Editor’s Note: Hey friends! I’m pleased to bring you our new feature, Bookshelf. Each month we’ll hear from Acro Collective creators on what they’re reading. For November, our creators delve into a diverse mix of texts. As we all head off into holiday season, remember to set aside some time for yourself—perhaps with one of these good reads? Continue reading “Acro Collective Bookshelf : November”
I’ve always loved dancing of any kind, but industrial and electronic dance music have a special place in my heart. It begs for chunky-soled black boots and heavy eyeliner, vinyl and hardware. When the right song comes on at the right dive bar or nightclub, I find my way from the lounge to the dance floor, walking tall and looking as aloof as possible, imagining I am the hero of a cyberpunk novel. Nostalgic for the clubbing years of my past, and hopeful that I will have more clubbing years in my future, I present the goth EDM club mix of my teenage dreams. Continue reading “Big Sound Saturdays: Lady Cyborgs (Guest Post!)”
Just in time for back-to-school, three writers at ACRO who are involved in high school or college instruction unpack the rhetoric of the “trigger warning”.
Trigger warnings began as a way to tag texts that may provoke a reader’s PTSD, but they have become widely used in tagging texts that contain content that ranges from offensive to traumatic. What began in social justice forums in the blog-sphere has made its way into discourse about the academy at large, leading to a call for the re-examination of the pedagogical value of certain canonical texts, the role of the professor and student in a shifting higher-education system, and the ethics of certain kinds of representation.
Just in time for back-to-school, three writers at ACRO who are involved in high school or college instruction unpack the rhetoric of the “trigger warning”.
Trigger warnings began as a way to tag texts that may provoke a reader’s PTSD, but they have become widely used in tagging texts that contain content that ranges from offensive to traumatic. What began in social justice forums in the blog-sphere has made its way into discourse about the academy at large, leading to a call for the re-examination of the pedagogical value of certain canonical texts, the role of the professor and student in a shifting higher-education system, and the ethics of certain kinds of representation. Continue reading “Trigger Warnings: A Discussion”
This is an ode to my first summer love. The one that made me realize that my imagination made me powerful. It taught me that there were whole worlds rippling underneath the surface of my everyday life, that creativity, bravery, and love for others were the highest of all virtues. When school let out for the summer, it became my constant companion and I visited its house on Library Ave. several times a week. It was during these sweet summers that I developed my love of narrative and imaginative worlds that has informed every career-related decision I’ve ever made. With great pleasure I offer this post, an ode to the Fantasy Novel, to share and honor all the lessons it’s taught me about love and the real world.
This is an ode to my first summer love. The one that made me realize that my imagination made me powerful. It taught me that there were whole worlds rippling underneath the surface of my everyday life, that creativity, bravery, and love for others were the highest of all virtues. When school let out for the summer, it became my constant companion and I visited its house on Library Ave. several times a week. It was during these sweet summers that I developed my love of narrative and imaginative worlds that has informed every career-related decision I’ve ever made. With great pleasure I offer this post, an ode to the Fantasy Novel, to share and honor all the lessons it’s taught me about love and the real world.
Love is always sacred and profane, human and divine, real and illusionary: the best love is often tinged with the pain of impossibility. Fantasy shows us the sweeping cosmic romance and the bounded, earthly erotic, the everlasting friendship sealed with sacrifice. But, let’s not forget the most important lesson that fantasy teaches us about love: it’s freaking weird.
Rhinegold by Stephen Grundy:
Love is apparently very hard to distinguish from lust and it can definitely happen on first sight. This whole distinguishing process is made more difficult when the object of your affection is an all-powerful god who walks the earth in human form, planting his seed in the wombs of strong women in the hope that they will raise a hero of epic proportions (physically and metaphorically). Also, sometimes you love yourself and the idea of continuing your genealogical line so much that you accidently/kind of knowingly have sex with your twin sister. Though while this is usually grounds for a plague on your houses, that is not always the case.
It’s clear that this book is also a labor of love, as Grundy (who studied English and German philology) produced a careful retelling that is part epic, part sexy romance novel. It’s got the best of the fantasy genre: dragons, rituals, heroes, sex, dwarves, failed marriage plots, witches, shaman, wolves, war, gods, religious tension, murder, and most importantly, mead. For me, this book will always be the perfect embodiment of the fantastic, the epic, and the shamelessly erotic.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern:
“Place me like a seal over your heart, for love is as strong as death.” Forever and ever amen.
When I think of this book, my mind conjures images of textures, smoothly rippling silk, plushy velvet, pebbly mounds of popcorn, and smells: caramel, cider, smokey late-autumn bonfires. This book has served as boredom buster, fantastic escape, and sartorial inspiration.
I have my husband’s ex-girlfriend to thank for this contribution to my list of books about love–she was working at a bookstore with this gem first hit the shelves. Morgenstern’s playfully surrealistic novel traces the story of two young and gifted magicians who are competitors in an ancient game using the travelling Night Circus as the arena for their battles of imagination. Set in an ahistorical Victorian world, it’s everything I want in a romance: an intricate story of larger-than-life proportions supported by a cast of unusual, endearing characters who make me wish that I could be part of the circus.
The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind
Love is never simple and sometimes your biologically or magically induced physical body is not compatible with the body of your one, true love–but this can often be overcome especially if you are an exceptional man who is determined to go until the ends of space and time in order to conquer all obstacles. Also, you can love peasants, too and because you love them, you want them to become better than what they are and so you apparently decide the best way to do this is by quietly invoking the teachings of Ayn Rand.
Confession: The only reason I read these books is because I became obsessed with their TV series incarnation, Legend of the Seeker, my first year in college and I couldn’t wait for the second season to come out on DVD. The novel traces the adventures of Richard Cypher and Kahlan Amnel as they fight to restore balance and order in their universe (often with help from some badass dominatrices!)
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski:
Sometimes love is messy and convoluted and growing together sometimes means growing apart. But sometimes love can be transcendent and bodies moving together can speak in “two dark languages” that “rarely survive. As quickly as they’re invented , they die, unable to penetrate much, explore anything or even connect. Terribly beautiful but more often than not inadequate.”
Love is convoluted.
A long list of people recommended this book to me, but the most convincing pitch was from one of my students who told me that she thought it would really relate to our class’s discussion of Freud’s essay on the uncanny (the term “unheimlich” is featured in the novel). House of Leaves is a triplicate narrative that is, most simply, about a house that’s curiously bigger on the inside than it appears and/or measures on the outside. In many ways, the book resists traditional summary by its labyrinthine, multi-genre nature—there are many ways to read the novel, many of them decidedly non-linear (kind of like love, right?).
Adult Fairy Tale Anthologies: Black Swan, White Raven; Snow White, Blood Red, (both edited by Datlow/Windling) and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, etc.
Sometimes love can be really fucked up, but there gets to be a point where love is so fucked up that it’s actually not love anymore. Also, Stockholm syndrome is different from love, although they look suspiciously similar. But lust can totally lead to love. Sacrifice and violence are often intertwined with love and lust, and if someone goes through massive amounts of bodily harm for you, then they probably love you. Anyone who says they are killing you because they love you doesn’t actually love you and you should probably kill them before they kill you. Ogres are actually viable sexual partners. Also, stepmothers never love you, no matter what.
Tithe by Holly Black
Sometimes love can be relatively predictable: an exceptional girl who grows bored of her lame-ish friends meets a mysterious man with a dark secret. She tricks the mysterious man into maintaining a contact with her, thinking she can manipulate him with her exceptionality like she does all the other men in her life. But the exceptional girl quickly finds out that out she may be in over her head as she is thrown into a world that she never knew existed.
The greatest and most enduring pleasure of reading Tithe was the introduction of a fantasy-world aesthetic that still resonates with me: a kind of “Alice in Urbanland” amalgamation of a mystic faerie world with the lives of ordinary people living in rather ordinary towns
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Because sometimes we all get by with a little help from our friends (especially when our friends are powerful wizards, able to command armies of dead warriors to fight on your behalf, or remember to bring spices in case you find taters on your journey to Mordor).
Tyler is a lot of things: brilliant set designer and master carpenter, comrade-in-arms in various D&D campaigns, athlete and mentor-coach-athlete for the Special Olympics, dedicated employee and fiercely loyal friend. But last weekend, we sat down to talk specifically about allyship, his journey as a transman, and his role as an outspoken advocate for LGBTQA people everywhere.
Among the things to admire about Tyler is his iron-clad belief that his openness about his experience as a transman will make future transgender people’s lives a little easier. Two noble beliefs lie at the root of his advocacy strategies: 1) that when given the chance through education and dialogue, people are capable of being kind to and accepting of another and 2) that his willingness to discuss parts of his life outside of the realm of polite conversation will have real, tangible, positive consequences in the world. Tyler carefully considers the ethical dimensions of his decisions about his “outness” as he debates whether or not it’s “right” for him to stealth when he knows that his ability to pass as a man makes him less visible, which he recognizes is an option many transgender people, especially transwomen, don’t have.
Our conversation spanned a variety of topics but continually came back to the central theme of education and communication as ways, not to erase difference, but to render it at once more visible and more celebrated on all levels.
Tyler is a lot of things: brilliant set designer and master carpenter, comrade-in-arms in various D&D campaigns, athlete and mentor-coach-athlete for the Special Olympics, dedicated employee and fiercely loyal friend. But last weekend, we sat down to talk specifically about allyship, his journey as a transman, and his role as an outspoken advocate for LGBTQA people everywhere.
Among the things to admire about Tyler is his iron-clad belief that his openness about his experience as a transman will make future transgender people’s lives a little easier. Two noble beliefs lie at the root of his advocacy strategies: 1) that when given the chance through education and dialogue, people are capable of being kind to and accepting of another and 2) that his willingness to discuss parts of his life outside of the realm of polite conversation will have real, tangible, positive consequences in the world. Tyler carefully considers the ethical dimensions of his decisions about his “outness” as he debates whether or not it’s “right” for him to stealth when he knows that his ability to pass as a man makes him less visible, which he recognizes is an option many transgender people, especially transwomen, don’t have.
Our conversation spanned a variety of topics but continually came back to the central theme of education and communication as ways, not to erase difference, but to render it at once more visible and more celebrated on all levels.
On ally-ship and appropriate questions:
KS: So let’s cut to the chase: what’s an ally to you?
TR: I think for me allyship is about not judging and encouraging others not to judge. You don’t have to agree, you don’t have to have been there, just live and let live.
KS: Recently Kurt [my husband] read an article slamming Amy Schumer for an apparently insensitive interview with a transwoman. One summary cited her asking about physical anatomy which the author considered a rude question. But, as you know, cis people have questions about trans people that are not politically correct. Do you think there is any space for those questions in conversation?
TR: I hadn’t heard of that! Well, I would say that if you’re doing an interview with Amy Schumer you should probably know what you’re getting into [i.e., she’d probably ask overly personal questions of anyone]. I just wish that as a society we were more transparent to differences in general [and that it was okay] to ask about cultures, preferences, and misunderstandings without the perception of being racist and sexist. Like, I wish I could walk up to a Muslim and be like “So, Ramadan. Can you explain your holiday a little bit?” without it seeming like a rude question. Being afraid of offending someone and being easily offended closes the door to conversations. Openness leads to being accepted. [Tyler’s Note: After having watched the interview, I think that Schumer does show some of the kind of blind stumbling that a lot of cis people feel when trying to relate to trans people. What it comes down to however, is again, that need to educate. Bailey does just that a number of times. What bothers me more is the author’s problem with the way Bailey is presented, but nothing is mentioned about portrayal of transmen in similar situations. Take this January 2015 interview of Buck Angel, for example. He was asked similar “inappropriate” questions… how does he pee, about his sex life, sexual orientation. Where’s the frustration? Is it because transmen can choose to stealth much easier than transwomen? Is the assumption that all trans people are searching for invisibility or assimilation? Is it because it’s not offensive to ask men about their genitalia? They’re the questions that everyone want to know the answers to, and we’re only doing ourselves favors by being willing to talk.]
KS: How about questions surrounding a transgender person’s past? Off-limits?
TR: So that’s a really personal thing that’s different for every transperson. I will be able to “stealth”, which eventually hides my past [living as a woman]. But you have the opportunity to talk about your past [which can then open up more important conversations]. We can stealth if we want to, but that’s a decision. A lot of trans people don’t like talking about it…what they looked like, their birth name. It can trigger a lot of dysphoria. Simply put, it can make them feel really uncomfortable in their own skin again.
On gyms, bathrooms, and stealthing.
KS: What is “stealthing?”
TR: Stealthing is what some people call passing, but to take it one step further, it’s also the idea of not being out about being trans. Not necessarily closeted, but about not telling people.
KS: Are there places you want to do that more than others?
TR: The gym. I almost blew that the other day by dropping my ID on the floor. But I also recognize we live in a really liberal area and so it would probably be okay. But there was a transgender 17 year old killed in Alabama last week. Florida is considering legislation that makes it illegal to use bathrooms other than the one that corresponds with your birth-assigned gender.
KS: But how do they actually enforce that without violating your privacy?
TR: The short answer is they can’t. I guess they could check your ID, but that won’t even work in all cases…my ID will reflect my new name and gender in a week. But it often constitutes illegal search and seizure like when Arizona was stopping anyone who looked hispanic to ask for papers. That begs the question….what does “transgender” look like? Being in a bathroom is not a crime until you start to do something creepy. You shouldn’t be able to legislate who can and cannot use a bathroom based on genitalia. On any given Saturday, I’m more likely to see naked coeds running down this street [we’re sitting at one of our old undergrad haunts] than I am in a men’s bathroom or locker room .
KS: Yeah, for some reason we seem to think bathrooms are sexualized spaces.
TR: Yeah, just like breastfeeding a baby is not a sexual act…breastfeeding a 30 year old man, different story. People just want to use the bathroom—not ogle other people.
KS: Though, didn’t you say you got hit on at the gym the other week?
TR: More gay guys hit on me now. This one guy was doing bicep curls in the mirror while looking intensely at me [Tyler demonstrates this amusingly]. I think gay men are the all-knowers of the male body. They both have a male body and are attracted to a male body, so if I can pass for them, I’m doing well.
MJ: Does being hit on make you feeling weird?
TR: I milk it.
~~~
On supporting a person as they begin their transition:
KS: So starting from the beginning of the process…
TR: Yes, generally speaking, discussing [a person’s] reasons for transitioning are conversations to be held with close friends and therapists—it’s not an ally’s job. [The other thing to consider] is that if a transperson is coming out to you, it may be sudden for you, but it’s not sudden to them. I remember talking to you for the first time that time we were driving to [one of our college friend’s] house and almost died in the storm.
KS: Yeah, and that was what, [does a bunch of math revolving around which one of our friends has lived in which city for how long] a good two years before you started transitioning?
TR: Yeah, people do not throw themselves out against social norms willy-nilly. For example, for my dad [my transition] seems really sudden, but it’s actually not.
KS: Do you think it’s weird that society kind of expects you to “come out” even though it’s really no one’s business?
TR: Society wants to know when you’re “normal,” and right now cis-hetero behavior is the norm and they want to know when and why you’re doing other things. But I didn’t officially come out everywhere, like work for example. I told a manager and a few close coworkers, but everyone still “knows” (and is remarkably supportive). People will surprise you sometimes. I’m just like “I’m going to talk about my fiance like you talk about yours and the gender doesn’t matter”.
KS: Does coming out “officially” offer you anything [advantages]?
TR: My biggest hang up about it is that people feel like it’s their business [when it’s definitely not]. But I also know that it’s a chance to explain and open up a conversation which will hopefully help future generations avoid the struggles I go through. Also, for trans people, at least at the beginning of the process, it’s how you get called by your chosen name and pronouns. Now I can introduce myself to someone as Tyler and they never bat an eye, but I had to come out so that people knew I wanted to be called Tyler and he.
KS: Like, maybe someday there will be a point where trans people don’t have to come out?
TR: Yeah someday… but we can’t even get racism right [i.e. there’s still institutionalized racism]. There will always be somebody who will be a dick about it.
KS: Ugggh, so true.
~~~
Things allies can do to support transgender people:
KS: Okay, so what’s one really important thing that trans allies can do to support transgender people?
TR: With trans people allies need to be good about sticking to pronouns, to try to reinforce and be consistent. At the Special Olympics [Tyler and his fiancee are both volunteers], all of our team had a lot of issues with pronouns (probably also related to their own cognitive issues, to be fair.) Our regional team coordinator told the team (who had known me pre-transition) about what to call me and which pronouns to use. One of our players responded “So she’s transgender, so what?” and then did not get names or pronouns right the entire season [laughs]. Yeah, they messed up pronouns and messed up names—but they were really trying, and [regional coordinator and Tyler’s fiancee] were really consistent to try to reinforce it. But my players were higher functioning so they had some fear that I was going to get mad if they messed up my name. Melissa [Tyler’s fiancee] assured them that, No I would not be mad about that.
KS: What should you do if you don’t know about someone’s pronouns?
TR: Ask! What are your preferred pronouns? One of the reasons I chose a really non-neutral name like Tyler when I could have been Chris is because I don’t want there to be the potential for ambiguity. Some people do. Also, the kind of things people will do when your name doesn’t match your voice [Tyler works at a place that requires him to answer the phone using his legal name which is in process of being changed, so luckily this is a temporary issue!] I answer [in my now deep voice] Christina and people say back Kevin, Tristan, Ricky, “you mean Christian,” or sometimes just “bud.” There’s one guy who will treat me completely differently when I answer and he catches that my name is Christina—he’s a lot more formal and his pleasantries are different. But if he doesn’t catch my name he just talks to me about sports and guy stuff and is less formal. And he wishes me happy father’s day. [A guy walks by with a fantastically well groomed beard]. Wait, I want my beard to look like that guy’s beard. Classy beard.
KS: That’s a great beard. [discussion of Tyler’s impending beard, transitioning into a conversation of Halloween costumes for this year].
~~~
KS: What’s one issue that affects the trans community that cis people may not consider?
TR: [immediately] Healthcare. If you [indicating K.S.] bust your femoral artery, you’re probably going to expect to drop trou when you go to the doctor’s. Everyone in the operating room will cut off your clothes, expecting a vagina, and then seeing a vagina continue on with care. But for transpeople, [there’s a fear] that the doctor will be concerned about what’s between your legs [and whether or not it matches the expectation] rather than your femoral artery bleeding out. Like, I know of someone who identifies outside of the binary who had heart attack-like symptoms but delayed seeking care because they were worried about how they would be treated in the hospital [they were treated well]. Someone else I know who prefers male pronouns and is on the male end of androgynous went to the hospital and had no problems whatsoever after discussing his preferred name and pronouns.
KS: But stories about positive health care experiences aren’t the ones that are coming out in the trans community?
TR: No, people are just hearing about being denied care. Like, as a transgender person, or as a homosexual, or even as Puerto Rican, I understand that I can be denied service at certain places. But then I can choose not to buy the goods and services of those places and hopefully all of my friends will also refuse to go to those places. Those business have the right to not cater my wedding, but I have the right to lambast them. Medical professionals should not have the right to deny me care under their oath, and most understand that. I worry a little that we’re telling businesses that they can’t refuse our business through legislation.
KS: Because if we can legislate “morality” in one direction, we could also legislate it in another direction?
TR: Let’s be realistic: at some point I need to go back to my orthopedist. I haven’t been to him since I started testosterone, and he seems like a cool guy, but it is a concern that he won’t treat you again because of your change. We are lucky enough to live in a liberal area and I feel like if I had a medical emergency in Alabama, Texas….I’d probably venture somewhere above the mason-dixon [line] to get care because of concerns about quality.
The ethics of visibility (or how transgender people can be their own allies):
KS: You’ve told me that you’ve written about Caitlyn Jenner… [see Tyler’s post here]
TR: Caitlyn has done nothing to help other trans people. She was like “This is my Vanity Fair Cover. Deuces.” Aydian Dowling could have gone totally stealth and no one would have to know, but look what he’s done to stand up, draw us some positive attention and try to get things done for us.
KS: So do you think that celebrities who are transgender people have an ethical obligation to be advocates for the trans community?
TR: Caitlin has an ethical obligation to be aware of the way that her image affects other people. By putting themselves out there as celebrities, they accept a social responsibility. By putting herself out there, she’s got a social obligation not to make the rest of the community look worse. She makes it seem like [being transgender] is all about the attention and she has not addressed any [issue affecting the trans community] since her coming out. She makes it seem like it’s all about the attention: “hey everybody look at me,” [perpetuating the myth] that we all just want to be looked at. Also, she perpetuates an image of a transwoman that’s stealth, whereas transwomen have a lot more of a problem passing.
KS: So part of the problem is that she has not addressed the fact that her privilege, like her ability to get surgery to “feminize” her face is what allows her to stealth?
TR: And then it’s like “I guess if transwomen look like that it’s okay.”
KS: And the media just runs with that. Off topic, but apparently Rachel Dolezal came out as bisexual—which is fine—but it doesn’t excuse her from wearing tanning-salon blackface.
TR: What’s really interesting about that case is that people think about that in the same terms as trans people. If people can identify as a different gender than what they were born with, then people can identify with a different race than what they were born with. But to some extent, the LGBTQA and ally community has kind of brought that on itself by also refusing to recognize nuance and difference when they say things like “50 years ago it was illegal for a black man to marry a white man” as an argument for gay marriage. [Dolezal’s situation] raises a lot of interesting questions about feeling “what isn’t right.” I feel like I can’t say that she is wrong to feel like that [i.e. that she is actually black], but I can see where a lot of people are upset about that. We need to look as society at how we treat people different than us, instead of trying to say who can or cannot be different. Because, “Don’t shoot I identify white” isn’t going to work.
~~~
TR: I haven’t made a decision whether or not I want to be out for the rest of my life or eventually go completely stealth. I will be more privileged and less visible [as a transman] as I continue to transition.
KS: Have you noticed any differences in the way you are treated yet?
TR: I’m gaining white male privilege: People stop talking when I talk, expect me to pick up checks, hold doors. I’m trying really hard to not take advantage of this, especially because many transgender people, especially transwomen who tend to be more visible experience the opposite, a denial of privileges once had.
KS: Oh my gosh, you can now be accused of mansplaining!
TR: What’s mansplaining?
KS: Remember that time when [name omitted] corrected me about my views on high heels?
TR: Oh yeah. As a transguy I have experiences with women things. But if I were to be a stealth transguy—[my opinions/advice] will still be my experience, but it will come off to some people as if I were mansplaining.
~~~
TR: What it boils down to is…stop judging. Stop judging transpeople, or feminists, or gay people, or even white middle class dudes. Just stop. Different does not equal wrong. Right now, I’m really caught up in the moral element of stealthing—is it fair for me to go back and forth between being out and being stealth. For example, there are some situations [like an upcoming wedding that we are going to]. It’s probably the best option and there will only be a couple people [at the event] who knew me before. Maybe that’s a bad example—weddings are a special circumstance and it’s rude to draw attention away from the couple, but I’m still thinking it through. Like, is it ethical for me to stealth when I know that others can’t?
~~~
Tyler can be found blogging at https://chivalrysundead.wordpress.com/.
Fitspo’s assertion that we have the power to change our bodies takes for granted that people are not—and should not—be happy with their bodies unless they fit into one of a few “attractive” body types, and learning to love, care for, and revel in the body that you have is never a virtue. While we have the power to fight back against genetics, fitspo never tells us we have the power to rescript what “fit,” “healthy,” “attractive,” and “beautiful” mean in our world.
As someone deeply invested in both the health of my own body and the right of people everywhere to make decisions regarding every aspect of their physical, mental, and emotional selves, I want to highlight what I see as some of the underlying issues that make the fitspo narrative—as well as other narratives we see or read about obesity and sickness—so dangerous. While fitspo pretends to offer us agency over our bodies, it really serves to affirm and extend the belief that fatness is a moral problem, an issue of work ethic.
During my typical daily perusal of Pinterest, I am beset with various cheerful, click-baity pins suggesting various diet and exercise tips for staying or becoming slim and/or fit. Whether I’m browsing for bathing suits, a new workout top, or a vegan cupcake recipe, Pinterest assumes I’m also looking to be skinny. A search using the term “fitspo” or “fitspiration” turns up very similar results to a search using the word “healthy”. Fellow pinners are constantly sharing posts like “How to Beat Back Fat,” “10 Natural Ways to Get Rid of Belly Fat,” or the more concerning “21 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week” or “5 Foods to Never Eat.” Each headline is accompanied by images of women showing off their toned physiques (all too often without showing the model’s head, driving home the point that I’m not to look at them as people: they are bodies and with enough work, I can insert my own head onto their form). The cumulative message of these pins is that with a few simple tweaks to my routine, I will be able to achieve the svelte physique of my dreams.
The internet is full of articles that seem aimed at empowering people to change their bodies. Through these articles, people are provided with questionably authoritative scientific knowledge that may help them make changes and choices in their lifestyle that allow them to wield a greater degree of control over their bodies and their health. They can, for example, fight against their genetics and natural body composition in order to seek a desired “look”. According to the fitspo narrative, our bodies are ours to shape and by exhibiting discipline, self-control, and extreme amounts of hard work, we really can achieve whatever shape we desire—or more accurately, we can achieve a physique which falls into a range of “acceptable” body types (for women, slim, toned, “goddess”, etc.)
On one hand, the claim that we have control over our own bodies, even against our predetermined genetics, is hopeful (if only lawmakers took women’s agency as seriously as Pinterest does). However, ultimately this narrative is built on an unstable web of half-truths and bad assumptions. Fitspo’s assertion that we have the power to change our bodies takes for granted that people are not—and should not—be happy with their bodies unless they fit into one of a few “attractive” body types, and learning to love, care for, and revel in the body that you have is never a virtue. While we have the power to fight back against genetics, fitspo never tells us we have the power to rescript what “fit,” “healthy,” “attractive,” and “beautiful” mean in our world.
As someone deeply invested in both the health of my own body and the right of people everywhere to make decisions regarding every aspect of their physical, mental, and emotional selves, I want to highlight what I see as some of the underlying issues that make the fitspo narrative—as well as other narratives we see or read about obesity and sickness—so dangerous. While fitspo pretends to offer us agency over our bodies, it really serves to affirm and extend the belief that fatness is a moral problem, an issue of work ethic.
But let’s back up a bit. Medical professionals have agreed that statistically Americans are getting fatter and sicker at an alarming rate (especially among juvenile populations).This fact, combined with the rise of processed foods* and the historically powerful lobby of certain food industries, has been the subject of documentaries such as Food Inc., Hungry for Change, and Fed Up. Each of these documentaries outlines the way that the “big food” lobbyists have created a situation where we are left in the dark about the nutritional content of the food that we are sold. For example, the sugar lobby has made it so that food manufacturers do not have to print the daily percentage values for sugar on their products, masking the fact that many foods probably have too much of that sweetener.
Here’s the typical narrative: Food companies are huge players in a capitalist system that encourages and incentivizes them to make processed food as cheaply as possible while also being tasty enough to fly off the shelves (read: lots of sugar or artificial sweetener). As more health information is disseminated amongst the general public (i.e. that a diet with too much sugar leads to health problems) these companies try to protect their product by hiding contents or by making a new product that has lower amounts of a specific ingredient (i.e. diet soda is sugar-free) and is marketed as “healthier”, despite the fact that in order to take out a specific ingredient, they often had to replace it with an even less desirable alternative (like aspartame, a neurotoxin-cum-sweetener found in diet soda). Occasionally, policymakers or healthcare whistleblowers call these companies out for their crap, often with scientific studies in hand in government hearings and demand that companies provide more information and become more accountable for the harmful ingredients in their food, but this rarely ever leads anywhere. Increasingly, the powerful “big food” lobbyists sideline systemic change by buying their way into academic studies and by choosing certain nutrients, often “fat” or “calories” to demonize while they continue designing low quality foods. These foods activate our brains in a way that causes us to become addicted to specific ingredients and then gain weight which has been correlated with certain health problems, such as diabetes.
It’s at this point that health professionals often step in, offering ways to combat big food’s nefarious plot. But health professionals are often also tied into their own industries and we see magazines and TV programs report on “superfoods” or supplements that promise to transform our diets and health (often these superfoods are then incorporated into processed foods to make them more appealing to health-conscious consumers). Thus when faced with criticism, the food industry throws up its hands and says “I don’t know what more you want from us. We gave you low fat food with acai berries. Your weight gain (obviously unwanted) must be because you don’t exercise enough”. And then, the fitness industry—bolstered by online movements like fitspo—takes over and tells us that “This month’s choices are next month’s body” and “suck it up so one day you won’t have to suck it in”. We are convinced that it is our work ethic rather than our ability to make informed decisions about food and exercise that will give us control over over bodies and self-esteem (nevermind freeing ourselves from this system by choosing to accept our bodies the way that they are).
Try as they may, the documentaries that shed light on this system also do little to actually combat it. Like fitspo, they focus on body weight as an indicator of health, often showing pictures of headless fat bodies as signifiers of sickness and spending little time discussing the way that thin does not mean healthy (and vice versa!). As many of these documentarians point out by using the phrase “fat and sick,” being overweight and being sick are two separate things. But by focusing so heavily on losing weight as a key to a healthier life, these documentaries implicitly make the inaccurate claim that we can know whether or not a body is healthy by looking at its size alone.
The solutions that these documentaries often suggest appeal to our power as consumers, not activists. They ask us to change our buying practices, moving away from processed foods and towards local, organic options, which are not options available to everyone. Though choosing one product over another can certainly be a form of activism, I am uncomfortable with the conclusion that the way to combat big food is to opt out of their productions, instead of demanding that they make more honestly-labeled and perhaps even higher-quality processed food. As it stands, these documentaries give people who do not have access to local, organic food no other options, confirming that people with less income or the many Americans who live in a food desert with limited grocery options actually do not have the same level of agency over their health as their wealthier, suburban counterparts.
A few more observations about this system:
The problem with all of this is that it transfers the “blame” for fatness or sickness to a person’s lack of labor and lack of moral fortitude without ever holding large scale capitalist industries accountable for the way that their practices affect not only our ability to make decisions about food and health as informed consumers, but also for the way their products have spawned other industries that contribute to this vicious cycle. This situation leads to phenomena such as fitspo that further affirms that society connects thinness with values such as discipline, willpower, and endurance (all forms of labor) and fatness with immorality and laziness.** Fitspo messages like “Don’t give up what you want most for what you want now” ignore the possibility that we may want to live in a mindset and a body where those two wants are not opposed. What I want is to live in a society where my self-control regarding ice cream is not an overall statement of my moral fortitude. Eating ice cream now does not threaten what I want most, because what I want most is not related to the way my body conforms to social norms. Fitspo assumes that our primary want is for our bodies to be deemed attractive by society.
I also do not want to argue that wanting to be fit or lose weight is bad. Fitspo and the food industry wrong those of us with those goals as well. They work symbiotically: the food industry keeps information from us that will actually help us make informed decisions in pursuing our health or weight goals and the fitness industry tells us that our ability to lose weight depends on us, regardless of the fact that the consumption of certain foods and chemicals that appear to be diet-friendly actually lead to weight gain.
What we choose to do with more accurate nutritional information once it is disseminated is ultimately up to each individual. It’s necessary for us to stop all of our body shaming practices, perpetuated by fitspo and the diet/fitness industries. Our power and right to decide what our body looks like is not limited to those of us who want our bodies to fit a certain cultural norm. We have a right to ignore any and all health guidelines without any consequence to the perception of our “discipline,” because if we can reshape our bodies however we want, fat is also an acceptable body shape.
Therefore, if we are truly to have power over our bodies, as fitspo wants to claim we do, we need accurate information about the nutritional content of our food and reliable information about nutrition and exercise that will promote health without selling us a normative body type. Furthermore, we need more healthful alternatives to low-quality food that do not come with a high price tag. Perhaps it’s time to start figuring out how to make a higher quality processed food that is available to everyone, or how to make organic and local food available and affordable for all.
Most food industry critics realize that the problem we face results from a capitalist system that creates low-quality, dishonestly-labeled food, but those critics still often insist that the solution lies in individual willpower and consumer practices. It’s time to rethink that logic: the problem is with production, so let’s fix production. Equally important is the cultural work we do in advocating for body-positive movements that will ultimately allow us to find pleasure and satisfaction in our bodies, whatever size and state of health they are in. We have a right to make informed decisions about our health, but we are not then obligated to make our bodies conform to a certain societal norm. As soon as we can culturally abandon the notion of an “ideal body,” the forces of the food, health, and fitness industries will have one less way to lure us into their traps.
*Due to the forces that we are discussing, the phrase “processed food” has been evacuated of stable meaning. I tend to use it to describe foods that have artificial ingredients or additives (with a negative connotation), but in reality most of the food we eat must be “processed” in some way to make it edible. Here’s a great article from Jacobin about the history of food processing if you’re interested in pursuing this further!
**By asserting that fatness is not a result of a lack in moral fortitude, I’m not trying to take anything away from those who have had great success with losing weight or toning up. It certainly does take discipline to do those things. My point is that being fat does not equate to a lack of discipline and we are wrong to make any assumptions about a person’s health, happiness, or fitness based on the way their body looks. We all have different goals, challenges, and resources and it’s time to stop policing bodies.
Some consider the original Mad Max films to be the originators of the current post-apocalyptic aesthetic that’s now a familiar theme in film, literature and video games: the world becomes a dirty, gritty place and the real villains are the humans running amuck in the wake of large scale catastrophe and institutional collapse. If you’re like me, the adrenaline rush of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road left you with the desire for more dystopian action and it’s going to be a long wait for Mad Max: Wasteland. Since you’ve probably already seen Divergent and The Hunger Games, let me humbly suggest another way to get your apocalypse fix: a few great summer reads that share in the Mad Max spirit by being gritty, raw, or beautifully self-conscious of their own genre (and all the campiness, hokeyness and playfulness that comes with along with it). What a lovely day!
Some consider the original Mad Max films to be the originators of the current post-apocalyptic aesthetic that’s now a familiar theme in film, literature and video games: the world becomes a dirty, gritty place and the real villains are the humans running amuck in the wake of large scale catastrophe and institutional collapse. If you’re like me, the adrenaline rush of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road left you with the desire for more dystopian action and it’s going to be a long wait for Mad Max: Wasteland. Since you’ve probably already seen Divergent and The Hunger Games, let me humbly suggest another way to get your apocalypse fix: a few great summer reads that share in the Mad Max spirit by being gritty, raw, or beautifully self-conscious of their own genre (and all the campiness, hokeyness and playfulness that comes with along with it). What a lovely day!
1. If you loved the gritty, violent world of Mad Max: Fury Road:
City of Bohane
by Kevin Barry (Graywolf)
Post-apocalyptic wasteland fraught with feuding factions of dandies? A technologically retrogressive world full of violence, intrigue, and romance? A shit-ton of awesome futuristic sartorial choices? Check, check, and check. City of Bohane takes us through the lives of people in 2053 Ireland as they contend with their pasts while trying to carve out a future for themselves in the the barren city none of them can seem to escape.
Like Mad Max, the environment of this novel is bleak. Characters consistently refer to the Bohane river and the way it “taints” the city, suggesting that the book has major eco-critical potential. The novel is set in the fictional Irish town Bohane and follows the feud between the Hartnett Fancy and their rivals as they try to maintain control of the city. Logan Hartnett, leader of the Fancy, relies (at least superficially) on his mother Girly to authorize the Fancy’s wargames, while actually relying on the murderous talents of three young possible successors, the galoot Fucker Burke, a lovestruck Wolfie Stanners and the fierce Jenni Ching. If you are into gritty, highly stylized, dystopian novels with a unique, rich, storyworld, then this is your new read.
Though he deftly uses description, the real meat of this novel is its unique dialogue, which Barry has said he based on “working class speech in the cities I grew up in, Limerick and Cork”, noting that “Those kinds of voices have never really shown up before in Irish literature.” By combining Irish slang, new insults, slurs, and curses with the rhythm of the contemporary Irish accent, Barry has invented a new dialect that is at once completely understandable but also believably alien. Playing with the structures and functions of language seems to be one of Barry’s goals and he has commented that “[The novel is] written in Technicolor…It’s intended to be a big, visceral entertainment as well as a serious language experiment.”
This is the debut novel by author Kevin Barry, who has also published two volumes of short stories and has been featured in the New Yorker and won various awards for his short fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for City of Bohane.
2. If you were interested in the way that the “half-life war boys” were used as disposable bodies to serve the greater will of “society,” (read: Immortan Joe)
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro (Alfred A. Knopf)
Time Magazine called this 2005 novel by Ishiguro (who already has a Booker Prize under his belt for The Remains of the Day (1989)) “the best novel of the decade” and it was a finalist for the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award (among just receiving general praise!).
*This section includes spoilers.
The novel tells the story of three friends growing up in a near-future dystopian England where humans are cloned so that these clones–who are not regarded as fully human–can donate their organs to increase the healthy life of the “real” humans. The novel explores the experiences of Kathy (our narrator and protagonist), Ruth, and Tommy as they pass from boarding school, to young adulthood, to “completion”. The novel transports us to their early days as they attend a boarding school that focuses on keeping them healthy and teaches them to produce art–which in this society can be used to denote the presence of a soul. Art, especially when created by those clones who will donate their organs until “completion”, perhaps not only indicates humanity, but also can represent a piece of the clone that lives on after they have “completed” (much like how George Miller has explained that “the “half-life war boys” who are doomed to die young, and they worship cars because “the machines endure when they know they themselves will not.”)
Critics have apparently debated what genre to put this book in, but I’m willing to side with horror writer Ramsey Campbell who said in an interview that this books is horrific precisely because the characters don’t see the horror of their situation. I think this sentiment also applies to Fury Road—part of the reason that Immortan Joe is so terrifying is because the half-lives don’t see their situation as negative, even though they, like the clones in Never Let Me Go, have no real agency over their futures. As the clones are told, “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.”
3. If you were fascinated by the disgusting, yet powerful system of authority set up by Immortan Joe
Zone One
Colson Whitehead (Anchor Books)
There’s no way I could make a dystopian book list and not include a novel about zombies, since the undead often operate as a catalyst of the apocalypse. This setting asks us to observe the way that authority reasserts itself in times of disorder, be it through webs of interpersonal microaggressions and community organization or authoritarian or military-style takeovers. Therefore in a book list that is Mad Max-inspired, I would recommend Zone One, where the desolate wasteland is not a parched, stormy desert, but the empty and barren shell of New York City.
Zone One imagines the emergence of a post-apocalyptic dystopia in the portrayal of the American Phoenix government (located in Buffalo) which tries to use the symbolic capital of New York City to promote its own authoritarian ends. The novels gives us a personal account of trauma, narrated by a black man who remembers his life pre-apocalypse and continues to make cognitive adjustments to the new world as he realizes that his mediocrity in the old world makes him the hero of the new.
The tie-in to Mad Max is in the way that the powers-that-be hoard resources and modify/sacrifice bodies as a way to further their own authority. In order to earn their keep, survivors like our protagonist (Mark) are required to do some sort of work—for example, Mark volunteers to be on a sweeper unit to clear NYC of its last remaining zombies. “We make tomorrow,” says the American Phoenix in a call back to the puritanical work “ethic” that is responsible for humans being seen only through the lens of their labor efforts. The authorities in Buffalo are always sending along new rules and regulations to the sweeper teams: looting for example, is prohibited. Buffalo even tries to regulate the responses that humans have to the trauma of apocalypse, categorizing all of their sensible psychological reactions to trauma as part of the “Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder,” a disease that can and should be fought. Suicide is a forbidden thought—new empires need to find some backs to build upon.
The narrative oscillates between Mark’s past and present, spiraling around his telling, eventually giving us a full picture of him: his narrative constructs his being. While there’s a good deal of recounted action and moments of high drama that will pull on your heartstrings, what’s really significant about Zone One is the sophistication with which it handles its subject matter. Ultimately, its about the way that bodies (living and dead), institutions and the city interact as separate sites of power during the post-apocalyptic reconstruction, with a particular sympathy for the individual experience. Furthermore, the language is just gorgeous. Whitehead chooses to have Mark narrate in 3rd person–a jarring experience at first–but one you quickly get accustomed to since Mark is an entertaining, thoughtful, and powerful narrator.
4. If you were really into the way that Mad Max: Fury Road gleefully embraced the action genre while simultaneously doing critical work
Watchmen
Alan Moore and David Gibbons (DC Comics)
Watchmen is Alan Moore’s imagining of an alternative history where masked vigilantes work for the government. At once a powerful meditation on justice and power and a biting critique of the superhero, Watchmen is both action-packed and philosophically rich as it forces readers to confront questions about the duty of the citizen, the workings of power, and the value of human life. The narrative is told in a kind of zig zag, traversing both time and space as the now aging superheroes confront the actions of their younger selves.
This passage encapsulates the spirit of the novel–really the spirit of the aesthetic that this book list is built upon: “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.”
The character that utters these words, Rorshach, is complicated. In some ways we could argue he is the protagonist (if we can agree that Watchmen has a singular protagonist) because we have unfettered access to his mind through his detailed journal; however, this journal reveals the severity of his bigotry, but also his hopeless resignation in a world made dark by the threat of war. Rorshach’s staunch, legalistic moral stance seems to have been conditioned by his exposure to violence, violence that was then replicated in his behavior, making him too a victim of his dark world.
Admittedly, Watchmen is not without its problems. The novels shows us scantily clad female superheroines and uses sexual violence and abuses as a trope meant to signify that the world is corrupt; but both of these elements could be explained by the work’s inherent parody of the superhero genre. However, the fact that the female characters are not actualized outside of their relationships with men is less easy to write off. Despite these issues, Watchmen is still worth the read, mostly because of the grand scope of its critique. It explicitly asks us to consider whether the ends of peace justify even the most horrific means–a question that I still believe is relevant, nigh essential, for us to fully consider as we rise against institutions that disenfranchise its citizens.
Alan Moore has also written V for Vendetta (another great read if you’re into graphic novels), From Hell (Jack the Ripper in Victorian London) and The Killing Joke (which apparently Heath Ledger used as source material for his widely acclaimed portrayal of the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight).
5. If you were really into the feminist readings of Mad Max or the society of the Many Mothers
Egalia’s Daughters
Gerd Brantenberg (Seal Press)
I first read this dystopian critique/novel in a women and gender studies class I took while in college. If I am to be honest, I find it comically heavy-handed in its satire: The world is populated by wim and menwim, the latter of whom are relegated mostly to the domestic sphere while the former tend to the affairs of state. A masculinist party forms and threatens the extant power structures of Egalia—but this is all a backdrop for the coming of age story of young Petronius, the son of one of the powerful wim, Director Bram. The book hits you over the head with its critique, and it’s more than a little silly, but as one reviewer put it, “If it takes this reversal of roles for men to finally understand how women feel, to walk a mile in our bruising, too-tight, ill-fitting, high-heeled stilletto [sic] shoes, then I implore every man to read Egalia’s Daughters twice. It’s a real eye-opener, and maybe then the sexes can finally reach an understanding and possibly even reach equality.” Though I agree that the novel certainly highlights inequities in society, its real work is in showing that the real problem isn’t gender: it’s the way the power uses gender to establish hierarchies.
When Mad Max returns to Furiosa and her badass companions as they begin their trek across the desert, he comes with a plan: escaping isn’t the best way towards lasting satisfaction, peace, or redemption. Those purposes are best achieved through elimination of institutionalized inequity, ie. taking down the Citadel. The catch of course becomes—aren’t all forms of power in some way abusive? For now, until a sequel tells us differently, we can live in the vague hope that the populist impulses Max and Furiosa bring back to Immortan Joe’s people will last. But I suspect we’ll get to see more intricate workings of power in the post-apocalyptic landscape in future Mad Max films.
So, I teach a college course about the zombie in popular culture. Well, actually it’s about academic writing, cleverly masked as a course about the zombie in popular culture. Using writing as a process for thinking (rather than a product of thinking), my class attempted to articulate what about the zombie makes it a particularly suitable monster to represent the social anxieties of our contemporary cultural moment.
In my piece on body horror, I claim that “Horror films can disturb our notions of safety, cause ripples in our faith in the human race, and reveal our monstrous natures. At their best, horror films can speak truth to power by providing new metaphors or alternative worlds that allow us to explore hegemony in our own culture”. Never has this been more more true for me than when talking about zombies in the classroom. Part introduction to zombie-research-methodology, part homage to my brilliant students, this post features some of the most important discussions we had this semester.
In the short story “Eat Me” by Robert McCammon, we get to see the world from the perspective of a dead zombie who only wants to find love in the post-apocalyptic world. When he meets a shy, but romantic-at-heart female zombie, they return to her apartment and engage in zombie intercourse: literally eating one another. Their carnivorous carnal act results in their bones floating away from the world, leaving nothing behind but a necklace found by a small boy on the other side of the mountain. My students: “This is not love. This is lust. They barely know each other.” Okay then. Also, the group that presented on this text warned us that google searching “eat me zombies” leads to a weird corner of the internet.
Thus, the zombie apocalypse provides a mental playground where we can imagine a world without the institutional structures that keep us in the thralls of particular hegemonies. But the freedom of the zombie-apocalypse is a ruse. In almost every text we read or watched this semester, we saw the way that people were reorganized, either top down (often imposed by military force) or bottom up through collectively enforced social behaviors. We asked the questions, “despite our desire to be free from the strictures of abusive institutions, do we know how to live without them? Does the toppling of one regime always lead to another, more violent or more authoritarian than before?” Thus zombies apocalypses provided an important space for students to discuss the abuses of current authoritarian institutions as they tried to imagine whether or not society ever has a way out from underneath certain structures.
On the last day of class we discussed how this attitude towards zombies is shockingly similar to attitudes about various groups of disenfranchised people across our globe. We treat some bodies like zombies already. If they are threatening us, it is okay for us to kill them. But perhaps zombies have the last laugh—in our destruction of their bodies, we prove we are no better or different than they are. They are our future.
Each of these takeaways could be its own blog post (or really, its own book) and it feels a bit like an injustice to my students to characterize their intellectual work in such broad strokes. But the larger purpose of my post is to serve as a primer of sorts for how people think about zombies. the kinds of critical work that zombies can do as metaphors for consumer culture, representations of disenfranchised bodies, catalysts for investigations of human morality, and grisly reminders of our own certain demise. By viewing the zombie as inextricably bound to the society that produces and consumes him, we can be better attuned to the way that our own fears, desires and anxieties are reflected in the zombie body. In this way, we can read zombies not as an Other, but as a reflection of ourselves.
Last month, The Feminist’s Guide to Horror took you into the world of body horror where films focus on the human form as a bloody, suffering spectacle–this month we’re taking a turn into the realm of Found Footage horror, which is all about the power of suggestion. Found Footage horror is the land of amateur documentarians in pursuit of a supernatural mystery. It privileges local narratives and urban legends told from the first-person perspective of those who are most invested in discovering the truth behind these phenomena.
Last month, The Feminist’s Guide to Horror took you into the world of body horror where films focus on the human form as a bloody, suffering spectacle—this month we’re taking a turn into the realm of Found Footage horror, which is all about the power of suggestion. Found Footage horror is the land of amateur documentarians in pursuit of a supernatural mystery. It privileges local narratives and urban legends told from the first-person perspective of those who are most invested in discovering the truth behind these phenomena.
Found footage movies often go something like this: skeptical young people decide to explore some kind of supernatural phenomenon (either an urban legend, or some paranormal activity they themselves are experiencing) and plan to document their efforts through the use of a video camera so that their discoveries can be compiled and shared with the world. Something goes awry, and all we have left to explain what happened to them is found in the reel of footage they leave behind. There are variations on this theme, but typically these films thrive on the conversion–and often possession–of the skeptical characters as their investigative efforts lead down a rabbit hole deeper and darker than they ever imagined.
Found Footage Forms
Though told from a first person perspective (or perspectives, if more than one character captures footage), our experience of the film is mediated through technology: we are self-consciously watching a film-within-a-film for the duration of the movie. In this way, found footage is unapologetically meta. These films rely on the fact that people are familiar with not only horror tropes, but the various devices used in horror cinematography. For example, as an experienced horror viewer, when I see a close-up shot of someone’s face directly followed by a camera pan to the left or right, I’m expecting there to be some sort of jump scare when the camera pans back to the actor’s face. Just the expectation of that jump scare—a ghost in the corner moving swiftly towards the screen, a movement in a mirror, a sudden “bang” —is enough to keep me on the edge of my seat. In this way, much of the suspense of found footage films comes from the viewer having certain generic expectations about horror cinematography and then waiting in anticipation of seeing how those expectations play out.
In that way, horror aficionados are ideal viewers for films like the Paranormal Activity series because though the writer and director sets up these kind of jump scares in all the of the ways one can (plenty of mirrors, corners, furniture where people can pop out of, etc.), they deliver that scare such a small percentage of the time that you’re on the edge of your seat the entire movie.
Because of this, watching found footage films in the theater with a bunch of other people enhances the experience. I always try to see a new found footage film on opening weekend because I love the camaraderie that builds in the audience as we are collectively “faked-out” and respond to the intensifying suspense with increasing verbality; the premature screams of other viewers can cause me to jump even when the movie does not create that effect. As the small child approaches the closed closet door rattling on its hinges, reaching out his hand to reveal what’s inside, you better believe I’m mumbling “Don’t open the door, don’t open the door” under my breath.
Is Found Footage Connected to Other Genres?
Some trace found footage films’ narrative strategies back to the epistolary novel, where the plot is relayed through a series of correspondence or diary entries. Typically, the constraints of the “film-within-a-film” form forces the narrative to unfold chronologically as the camera-operator follows the rest of the group. Flashbacks are all but unavailable unless they occur though a verbal narration of past events by a character on screen. However, as begin to see in films like the Paranormal Activity series or, most recently in Unfriended, the ability for flashback can be recuperated if that flashback is achieved through use of another technological means (i.e., someone taping someone else while they are watching surveillance footage of the ghost’s nightly activities.)
Found footage horror is also connected to the documentary film form. Often the premise of the film is an investigative enterprise and filmmakers strive for a high degree of verisimilitude. For example, the actors in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity used their real names as their character’s names. Often, the filmmakers will attempt to mimic the amateur filmographer, as is done in the sci-fi found footage thriller Cloverfield (Robert Ebert apparently called this style, “shaky-cam”— Paranormal Activity mostly gets around this problem by having characters place cameras on tripods).These kind of cinematic choices serve as a kind of Barthesian “reality effect”, letting us know that we should believe the film takes place in the real world. One of the most impressive feats of a found footage movie is when it does not break its frame: every sound and picture is completely organic and can be derived from the scene itself (i.e., there are no shots taken outside of the perspective of the in-film camera operator).
Almost all of the found footage films that have been widely popularized deal with supernatural subjects, mainly ghosts or demons. Perhaps some of the scary appeal of these films comes from the possibility of seeing unbelievable things in a form that is completely bound to reality: if the ghost shows up, embodied, on camera, it’s harder to dispute. If the filmmakers achieve verisimilitude in their film-making, they build credibility, so that when the audience sees something bizarre on their film, it seems more real.
In the most successful movies of this genre, the film patiently allows viewers to be confronted with weird sounds and movements without clue-ing them in on their source. The climax of the movie is usually quite an intense—though often still suggestive—encounter with the entity that may include a few moments of bizzarity or violence, but this is typically not sustained. Fear is primarily created and sustained by the power of suggestion.
Because the genre depends more on narrative creativity and convincing special effects than makeup, gore, and post-production effects, these films often cost a fraction of a typical Hollywood budget to produce, making it an accessible genre for amateur filmmakers. (Notable examples are The Blair Witch Project which was made for an estimated $60,000 and Paranormal Activity which was made for about $15,000.)
Unfriended as Social Media Horror
When I went to see Paranormal Activity 4, I was impressed by how the filmmakers managed to shoot the film through a video chat between a teenager and her boyfriend with occasional help from an Xbox Kinect, and another camera. The people at Paranormal Activity know what’s up: they were able to angle the main character and her laptop in ways that set up scares and their use of the Xbox and Macbooks for surveillance didn’t break the frame for me.
After that film, I was just itching for someone to push that concept the to the next level, and Unfriended, released widely last weekend, did not disappoint.
The real art of the film is its form (the plot itself can be summarized surprisingly accurately by this Knife Party song). The film focuses on a group of teenagers on the one-year anniversary of the death of their “friend” Laura Barnes, who committed suicide after being horrifically cyberbullied following the release of a humiliating video of her at a party. The group of teenagers gear up for what seems like a fairly normal group chat on Skype. Their easy camaraderie is interrupted by the presence of an unwanted, unknown interloper in their Skype conversation.
This film makes an important contribution to the found footage genre because it represents an attempt to contend with the ways that we are also now, in part, virtual selves. The identities that we cultivate online, our loose personage constructed from our search histories, is the consciousness that this film engages. It is entirely mediated through virtual reality. For the entire film we are bound to the laptop screen of one of the teenagers, Blaire.
Unfriended solved the problem of how to handle flashbacks in the found footage narrative. As the film opens, we see that Blaire is watching youtube videos (we watch them with her) of Laura’s suicide (apparently taped on a crappy cell phone camera and uploaded), and then begin to watch what we would see later in full: the infamous video that eventually caused Laura’s suicide. By being able to use social media platforms like YouTube, or features like Facebook’s photo-albums, Blaire can show us the past while effortlessly keeping the film firmly rooted in the present.
As Blaire’s keystrokes lead us through the landscape of her iOS system we learn about her and as the plot heats up, we see her try to mediate between various entities—herself, her boyfriend, her friends, the ghost in the machine—through technological means. The negotiation between the virtual self and actual self is a key component of the film. As the movie progresses, Blaire and her friends’ physical bodies are punished for the sins of their virtual selves (a fitting reverse: the humiliating state of Laura’s physical body was ephemeral until it became virtualized in the form of the viral video).
The filmmakers also smartly make use of the technical foibles of social media platforms to create suspense. Using the annoying noise that Skype makes when it’s trying to recapture a lost call, we never know when the video screen will flash on and the noise we hear in the background will also yield to a violent, graphic image. That device itself was really effective in creating and maintaining suspense.
Impressively, the film almost never breaks its frame.This made it even more disappointing when the frame did break, which happened in two ways a handful of times throughout the film. Occasionally, Blaire would minimize the Skype conversation to look something up and the volume of her friends who were still talking would fade out without us seeing her adjust the volume on her laptop. This seems like a minor break to me, meant to refocus our attention on reading the important correspondence occurring on screen. The second and more egregious break occurred when a deep bass note began to play under the more suspenseful scenes. This use of bass note is a time-honored technique in horror; however, in a film that is so delightfully well-wrought in every other way, the presence of a sound that is unaccounted for within the iOS system, seems out of place and highly noticeable.
Throughout the course of film we learn much about the questionable behavior of this group of teenagers including their use of illegal drugs, drinking habits, cavalier sexual encounters, and lies, but those moral infractions (if you can call them that) are not why the teenagers are possessed and then punished in the film: they are punished as revenge for the way that they bullied one of their peers.
Other possession narratives often leave the audience feeling immune from the possibility of the events in the film ever happening to them: for example,“Well, this could never happen to me because I don’t play with Ouija boards,” or “If I found a creepy box like that, I wouldn’t make the mistake of opening”. Unfriended does not leave viewers this same kind of escape because so many of us are terrible internet citizens. The kind of mean-spirited trolling that led to Laura Barnes’ fictional death in the movie actually leads to death in real life. Even if the ghost in Unfriended is a fantasy, the premise for the haunting is all too real.
I’ve purposely focused this review on the structure of the film because I don’t want to spoil the plot for those who are going to see the movie this weekend. Ultimately, this is one of the first horror movies that tries to engage with the way that we are becoming virtual selves and negotiate the way that our virtual actions have consequences in the actual world. This is an important direction for film, and it’s exciting to see horror filmmakers leading the way.
Found Footage Watchlist:
By now, Judith Butler’s idea of “gender performativity” is well established in feminist parlance and the idea that gender is constructed by repetitive acting–as opposed to being predetermined by biological sex–seems almost intuitive. But we are far from ending the conversation about how various kinds of performance can operate, and feminist and queer theorists and activists continually strive to find language to better express the diversity of gender identities that we claim.
These conversations about gender performativity have long found a home in the theatre, which functions as a literal stage for exploring aspects of gender performance. Sometimes, these issues are taken head-on, like in the rousing revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Trask/Mitchell) that won the Tony for Best Musical Revival in 2014. On stage, the audience watches and listens as Hedwig tells her life story (including her love affair with a soldier, her botched sex change operation, and her killer rock band). They also meet her husband, Yitzhak, a Jewish drag queen who is also Hedwig’s much-abused assistant and back-up singer. To further reiterate the theme of gender performativity, Yitzhak is always played by a female actor.
So a woman plays a man, who then plays a woman? If you read that and thought “that sounds oddly Shakespearean,” give yourself a point.
Shakespearean drama has been especially amenable to gender play, in part because cross-playing is often written into the scripts themselves: Twelfth Night and As You Like it both have cross-dressing protagonists, and many of the Bard’s plays take up questions about performing masculinity and kingship. Furthermore, historical staging practices added an extra level of gender-bending to the mix. As any introduction to Shakespeare’s stage will note, all of the female roles were originally played by young boys because women did not appear on stage in Elizabethan England. Over the next couple hundred years it became acceptable (and more common) for women to be seen on stage and some fiesty lady actors began to take on some of Shakespeare’s most famous–and most stereotypically masculine– roles. For example, observe Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in the late 1800s:
Today, cross-gender casting remains a huge component of Shakespeare in performance. There are many explanations for why this may be. Perhaps the fact that Shakespeare is open-source and free to perform licenses gender-playfulness–no one is holding directors and actors accountable to performing the play exactly as Shakespeare wrote it (as is the case with modern plays that you must purchase rights to perform). Furthermore, historical distance has not dulled the performative content of the plays. Whatever the reason, recent productions of Shakespearean drama provide a window into how gender-bending functions on stage, and what kind of work it can perform.
Gender-bending usually happens in one of two ways: 1. a role that has been labeled “male” or “female” is changed to suit the gender of the actor that is cast or 2. An actor plays the opposite gender. Both choices have potential strengths and contributions to the discourse surrounding gender performativity.
The first way—changing a character’s gender to match that of the casted actor—relies on the fact that women can hold power in modern governmental and societal institutions as justification for having female actors play roles typically designated as “male.” Female actors can believably play the various Scottish lords in Macbeth, Hamlet’s compatriots Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or the various grumpy dukes and wayward sons scattered throughout the Shakespearean canon. Casting women in roles traditionally written for men can redistribute authority in the world of the play and work towards normalizing a vision of society that includes women as powerful agents of political action.
A recent example of this kind of gender-play occurs in the lively film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing by Joss Whedon that features Riki Lindholme as the typically male role “Conrade”, one of Don John’s cronies. In this instance, Whedon does not ask Lindholme to cross-play; instead he reimagines the character as a woman without changing her words or motivations.
When practitioners like Whedon change a character’s gender without also changing his/her intentions or language, they contend that there is no essential difference between the genders.
The second way—when the actors are asked to cross-play a different gender—is a fairly common practice across the board in theatre because often you don’t have corresponding numbers of male and female actors and male and female roles. One fascinating iteration of this kind of gender play is the occasional return to the Elizabethan practice of the all-male production, where men play both the male and female roles in a given play.
Though all-male productions, much less all-male companies, are still relatively rare, the few that do exist are touted as paragons of Shakespearean virtue. For example, Mark Rylance (of Royal Shakespeare Company fame) recently earned huge critical acclaim for his all-male productions of Twelfth Night (where he played Olivia) and Richard III (where he played the title role). Of Rylance and company, theatre critic Ben Brantely writes that “This is how Shakespeare was meant to be done.” Most likely, his compliment was intended to simply applaud the performances of Rylance and company. However, putting his praise in those terms opens the possibility of reading Brantley’s comment as a suggestion Shakespeare is ideally performed without female actors.
Propeller, an all-male company based in England, has gotten a lot of attention for its well- reviewed productions of Shakespeare; however, the way director Edward Hall describes his artistic decision to cast only men is worrisome. In an interview by Mark Ravenhill (“Surely this is a bit poofy?’) Hall claims his interest in all male casting “started because I directed a production of Othello with a mixed cast and I couldn’t help them to get to the level of metaphor that a poetic play like that demanded. So when the opportunity came to direct Henry V, I was looking around for some new way of really being true to the text, but also giving it our contemporary response. The all-male cast unlocked that for me.”
Thus, for Hall, excluding women from the cast apparently allowed him to unlock some kind of deeper hermeneutic level of the play. The poetry of Shakespeare is better left to men—according to him, that’s being “true to the text”. From my vantage point as a director, I would diagnose “Not being able to get them to the level of of metaphor” as a problem with the director’s ability to communicate with his actors rather than a problem rooted in those actors’ genders. Thus to me, the reasons behind Hall’s all-male methodology read as a cop out, meant to hide his weaknesses as a director under the blanket of textual fidelity.
On the other hand, all-female productions of Shakespeare have not been given the same critical acclaim as their male counterparts.One recent attempt was a production of Julius Caesar staged directed by Phyllida Lloyd who reimagined the play as taking place in a women’s prison. In one of the more heinous reviews in the Telegraph , Charles Spencer described the production like this:
“This is an all female production of Julius Caesar, one of the most masculine of Shakespeare’s plays, with just two small parts for women. I was rather hoping that the wives of Brutus and Caesar would be played by men in drag but this is a feminist closed shop and chaps aren’t allowed…This is a production that is resolutely determined to be as edgy and uncomfortable as possible, including noisy outbreaks of live punk rock that are evidently meant to remind us of Russia’s Pussy Riot….Having given so much uncomplicated pleasure with her production of Mamma Mia! Lloyd now appears hell-bent on making the audience suffer for their art.”
The tone of Spencer’s critique suggests that he finds art which does not strive to be beautiful as stuck in a sophomoric paradigm of the avant-garde, raging against the hegemonic machine, so completely caught up its own desire to be edgy that it makes itself completely unpalatable to any sensible audience. Though, I would bet that a reviewer who above all admires “uncomplicated pleasure” was doomed to dislike an all-female, punk rock rendition of a canonical tragedy from the start. Also, just to be clear: any comparison to Pussy Riot is a compliment in my book.
However, even the most troubling voices cited here cannot deny the powerful way that cross-gender casting accentuates the way that the gender of a particular character in a certain script doesn’t have to matter. Edward Hall goes on to say that “on the whole, it’s amazing how little the gender of these characters matter. You just play them as people.” Even though he concludes that the all-female Julius Caesar suffered from “crass, attention-seeking staging,” that makes one begin “to feel that its not just Caesar who has been murdered but the play itself” Spencer admits that “Watching this pair [of female actors] at their best, you genuinely forget their gender and simply admire their acting, and the truth of their response to Shakespeare’s richly drawn characters”. So hidden within otherwise troubling reviews, we can find evidence of what I find to be the most important quality of cross-gender casting: it reminds us that playing a gender, is really playing a role.
“So wait, I get to play a woman, but my name is still Malcolm”, uttered one of my female actors, mostly in relief, upon learning that though we weren’t changing her character’s name in our production of Macbeth, we saw no need for her to pretend to be male. This moment is emblematic of my experience directing Shakespeare at a small, self-funded college theater group.
For us, cross-gender or gender-blind casting wasn’t a luxurious artistic choice meant to foreground issues of gender performativity; it was the best way to address the sheer fact that we just had more women than men who wanted to be on stage. This speaks to perhaps the most important hidden power of cross-gender casting: we can use it to reclaim rich, diverse roles for female actors.
As a company, we (and I say we, because these discoveries resulted from the communion of director, designer, actor and audience) found that so many of our most beloved plays are written by and about white, heterosexual males and that if we were to give women a place to play on stage, we had to find a way around that. I refused to not cast talented female actors just because the role in question was technically a male one. In order to work around the lack of female roles in the we made choices about whether or not the women playing “male” roles were going to play men (and thus cross-dress) or whether or not we were going to be willfully blind to the intended gender of the character, and just let the actor play the character however s/he wished.
These practices leads to whole host of complications: How do we costume cross-played characters in a way that makes them believable, not farcical? How do we protect homosocial or homosexual dynamics within the text when we cast the play? When is it necessary to cast certain characters as the script dictates?
Though I have some ideas on how to address these important questions, I prefer to keep them open and unresolved because the discussion of gender performativity in general is still very much alive. That theatrical practice intersects with discussions of gender and sexuality in meaningful ways proves that the stage is still a relevant site for transgression and experimentation. I have learned to never underestimate the power of (a) play.
acromag.wordpress.com 