench piece. On the back of the sheer coat was a beaded symbol for the transgender community. The entire outfit was quite the statement, but I got the feeling that she was going for that “I’m not trying, but I tried really hard to look like I’m not trying” look. Due to the casual nature of a crop top and pant combo, the pieces seem haphazardly thrown together. However, the perfect complementary colors, and the identical silky fabrics make that lackadaisical approach almost impossible. I think it is also important to mention that the outfit as a whole read a little mermaid-y. To the untrained eye this might have gone completely unnoticed, but to someone with a recent history in Women and Gender studies, namely me, this reference was another direct tie to the trans community. Popularized by the television show Life With Jazz, mermaids have become an almost superhero-like figure for many people within the trans community, and now serve as a symbol of recognition. In an interview the star spoke on their significance, “Mermaids are just the most whimsical, mystical creatures of all time. A lot of transgender individuals are attracted to mermaids and I think it’s because they don’t have any genitals, just a beautiful tail” (Jennings, 2015). Jules continued to wave her pride flag high and exuded confidence. She held the message of being proud of whoever you are.

(Kat’s prom look).

Kat, a plus-size girl surrounded by a sample-size school, went through many changes this season. After her first-time having sex not only gets recorded, but also then is virally leaked throughout campus, Kat decided to reclaim control of her body. Kat had the edgier version of the “Pretty Woman” makeover. With an entire new wardrobe of bondage-inspired pieces, sexy black and red lingerie, latex, leather, and laces, she conquered not only her sexuality but also gained a whole new world of confidence as well. Throughout this journey, she also struggled with the duality of being a grade-A bad ass and still navigating soft and cute teen romance. For her prom look she wore all red, the color most symbolic for both power and romance. With a red leather corset on top and red silk midi skirt on the bottom, she exuded confidence as a woman in control of her own body. The black lace-up detailing that became a motif in many of her previous outfits also made a cameo in the prom episode running through both the top and the skirt. These specific choices show her character’s development of self-confidence. In the beginning, she was self-conscious and afraid of intimacy, but as the season progressed, the audience was able to see her blossoming into a woman in charge. She was able to reclaim her body after the sex-tape scandal and make a name for herself by camming on PornHub, and also by gaining enough appreciation for herself to see her love for Ethan. Kat struggled with coming into herself as a sexual woman and in her final look is able to show that you can be strong and confident and still express emotion and love.

(Maddy’s prom look).

Maddy, Maddy, Maddy. Where do I even start? Without a doubt Maddy was the most confident female character on the show, but when her boyfriend abused her at the annual carnival she began to break down. Although she was aware his actions were brutally wrong, she forgave him, like a story of Stockholm syndrome. Following his release back into school, they reappeared as a couple only to break up again in the following episode. Their relationship was undeniably toxic. At prom Maddy went with her group of girlfriends, surrounding herself with positivity and love. She wore a see-through black, crystal embedded, two-piece halter top and form-fitting skirt. She also wore a veil. Maddy shone bright on the dance floor and conveyed the message that relationships aren’t everything, and in the end all she needed was support from her friends, self-love, and some serious distance from her abusive ex-boyfriend, Nate. Maddy loves herself, but by ignoring her case of domestic violence she lost a part of herself. Luckily, in the finale, Maddy surrounds herself with good friends and shows that self-worth and self-love are important and still sexy.

(Cassie’s prom look).

Cassie’s prom look showed less of a character arc than the others, but her message remained just as pungent. On the day of prom, Cassie had gotten an abortion. The pregnancy was the unintended consequence of her boyfriend McKay. They came to the decision together, but Cassie made sure that the decision was ultimately her own. Needless to say, she was not dressed as her usual provocative self. She wore a soft pink satin gown, the most traditional of all the looks, and barely-there makeup, which according to the makeup artist was a distinctive choice given the earlier abortion. The makeup artist for the shoot took to Instagram to explain her look, “As much as I wanted to give Cassie a glittering euphoric winter formal makeup look, I didn’t feel like it would help tell her story in this moment. I wanted Cassie’s total absence of makeup here to signal to the audience that she’s reached the start of a new phase of her life…”(Davy, 2019). The neckline was still flattering but she remained quiet and pensive for the rest of the evening. In the same girl group as the others, Cassie took that day to surround herself with those who could support her without their knowledge of the previous event. Cassie’s prom look said that it is okay to not always be okay, and that expressing that is perfectly fine. This message can be gathered through her soft color pallet the contrasted the otherwise bright evening, the simplicity of the silhouette, and the unexpected lack of dark eyeshadow, a typical element of Cassie’s normal look.

(Nate’s prom look).

I intentionally saved the worst for last: Nate. Nate’s look was boring, and quite frankly fell flat. It would have made more sense for him not to go at all, or maybe to show up in hand cuffs as he did for Halloween. But whatever, he did go to prom, and he did wear a suit. Given the extravagance of the rest of the characters’ prom looks, there was an unofficial standard for all the characters to express themselves creatively in some way for the event. However, I believe that Nate’s blatant lack of creativity is his statement. For his whole life he has been molded to become a superstar athlete, and at no point was he given the opportunity to outwardly express himself. We can thank both toxic and hegemonic masculinity for this lack of expression, for in their essence both of these ideas encourage the repression of emotion in boys and men. His outfit shows that when not given the opportunity to find oneself beyond the expectations of others, or not being able to to explore one’s own creative capabilities a person could become a drone, in this case one with severe anger issues. The suit further shows his acceptance and assimilation into the norms and expectations for his character. Rather than expressing himself through stylistic choices, like many of the other characters, Nate’s feelings come out in destruction and violence. He serves as a precautionary tale, of what the dangers of toxic and hegemonic masculinity can have on young men: crushing self- hatred. For many, fashion can serve as a critical outlet for self-expression. Especially for Euphoria’s teenage viewership, style can feel like the only controllable element of their life while the lack of adolescent autonomy is at its height.

As both a thoroughly engaged audience member and fan of Euphoria, there is not much the creators could have changed about the prom looks to further appease me. Throughout the entirety of the season I found that I was able to relate to every individual character within the show, admittedly even Nate. I was able to see my own life tied into bits and pieces of every character’s individual story. Maddy and Rue stuck out as the characters with which I had the most identification with, and although their characters are almost direct opposites in the show, I felt comfort in being able to compare their stories to my own. However, I feel that it is also important to acknowledge the lack of identification some of my peers felt with Euphoria’s main squad. Some have never had experiences with “hard-core” drugs, struggled with gender representation, bee involved with sex tape scandals, or instances of domestic violence, dealt with the after effects of an abortion, or emotional repression. For many of these people who struggled to find identification with the main characters, the supporting roles served as their substitute. With characters as Lexi, McKay, Gia and Fez, many other identities were explored throughout the season, although in lesser detail. I believe that if these supporting characters had also been given equal screen time, an even wider range of audiences would have been able to engage and identify with Euphoria. By digging deeper into their stories, new plot lines could have been uncovered. Many teenagers struggle with eating disorders, which were left out of the show despite alarming statistics claiming that at least 30 million people suffer from eating disorders in the United States (ANAD, 2019). Nicotine has become a significant outbreak in American teenagers with the Center for Disease Control reporting that “5.6 million of today’s Americans younger than 18 will die early from a smoking-related illness” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). And topics of bullying were also left unexplored by the show despite its constant prevalence in teenage society. Studies have even gone to show that “Bullying was a factor in 2/3 of the 37 school shootings reviewed by the US Secret Service” (Stop Bulling Now Foundation, 2019). However, including all of these topics could have been destructive to the season as a whole, and overwhelming to audiences. Given the relevancy of these topics, they are explored elsewhere in outer outlets. Euphoria was a show intended for people who had rarely seen their identities presented on mainstream media of this scale before. So, despite the few missing teenage issues that are more commonly explored today, Euphoria was able to uniquely cover some groundbreaking material for a show of its size.

Euphoria’s characters all held distinct messages within the show. Through the use of visual clothing cues Euphoria was able to further the identification factor of these stories by visually signaling their significance. Created out of a need for representative media and birthed into a world of social unrest, Euphoria became a breakout show on HBO’s streaming platform and now has the power to unify an entire generation. In “And Salt the Earth Behind You” Rue, Jules, Kat, Maddy, Cassie, and Nate give their final send off to the show by highlighting their completed respective messages between satin finishes and starchy, pressed suits. As a result of the creative expression of the prom outfits in the finale, viewers are left with a lasting impression of self-identification closing off the season.

References

Albakry, N. S., & Daimin, G. (2014). The visual rhetoric in public awareness print advertising toward Malaysia perceptive sociolculture design. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 155, pp. 28-33.

ANAD. (2019). Eating disorder statistics. Retrieved from www.anad.org/education-and-awareness/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/.

Aspden, P. (2011, September 24). How HBO revolutionized television. Retrieved from www.slate.com/human-interest/2011/09/hbo-how-it-revolutionized-television.html

Burke, K. (1950). A rhetoric of motives. Berkley: University of California Press.

Cassie’s prom look [Digital image]. Retrieved from www.usa-grlk5lagedl.stackpathdns.com/production/usa/images/1565025651204007-66121653_654233518429076_5605336542765432610_n.jpg?w=1900&fit=crop&crop=faces&fm=pjpg&auto=compress.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2010, June 3). CDC survey finds that 1 in 5 U.S. high school students have abused prescription drugs. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2010/r100603.htm.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019). Youth and tobacco use. Retrieved from www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth_data/tobacco_use/index.htm.

Chen, E. (2019, June 6). In praise of euphoria, the perfect anti-binge TV show. Retrieved from www.wired.com/story/euphoria-anti-binge/.

Chuba, K. (2019, June 5). 'Euphoria' creator on authentic trans portrayals, mining "deeply personal" history to tackle teen drug abuse. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/euphoria-creator-mining-deeply-personal-history-tackle-teen-drug-abuse-1215844.

Davy, D. [@donni.davy]. (2019, August 17). Cassie’s clean slate, episode 8, euphoria [Instagram photo]. Retrevied from www.instagram.com/p/B1SOb1EJcve/?igshid=ork83uq4xhn.

Foss, S, K. (1994). A rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery. Communication Studies, 45, pp. 213-224.

Jennings, J. (2015, June 8). Jazz Jennings: the transgender teen and wannabe mermaid the internet needs (M. Ruiz, Interviewer). Cosmopolitan. Retrieved from www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a40068/jazz-jennings-internets-most-fascinating/.

Jules’s prom look [Digital image]. Retrieved from www.usa-grlk5lagedl.stackpathdns.com/production/usa/images/1565024720966459-66659243_159635475163665_1587604092859566839_n.jpg?w=1900&fit=crop&crop=faces&fm=pjpg&auto=compress.

Kat’s prom look [Digital image]. Retrieved from www.usa-grlk5lagedl.stackpathdns.com/production/usa/images/1565025241108497-67911105_2343940372514856_2058399465206680217_n.jpg?w=1900&fit=crop&crop=faces&fm=pjpg&auto=compress.

Kolodziejski, L. (2019, October 16). Pentadic criticism overview [PowerPoint Presentation]. Retrieved from handout sheet.

Kolodziejski, L. (2019, October 23). Visual rhetoric criticism overview [In-class handout]. Retrieved from handout sheet.

Maddy’s prom look [digital image]. Retrieved from www.usa-grlk5lagedl.stackpathdns.com/production/usa/images/1565024910235630-66213364_669264316881864_5463572260054969293_n.jpg?w=1900&fit=crop&crop=faces&fm=pjpg&auto=compress.

Nate’s prom look [Digital image]. Retrieved from www.data.whicdn.com/images/334716009/original.jpg

Nissen, D. (2019, June 6). 'Euphoria' creator sam levinson opens up about drug addiction at premiere. Retrieved October 20, 2019, from www.variety.com/2019/scene/news/euphoria-creator-sam-levinson-opens-up-drug-addiction-1203233881/.

Rue’s prom look [Digital image]. Retrieved from www.i.pinimg.com/originals/01/2f/1d/012f1d3dc6e81ba8e9d1ef7f4970d064.jpg

Stack, T. (2019, June 16). 'Euphoria' creator on why it's okay that some people are 'freaked out' by his controversial new show. Retrieved October 20, 2019, from www.ew.com/tv/2019/06/16/euphoria-creator-sam-levinson/.

Stop Bullying Now Foundation. (2019). School bullying affects us all. Retrieved from www.stopbullyingnowfoundation.org/main/.

Zendaya [@zendaya]. (2019, August 24). Thanks to season 1 [Instagram story post]. Retrieved from www.google.com/amo/s/amp.redit.com/r/euphoria/comments/cuyynl/from_zendayas_ig_story_who_knew_a_pair_of_chucks/.

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twilight-blossom · 7 years

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Things I love (and miss) about Hawaiʻi

Hello all. Since I don’t talk about this much (and have gained some new followers of late), a quick summary of why I’m posting this: I am kanaka maoli (native Hawaiʻian) on my mom’s side; we’re both hapa haole (part white - mainly German and English with some Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Portuguese, and French, among others). I grew up all over the place, but spent the largest portion of my childhood in Hawaiʻi after my mom decided she wanted to move back and reconnect with our family over there, and it is the place I most identify with as my childhood home. So for Aboriginal Day 2017, I wanted to write up a list of things I love and miss about Hawaiʻi, in no particular order.

The food. I’m a major foodie, and have a lot of memories and general nostalgia around certain foods I ate growing up. Some foods I am super happy to still have access to include: dried coconut, mango, and pineapple; arare and other senbei (japanese rice crackers); li hing mui (dried plum powder, which is used liberally as a spice for fruits, popcorn, arare, and other sweet and salty foods); dried seaweed, sweet potatoes, sweet bread, malasada, and sushi. But not many of these are actually Hawaiʻian foods, which are a lot harder to come by on the mainland. I love haupia (coconut custard). Cooked taro (a root vegetable that tastes a bit like sweet potato) is delicious. I even miss poi (yes, it’s an acquired taste, and I used to doctor the shit out of mine with sugar anyway). I also really miss shave ice, POG (passionfruit-orange-guava juice), bubble drinks (they have little squishy tapioca balls in them), and Bubba’s mochi ice cream (especially the azuki bean flavor). Seriously, if any of you know ways I can get ahold of any of these here on the mainland, please let me know.

The weather. The sky is always beautiful. I used to love watching the sun set the sky aflame in tones of orange, pink, and violet at dusk. There’s so many different kinds of rain I liked over there too, including one I have yet to experience elsewhere: the really soft, misty rain that sweeps down from the mountains like a gentle cloud. And I loved that the rain, no matter the type, could sometimes only last a few minutes (there was also that time we literally had forty days of nonstop rain... that’s makahiki season for ya). And of course, there are lots of rainbows (we’re called the Rainbow State for a reason).

The everyday sense of the divine. We kānaka maoli are a very ecologically-conscious people (ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono), and much of that stems from our reverence of nature. The gods and spirits are very much alive and well in Hawaiʻi. I felt them watching me whenever I walked the tree-lined route to the bus stop, or passed by Diamond Head on my way to church or KCC. I felt their presence in our stories. My favorite one was the story of Pele and Hiʻiaka, sister goddesses who could not be more different — or more similar, in their shared passion. I have never lived in a place where the gods felt more present than in Hawaiʻi. One of my major regrets is that I did not find out more about my family’s own stories, and in particular our ʻaumākua, our ancestral guardian spirits. I am working on getting in touch with some relatives and am hoping to change that soon, though.

The people. A lot of folks are pretty laid back (a lot use pakalolo, too, which is definitely a factor, lol). The idea of us being happy and smiley all the time is definitely a stereotype, but there is still a lot to be said for what has been called our “Aloha spirit.” I grew up around many people of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, and gender identities, and by and large, we all supported each other. I never knew how unusual this was when compared to most other modern Americans until after I moved to the mainland. We are the most racially integrated state in the nation, with over a fifth (21.4%) of the population being of mixed race, according to the 2000 Census. We’re also doing better at women’s financial and political equality than most in the nation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of discrimination are still an issue in Hawaii, but they are not as common as on the mainland, and there’s a fair bit of nuance to a lot of it having to do with colonization and Christianization.

The cultural history. Our recent history is, like those of many colonized peoples, rather dark and messy. I am reminded of that often; I actually share a birthday with the date of one of the darkest moments in our history. But there is also a great deal of goodness to be found when you go back further, looking to what our people were like before Western contact. As a people, we were largely polyamorous, free to date whom we pleased and have as many lovers as we wished. Being queer was a non-issue. Māhū people like me (transgender and nonbinary people) were accepted and honored for our unique perspective as a bridge between kāne and wāhine (men and women). Our economic system was specifically crafted to support everyone, so that very few died for want of food, shelter, or other basic needs. We were not perfect (when the Tahitians settled Hawaiʻi some 800-1000 years ago, they instigated a caste system, the lowest tier of which was composed of war captives and their descendants, and there are elements of the kapu system which were sexist). But there’s still a lot of good to our past, and many modern people striving to carry that goodness forward now and into the future.

Our acceptance of each other. The formal definition of kānaka maoli is anyone who can trace their ancestry back to the people living in the Hawaiʻian islands prior to Western contact. In some ways, this is due to the sad reality that there are very few pure-blooded kānaka maoli left. In other ways, though, it’s a mark of our acceptance of each other, our bond as an extended ʻohana. We are all descendants of Papa and Wākea, after all. I used to think it mattered how much of my racial make-up was kānaka maoli (a bit over 1/16th, as it turns out), and I worried that maybe it was too little, too diluted to be able to appropriately claim my identity as kānaka maoli. My mother is listed as Hawaiʻian on her birth certificate; I am not. I still worry about it at times. But every other kanaka maoli I’ve met and discussed my heritage with has accepted me (though not always without challenge, which is sometimes frustrating but understandable). I have come to understand that my worries largely stem from being raised with the European-originated concept of blood quantum, a concept imposed on the native peoples of the United States and which many (though not all) native groups reject as racist. This is, by and large, what we kānaka maoli have done, as well, for which I am immensely grateful.

There is so much more I could mention, including the language, our traditions of dance (hula kahiko), traditional garments like the pa‘u (skirt) and feathered cape, and so on. The ways I talk, like using the terms chickenskin (for goosebumps) and slippers (what mainlanders call flip-flops; they are not flip-flops, they are SLIPPERS). But I feel like this post has gotten long enough, and I need to get to bed.

A brief and unhappy note: I am also most likely of Chickasaw descent through my great-great-grandmother, though I cannot verify this (My grandma remembers talking with her and is certain that she was native, and I have been able to trace her back to a childhood in Chickasaw county, Oklahoma, where she was adopted by a white family, but there are no records of her birth parents). If this is true, that would mean she was a split feather, the name for victims of a disturbingly common phenomenon in which native children were taken from their birth families and adopted by white people, resulting in large numbers of disenfranchised natives; they and their descendants are now unable to benefit from tribal enrollment. This practice is a form of genocide (a willful attempt to destroy a culture or group of people), and is no less harmful than the many other genocidal activities the US used against natives. But nonetheless, we are still here.

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tortuga-aak · 6 years

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Ellen Page accuses Brett Ratner of 'blatantly homophobic and abusive behavior' on the set of 'X-Men: The Last Stand'

Sonia Recchia/Getty

Ellen Page wrote in a Facebook post on Friday that director Brett Ratner verbally abused her on the set of "X-Men: The Last Stand."

She also called working on Woody Allen's "To Rome With Love" was "the biggest regret of my career."

Actress Ellen Page, in a scathing, extended Facebook post on Friday, says director Brett Ratner outed her on the set of "X Men: The Last Stand," and verbally abused her. She also says working for director Woody Allen (2012’s "To Rome With Love") is “the biggest regret of my career.”

Elsewhere in the post, she describes being harassed as a 16-year-old actress, and condemns anyone complicit in the protection of Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein.

Ratner was accused in an Los Angeles Times story earlier this month of sexual harassment or misconduct by six women. The Times reporter has since said that numerous other women have contacted him with similar claims. Ratner has denied the allegations.

After Page’s post, actress Anna Paquin tweeted that she witnessed Ratner’s comment. “I stand with you,” Paquin wrote.

Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/929057776650698752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw I was there when that comment was made. I stand with you .@EllenPage https://t.co/DEIvKDXeELTweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/929054163488477184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Ellen Page is a badass. https://t.co/BHmF442C7L

Here is her entire post (but it’s worth checking it out on Facebook for the conversation in comments, which include director James Gunn writing a simple “Thank you, friend”):

“'You should f--k her to make her realize she’s gay.' He said this about me during a cast and crew 'meet and greet' before we began filming, X Men: The Last Stand. I was eighteen years old. He looked at a woman standing next to me, ten years my senior, pointed to me and said: 'You should f--k her to make her realize she’s gay.' He was the film’s director, Brett Ratner.

I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened. I looked down at my feet, didn’t say a word and watched as no one else did either. This man, who had cast me in the film, started our months of filming at a work event with this horrific, unchallenged plea. He 'outed' me with no regard for my well-being, an act we all recognize as homophobic. I proceeded to watch him on set say degrading things to women. I remember a woman walking by the monitor as he made a comment about her 'flappy pussy.'

We are all entitled to come into an awareness of our sexual orientation privately and on our own terms. I was young and although already a working actor for so long I had in many ways been insulated, growing up on film sets instead of surrounded by my peers. This public, aggressive outing left me with long standing feelings of shame, one of the most destructive results of homophobia. Making someone feel ashamed of who they are is a cruel manipulation, designed to oppress and repress. I was robbed of more than autonomy over my ability to define myself. Ratner’s comment replayed in my mind many times over the years as I encountered homophobia and coped with feelings of reluctance and uncertainty about the industry and my future in it. The difference is that I can now assert myself and use my voice to to fight back against the insidious queer and transphobic attitude in Hollywood and beyond. Hopefully having the position I have, I can help people who may be struggling to be accepted and allowed to be who they are –to thrive. Vulnerable young people without my advantages are so often diminished and made to feel they have no options for living the life they were meant to joyously lead.

I got into an altercation with Brett at a certain point. He was pressuring me, in front of many people, to don a t-shirt with 'Team Ratner' on it. I said no and he insisted. I responded, 'I am not on your team.' Later in the day, producers of the film came to my trailer to say that I 'couldn’t talk like that to him.' I was being reprimanded, yet he was not being punished nor fired for the blatantly homophobic and abusive behavior we all witnessed. I was an actor that no one knew. I was eighteen and had no tools to know how to handle the situation.

I have been a professional actor since the age of ten. I’ve had the good fortune to work with many honorable and respectful collaborators both behind and in front of the camera. But the behavior I’m describing is ubiquitous. They (abusers), want you to feel small, to make you insecure, to make you feel like you are indebted to them, or that your actions are to blame for their unwelcome advances.

When I was sixteen a director took me to dinner (a professional obligation and a very common one). He fondled my leg under the table and said, 'You have to make the move, I can’t.' I did not make the move and I was fortunate to get away from that situation. It was a painful realization: my safety was not guaranteed at work. An adult authority figure for whom I worked intended to exploit me, physically. I was sexually assaulted by a grip months later. I was asked by a director to sleep with a man in his late twenties and to tell them about it. I did not. This is just what happened during my sixteenth year, a teenager in the entertainment industry.

Look at the history of what’s happened to minors who’ve described sexual abuse in Hollywood. Some of them are no longer with us, lost to substance abuse and suicide. Their victimizers? Still working. Protected even as I write this. You know who they are; they’ve been discussed behind closed doors as often as Weinstein was. If I, a person with significant privilege, remain reluctant and at such risk simply by saying a person’s name, what are the options for those who do not have what I have?

Let’s remember the epidemic of violence against women in our society disproportionately affects low income women, particularly women of color, trans and queer women and indigenous women, who are silenced by their economic circumstances and profound mistrust of a justice system that acquits the guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence and continues to oppress people of color. I have the means to hire security if I feel threatened. I have the wealth and insurance to receive mental health care. I have the privilege of having a platform that enables me to write this and have it published, while the most marginalized do not have access to such resources. The reality is, women of color, trans and queer and indigenous women have been leading this fight for decades (forever actually). Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Winona LaDuke, Miss Major, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, to name a few. Misty Upham fought tirelessly to end violence against indigenous women, domestic workers and undocumented women. Misty was found dead at the bottom of a cliff three years ago. Her father, Charles Upham, just made a Facebook post saying she was raped at a party by a Miramax executive. The most marginalized have been left behind. As a cis, white lesbian, I have benefited and have the privileges I have, because of these extraordinary and courageous individuals who have led the way and risked their lives while doing so. White supremacy continues to silence people of color, while I have the rights I have because of these leaders. They are who we should be listening to and learning from.

These abusers make us feel powerless and overwhelmed by their empire. Let’s not forget the sitting Supreme Court justice and President of the United States. One accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, whose testimony was discredited. The other proudly describing his own pattern of assault to an entertainment reporter. How many men in the media – titans of industry – need to be exposed for us to understand the gravity of the situation and to demand the fundamental safety and respect that is our right?

Bill Cosby was known to be predatory. The crimes were his, but many were complicit. Many more chose to look the other way. Harvey was known to be predatory. The crimes were his, but many were complicit. Many more chose to look the other way. We continue to celebrate filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was convicted of drugging and anally raping a young girl and who fled sentencing. A fugitive from justice. I’ve heard the industry decry Weinstein’s behavior and vow to affect meaningful change. But let’s be truthful: the list is long and still protected by the status quo. We have work to do. We cannot look the other way.

I did a Woody Allen movie and it is the biggest regret of my career. I am ashamed I did this. I had yet to find my voice and was not who I am now and felt pressured, because “of course you have to say yes to this Woody Allen film.” Ultimately, however, it is my choice what films I decide to do and I made the wrong choice. I made an awful mistake.

I want to see these men have to face what they have done. I want them to not have power anymore. I want them to sit and think about who they are without their lawyers, their millions, their fancy cars, houses upon houses, their 'playboy' status and swagger.

What I want the most, is for this to result in healing for the victims. For Hollywood to wake up and start taking some responsibility for how we all have played a role in this. I want us to reflect on this endemic issue and how this power dynamic of abuse leads to an enormous amount of suffering. Violence against women is an epidemic in this country and around the world. How is this cascade of immorality and injustice shaping our society? One of the greatest risks to a pregnant woman’s health in the United States is murder. Trans women of color in this country have a life expectancy of thirty-five. Why are we not addressing this as a society? We must remember the consequences of such actions. Mental health issues, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, to name a few.

What are we afraid to say and why can’t we say it? Women, particularly the most marginalized, are silenced, while powerful abusers can scream as loudly as they want, lie as much as they want and continue to profit through it all.

This is a long awaited reckoning. It must be. It’s sad that 'codes of conduct' have to be enforced to ensure we experience fundamental human decency and respect. Inclusion and representation are the answer. We’ve learned that the status quo perpetuates unfair, victimizing behavior to protect and perpetuate itself. Don’t allow this behavior to be normalized. Don’t compare wrongs or criminal acts by their degrees of severity. Don’t allow yourselves to be numb to the voices of victims coming forward. Don’t stop demanding our civil rights. I am grateful to anyone and everyone who speaks out against abuse and trauma they have suffered. You are breaking the silence. You are revolution."

NOW WATCH: A legal loophole prevents most workplace sexual-harassment cases from seeing the light of day — here's how to close it

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