An exclusive excerpt from "The Weird Sister Collection," edited by Marisa Crawford.
I didn't deign to call myself a feminist until I was nineteen years old, in my second year of college. Before then, I just wanted to be a writer. Reading Judy Blume and the Baby-Sitters Club books obsessively as a kid, I decided I wanted to be an “author” when I grew up, and started writing my own poems and young adult novels in fourth grade (a baby poet at heart, I could never get past chapter two). “Feminist” was a word I rarely heard growing up. If I did, it was mentioned with suspicion at best and disdain at worst. My first encounter with feminism as not purely negative came at fourteen, when my friend’s dad took us to a feminist vegetarian bookstore and restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, called Bloodroot (it’s still there; please go). There, customers brought their own used dishes up to the counter in an apparent rejection of female subserviency that set off a little spark in my brain about the roles of women in the world around me, even if we sort of made fun of it after we left. I bought a bumper sticker that said “Vegetarians Taste Better,” uncertain if the sexual undertone was intended. I also bought a book of poems called Used to the Dark by Vicky Edmonds, a totally obscure small-press work, but the sole example I had at the time of what might be called feminist poetry. Of course, I wouldn’t have used that shameful word, “feminist,” to describe Edmonds’s book—maybe “writing by a woman about the dark parts of how it feels to be a woman,” like so much of my favorite music was? Weird, outspoken women artists like Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco and Courtney Love, who all my boyfriends and boy friends made fun of.
In college when I finally started calling myself a feminist—after meeting cool feminist friends who were nothing like the humorless stereotypes I had been warned about, and who told me I needed to throw out my bleached tampons and listen to Le Tigre and take women’s studies classes—I wanted desperately to make up for lost time, realizing that my whole life had been missing this essential perspective. So I read any and all feminist media I could get my hands on: I borrowed Inga Muscio’s book Cunt from a friend and read it along with every issue of Bitch magazine. I declared a minor in women’s studies and took classes where I learned about intersectionality, agency, privilege.
In my creative writing classes, we never talked about those things; in my first workshop that same year, the MFA student instructor was so infectious in his excitement about literature that I didn’t even notice the syllabus he handed out had zero women writers on it until another female student in the class pointed it out—I was too busy becoming obsessed with Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Slowly I learned about feminism on a parallel path just next to the one where I was learning about how to be a writer. But I couldn’t quite figure out how these two spaces could coexist, let alone collide, and how on earth to go about building my own life within that collision.
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Years later, I started the blog Weird Sister in 2014 because these two worlds—the feminist world that was incisive and inclusive, and the literary world that was performative, tongue-in-cheek, and experimental—still felt far too separate to me, even as I entered my thirties. In college, I’d started to see glimpses of the intersections between them: in women’s lit courses where we read Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa. I went to see Eileen Myles read for extra class credit. I found Arielle Greenberg’s Small Press Traffic talk “On the Gurlesque” on the internet one night. Each piece of the feminist literary puzzle I learned about blew my mind all over again, and it occurred to me that there was not just one right way but many, many ways to be a feminist writer.
All these rich lineages of literary work and activism were out there, but where were the spaces outside of academia for people to come together to think and talk about them? From the mid-2000s into the 2010s, the blogosphere was where people talked about things. After college, I discovered the blog Feministing and made it my computer’s homepage so I wouldn’t forget to read it every day. That blog—along with other feminist blogs of that era like Crunk Feminist Collective, Everyday Feminism, Black Girl Dangerous, Tiger Beatdown, Racialicious, and the Women’s Media Center blog—offered supersmart, inclusive takes on politics and pop culture in an accessible, conversational tone that helped me and so many other young people better understand the world. But they didn’t often include literary content—how could they, strapped as they were with the task of breaking down the entire world for young feminists, and payment-free at that? When these spaces did cover books, they were more commercial publications, not the niche within-a-niche world of experimental poetry where I had found my home as a writer.
At the same time—but in a separate sphere—lit blogs were where my particular literary world found community and dialogue on the internet. On blogs like HTMLGiant, Coldfront, The Rumpus, and We Who Are About To Die, poets and experimental writers wrote and read about the small poetry presses and underground literary culture that rarely got covered in larger venues. I remember reading some posts that addressed feminist issues by writers like Roxane Gay and Melissa Broder, then still aspiring writers themselves, but more often I read a lot of posts by cis white men that were interesting, insightful, and funny but lacked the political analysis I was looking for about how poetry related to gender and race and the other aspects of identity and power that mattered most when it came to living in the world.
These indie lit blogs were mostly edited by men and featured long rosters of mostly male contributors, mirroring the gender disparities of more mainstream literary publishing outlets and gatekeepers of the time. Of course there were, thankfully, some exceptions. Pussipo (later renamed HemPo), a collective of 160 feminist poets, started the blog Delirious Hem in 2006, which featured feminist poetics forums, roundtables with feminist small presses, feminist poets writing about everything from rape culture to movies, fashion, and fitness (“It’s a blog, it’s a poetics journal, it’s a platform. From time to time, a post will appear,” reads the description on the now archived Blogspot website). In 2009 I was forwarded a mass email from poet and professor Cate Marvin called “Women’s Writing Now!” which began “Dear Female Writer.” The email—which explained that Marvin’s panel proposal on Contemporary Women’s Poetry had been rejected by the annual writing conference AWP, while the conference regularly accepted proposals on topics unrelated to women (Birds in Poetry, for example, stands out in the mind from my own years of attending)—was a rallying call for the creation of a whole new organization dedicated exclusively to women’s writing. As a result, Marvin, along with Erin Belieu and Ann Townsend, soon founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and in 2010 the organization began, among other vital literary projects, their annual VIDA Count to draw attention to gender disparities in publishing. With the Count, VIDA was not just critiquing inequities in literary culture but also holding institutions and gatekeepers accountable to do better in a very clear, measurable way.
But as Christopher Soto writes in his piece “The Limits of Representation” (page 113), equity in numbers, while hugely important, is only one measure of progress. I still longed for an intentional, energetic, creative, and community-building space to fill in even just some of the lack of feminist literary commentary online, to bridge a bit of the gap between these two distinct worlds I inhabited, and to disrupt the white male lit-blog industrial complex with an explicitly feminist Blog of One’s Own. Boosted by the encouragement of a girl gang of feminist poet friends (special shout-out to Becca Klaver for helping me get the blog off the ground), I bought a web domain, went into a temporary and never-to-be-replicated fugue state wherein I designed a website, and asked a roster of the smartest, coolest feminist writers I knew to join me in launching Weird Sister.
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I wanted Weird Sister to be a space for talking about the feminist poems and books that inspired us, the contemporary literature that was doing interesting work around gender and other aspects of identity, the sexist shit that happened in the literary world but that nobody talked about publicly, how the established canon we all learned in school upheld what bell hooks calls the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the exciting readings and events going on, and the pop culture we consumed alongside it all with glasses of wine or Dr. Pepper—because we were not, after all, monoliths who existed only within the literary world. Like Becca Klaver writes in her piece about Bernadette Mayer’s poetics of “radical inclusiveness” (page 74), it felt feminist and unapologetic to show ourselves as full people who were not just poets and literary critics but also nostalgists and reality TV watchers and record collectors and parents and teachers and people working to survive in the world.
With Weird Sister, I wanted to create an online platform that was filled with serious ideas, but didn’t feel stuffy and exclusionary like poetry criticism so often can. Emulating the chatty, conversational tone of my favorite feminist blogs, Weird Sister aimed to be open and unpretentious. Vernacular language and oft-ridiculed traditionally feminine speech patterns like saying “like” too much were welcomed and encouraged. And, as on the best lit blogs, conventional criticism, creative forms, and personal elements could all, like, blend together. It was a space to celebrate and encourage dialogue between seemingly divergent aspects of culture, both “highbrow” (poetry, film, visual art, politics) and “lowbrow” (pop music, nostalgia, TV, celebrity gossip), and to take to task those supposed cultural distinctions with a glitter-nail-polished middle finger held high.
When it came to the blog’s name, I wanted to invoke the ineffable, the interplanetary; the glittery liminal spaces that art comes from. The “Weird Sisters” are the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, double double-ing and leading the play’s hero to his demise. They’re prophets, goddesses, bearded hags stirring a glowing cauldron. A weird sister is also an outcast, a goth girl, a nerd, a poet. Her existence is a disruption to the status quo. In my own family, I always felt like the weird one—sandwiched between my two sisters, the art-y and sensitive one traced in heavy black eyeliner. Seeing other “weird” girls and women and femmes in pop culture growing up made me feel seen and inspired.
Weird Sister emerged as a space where we and others like us could see ourselves reflected back, and where we could hang out together and talk and write and multiply; a weird sister to both the more journalistic feminist blogs and the less feminist lit blogs that came before us. A platform and community of feminist poets and creative writers, many of whom were trying out writing critically for the first time in a collaborative blog space, all of whom have gone on to do so many incredible things in the literary world.
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I didn't realize it at the time, but in 2014 we were on the precipice of a cultural sea change. When Beyoncé performed at the VMAs the next year alongside a giant glowing “FEMINIST” sign and a sample from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” it made me wonder if a column debunking stereotypes about feminist poetry was even still necessary. In a turn toward what writer Andi Zeisler calls “marketplace feminism,” everywhere you looked people were suddenly wearing feminist T-shirts bought from indie retailers or from H&M, drinking from feminist mugs, meeting at feminist co-working spaces. There was also a huge influx of mainstream, corporate-funded feminist publications and content popping up online. Broadly, VICE’s women’s imprint, launched in 2015. (I both was miffed by their tagline, “Women’s news you thought would exist by now,” and longed for them to hire me.) Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner teamed up to create Lenny Letter that same year. Bustle, Rookie, and xoJane had all launched a few years earlier, and the media landscape was suddenly flooded with women’s personal stories and lists of “ten feminist novels to read this summer.” Most of these publications folded by 2019—a testament to the tumult of the industry, but also to the fleeting nature of corporate interests in feminism as a cultural fad. Many of the original trailblazing feminist blogs and magazines of the 1990s and early 2000s—like Bitch and Feministing—have also since folded, a testament to the difficulty of sustaining an independent feminist project without sufficient funding.
But of course the cultural and social activism of the mid-2010s was about much more than just corporate co-opting of feminism, something that’s been happening since the dawn of the women’s movement itself. Between 2013 and 2015, in response to non-indictments of the murderers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi became recognized as a protest movement on a global scale. And #MeToo, the campaign started by Tarana Burke in 2006 to draw attention to sexual assault, was popularized as a viral hashtag in 2017. Around this time, my own writing community also began having vital conversations about inclusion, abuse, race, and gender on a scale I had never seen before. In 2015, for example, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Javier Zamora, and Christopher Soto founded the Undocupoets Campaign—and later a fellowship with the same name—to protest the discriminatory rules of many first-book publishing contests in poetry, which prohibited undocumented poets from applying. And after several high-profile conceptual poets were called out for racist performances, an anonymous collective of poets called the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo began sharing online manifestos lambasting what they saw as the white supremacist project of conceptual poetry (or “conpo”). When a number of instances of sexual misconduct came to light in the poetry and Alt Lit worlds, a proto–#MeToo movement, started by feminist poets including myself in cities across the US and beyond, undertook efforts to dismantle a widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment in poetry and Alt Lit. Jennif(f)er Tamayo, whose literary activism was instrumental during this time in organizing “Enough Is Enough” meetings and discussions on sexism and accountability in the New York poetry community, writes about their commitment to “Being Unreasonable” as a locus for resisting entrenched forms of oppression in our particular literary communities (page 129). Weird Sister was created to encourage dialogue at the intersections of literature, culture, and social justice, and during this transformative moment it served as a space to document some of these conversations as they were happening in literary communities.
A feminist lit blog was never enough, would never be enough, to eradicate the world’s injustices, but being one small piece of the puzzle trying to change things for the better was all we could ever really hope to be. Writing this in 2023, I can’t say that I feel particularly hopeful about the state of the world. But I think about an interview with Jia Tolentino in 2022 where she says that she can accept hopelessness as a feeling, but never as a political standpoint, and I feel inspired by the continued work of all the writers gathered in this book and at work beyond it—all those “humorless” and hilarious and smart and radical and messy and groundbreaking literary activists that paved the way for us and continue to do so.
When I first launched Weird Sister, I loved the feeling of running a vibrant space where vital conversations about feminism, poetry, and pop culture could flourish. I stayed up late each night working on it between days at my copywriting job—high on the blend of excitement and anxiety—but naturally it was impossible for me and for all of the Weird Sister team to keep doing this work, at this rate, sustainably. And without a model for funding or time to make one, the blog slowly went from a rush to a trickle of occasional content. As Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former executive editor of Feministing, wrote for Barnard College’s 2012 #FemFuture conference on the future of online feminism, “Blogging has become the third shift. You do your activist work, you have a job to make money and then you blog on top of that. It’s completely unsupported.” The feminist blogosphere that Mukhopadhyay refers to is widely considered the hallmark of a whole “wave” of feminism, but—like so much activist work throughout history— it’s had virtually no financial support. Still, in spite of the challenges that came with Weird Sister, it’s amazing to look back on the vast and mind-blowing array of writing that came out of planting this weird little seed on the internet. I hear there’s a movie about baseball where they say, “If you build it, they will come.” I built Weird Sister, and out came all the feminist weirdos with their brilliant minds, and this incredible collaboration and community was born.
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The Weird Sister Collection brings together some of the most popular, insightful, LOL-funny, moving, and unforgettable posts from the blog between 2014 and 2022, along with some new work highlighting essential perspectives, figures, moments, and movements in feminist literary history. The book pulls out natural themes that emerged from the blog’s eclectic archive: from bringing a contemporary feminist lens to historical literature and paying homage to the iconic writers that came before us, to shining light on current books, events, organizations, and conversations. And, of course, it includes writing about pop culture, both nostalgic and present-day. While never exhaustive, this book hopes to offer a snapshot of some of the vital conversations and commentary surrounding feminism, literature, and pop culture from the last decade, and those that led up to it.
Weird Sister was born out of a love for feminist books, from my longing for feminist books to exist, to line the walls; to read them all, to write them. So it makes sense that it is now a feminist book too. I want feminist literary writing to take up more and more space, both on the internet and in the physical world, on bookshelves where a teenager at a feminist bookstore café might stumble upon them, goddess willing, after bringing her tray up to the counter. And I hope that putting Weird Sister’s contents in a book will allow future generations to learn about the early twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere in a format that gives it the same legitimacy as the white male literary canon; the same weight as the copy of On the Road that my high school English teacher handed me because she thought I might like weird, emotional, experimental prose, and assumed, correctly, that I would ignore how it treated women. The impulse that propelled feminist bloggers in the first place was an interest in creating our own media, holding it up, declaring it real and legitimate and important amid a patriarchal culture that devalued it and gatekept it away. So this book is a reminder that Weird Sister happened, and of the powerful, cool shit you can do together as a creative community. It’s proof that all these feminist writers read books by all these other feminist writers and wrote about them—and about music and movies and TV and art—and then became the feminist writers that others will write about someday. And actually, people are writing about them right now—go read it. Go write it. It’s a never-ending cycle of influence, admiration, and creation. I hope that you find it weird and inspiring.
An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.
The first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States was told it would be temporary.
Just 19 years old (or 14, or 16—reports vary), Afong Moy was brought to America not as an immigrant, but as a curiosity, sold off by her father to a ship captain who promised he would return her on his next voyage back to Canton in two years. Moy's father wouldn't be the only one to capitalize off of her: Arriving in New York in 1834, Moy's main purpose would be to help two American merchants, the Carne brothers, sell "exotic" goods—essentially acting as a living mannequin, singing traditional songs, demonstrating how to use chopsticks, and, on occasion, walking for short distances on her bound feet as a way to solicit interest in the brothers' imported Chinese wares.
She would never return home.
Moy would go on to become incredibly famous—so famous she eventually met then-President Andrew Jackson while touring around the country. She would also die in obscurity, no record of her existence after 1850. Very little is known about her today, and even less about how she might have felt about her new life and exploitation. But a new short film seeks to capture a glimpse at both: Astonishing Little Feet, written and directed by Maegan Houang, reimagines what Moy's first experience "performing" for potential investors might have looked like—and the result is harrowing, an uncomfortable exploration of complicity, curiosity, and the history of Asians in America.
Below, we spoke with the writer-director about her film—the title pulled from surviving advertisements that bill Moy as the "Chinese Lady" with "astonishing little feet"—and the importance of not looking away from an ugly past.
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The Conversationalist: How did you first decide you wanted to do a film about Afong Moy?
Maegan Houang: I was reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, and there’s one line in it that mentions her. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It really struck a chord with me—I felt so connected to the idea that the first Asian woman most people in the United States saw was there to help someone else sell goods, just because she seemed particularly exotic and strange. I immediately thought there was a movie there.
From what I’ve read, it seems like Afong Moy was treated as a “good” herself, as a commodity. I only knew the bare minimum about her before watching your film, and then I went down my own wormhole. What struck me is how young she was. Some reports say she was as young as 14—so to even call her the first documented Chinese “woman” is a misnomer.
She was between 14 and 18—max.
What resonated most with you about her story?
It was what you just said, that she was a commodity. That she was commodified to help other people make money, because she was such an interesting, exotic object. To me, there’s no way there’s not an element of hypersexualization there, which was really resonate to how I felt growing up. For context, I’m half Asian, and I grew up in Michigan, where there were mostly white people at my school. I grew up being perceived as Asian; I also grew up understanding that I was being seen as different—but no one was explaining to me why. To me, that’s a deficit in our education as Asian Americans. I think it’s easy to blame the system, but I think it’s our own parents, who are immigrants, who really don’t—understandably—know the history of the country they moved to, and the history of how Asian Americans have been treated, and therefore have no reason to tell us. So we’re thrown into a system where we don’t really understand all this context and all this history.
In high school, when I was being really hypersexualized and sexually harassed, as many young women are, there always seemed to be a layer of cruelty, of dehumanization. I didn’t understand it, and I felt like it was my fault. As anyone who’s a woman of a minority, we all understand that there’s no one reason for everything. I can't sit here and say it's a hundred percent that I'm Asian. I don't know. But I think what I wanted in this film was—if other people know her story, maybe they'll better understand their own context as young women in our country. Because there’s no way that kind of introduction to Asian women—which continued throughout the 1800s with P.T. Barnum, with different circus acts [including Moy]—doesn’t impact our present day understanding of what and who an Asian American woman is.
Obviously, my life is not nearly as horrific as Moy's. I’m not trying to create a false parallel of trauma, because I actually really despise that. But at the same time, I think it's really important to know that there might be things about our existence and the way we're treated that really have nothing to do with us, so we don't internalize them. And that's why I wanted to make the movie, and why I wanted it to be hard to watch. Because the other thing is, I don't think there's anyone watching the film, including myself, who kind of doesn't want to look at her foot.
I was going to ask—you made the decision to show Moy's bound foot. Why give in to the curiosity of the viewer?
I think we're all ultimately quite complicit in the systems of exploitation and capitalism of even our own bodies and people. As a filmmaker, it was instinctual to some degree. But also, people feel bad at the end of the movie, because they did participate in it. I think that's fine. It's okay to feel bad. It's okay to have to question your own role in the way that we live our lives. I'm not trying to create a false equivalency. Objectively, things are better than they were then. You and I are not people who were trafficked from Asia to make people money.
It's not that our experiences are equivalent, but it is shining a light on the historical origins to certain narratives and how they're baked into Western and American culture on some level. Even though it's not nearly as bad, or as surface level.
Yeah, totally. I do believe in historical consciousness. It was only forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. That's not very long ago.
Talk me through what was important to you in portraying the other characters in the film, especially Captain Obear and the Carne brothers.
Sometimes, I think we over-intellectualize, or—it's not a real word, but—evil-ize people, trying to prescribe more evil intention to certain things that I fundamentally don't think is there. All of them just want to rise in class. And it has an abhorrent result. But none of them think they're a bad person. None of them think they're doing something wrong. They're just operating within the rules of our society and our system. I was happy when I would screen it and people would laugh at certain things because that shows a discomfort with the absurdity of the past; we can't imagine being that way. But I think people were. So I wanted them to be realistic, but hopefully inspire people to think about the parallels that we might still have—which is also why I wanted to show the foot from their point of view, because sometimes, when you finally get what you wanted, it's really horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that you wanted it. And that's an uncomfortable space.
So much of what you're talking about is complicity and capitalism; that if you're conditioned to believe that this is the only way to succeed in life, then you become blinded by what you're sacrificing morally or otherwise in the process to achieve it.
Yes.
Which, going back to the choice to show the foot—I do want to discuss the very intense and visceral scene of the unwrapping in a second, but first, I was really struck by your choice to switch back and forth between perspectives in the film, almost as if we're both being perceived and also the perceiver.
In early screenings, I actually got notes from people that it should be more in her perspective. And I was so bummed out by that note—because that's the easy way out. Because if you're aligned with her, you are like, "I'm aligned with the victim, I'm aligned with the person being oppressed." And I think that's trauma porn, a little bit. If it's fully from her perspective, we get to feel okay, and I think that's dishonest.
It was interesting the extent to which this note would mostly come from men. I'm like, why do you need me to spell this out for you? Why is that something you need?
That's interesting, given the scene where her foot is being unwrapped—there are very obviously a lot of parallels to assault, to rape. It feels like a rape, I think, to the viewer. And that felt very intentional. I wanted to just talk a little bit more with you about your decision to approach it that way, and her translator Atung's place in all of it as the one who actually unwraps her foot while the other men watch.
All he does is unwrap her foot, and it feels like assault. I would imagine that's what it feels like to her.
Yes.
It's horrible, but it's also obviously what the men want to see, and then they're also a little bit stunned by it. With the translator, he is trapped. He just has to do what they say—this is how he eats, this is how he lives. Now, it's not enslavement, but it's imprisonment through capitalism, it's imprisonment through just needing to survive. So he doesn't want to do it, but it's what he has to do. Those are just the terms that you accept sometimes when you immigrate to a new country where you're a minority, and they're unpleasant, but they're also just reality. Unfortunately, people don't really stand up to power—but he tries. She tries. Meanwhile, [the merchants] aren't doing their own dirty work. They're observing it.
The voyeurism of it was really striking to me.
Not to be lame, but I'm a student of Hitchcock. And his whole thing was that everyone has a dirty little mind. I was trying to play with that idea, which, again, doesn't work if you're only in her perspective. You have to feel like, oh, I am sort of drawn in to this act, but I know I shouldn't be.
I really loved that the film was in Cantonese, and how that added another layer to her isolation within it.
My family is from Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.
Mine, too.
It's really painful because Cantonese is the oldest spoken Chinese language, and when going back thousands of years to characters that we don't know how to read anymore, it's Cantonese that helps guide you, not Mandarin. It's also accurate—they would've spoken Cantonese.
It's also another way of feeling othered, being disconnected from the language around you. She couldn't speak English, which meansshe couldn't understand what was being said if it wasn't translated for her.
A lot of people say, well, women didn't have agency [back then], and that's something I just don't agree with. Women had agency within the confines of their circumstance, and they did employ their agency however they could. It's a myth that we have about women in the past, that they're just sitting there while things happened around them. Moy is deploying whatever agency she has. It just may not work, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have it and that she doesn't try to use it and that she doesn't feel proud of where she's from in her culture. I imagine her dad was like, you're going to go show people what China's really like; that she was told she was going to help educate Americans. That he told her some kind of fable, because that's what people do to survive. And ultimately, she met Andrew Jackson—which, there's no way when that was happening, she wasn't like, "I'm a badass." That's just the reality of power. It's better to be an oppressed person with status than to be an oppressed person without it.
What do you think Afong Moy dreamed of?
I think she dreamed about home. There are moments even I dream about this, and I am obviously born in America, but I still dream of going back home. It's not to live there, but it's to touch and feel the culture that I don't have as easy access to. It's why I would want to go get dim sum, or why I would want to get Hong Kong breakfast, or—my family's also Vietnamese—why I sometimes just really want a bowl of pho. And I imagine in that time period, all those kind of home comforts, particularly food, would be so out of reach and so inaccessible that I would probably, if I were her, really yearn for some of those things.
On the flip side, I also think if I were her, I would dream of other types of fame, of success within the system that she's trapped within. Or freedom, which in that situation, might have been someone marrying her. I don't know.
Of course, we can't know. I was just curious what you imagined when trying to get in her headspace.
No, no, I love that question. It's so interesting. I mean, you just try to think how it would feel to be so far from home, and so poor—and disabled, which is a whole other thing. Women with bound feet were trapped in their houses basically, because they couldn't really walk. It was a status thing, and people were proud of it, but it's still really fucked up. We've tolerated a lot from the way men have tried to disempower us, and she really embodies a lot of those longstanding trends.
It feels fair to say Moy wasn't just commodified for her ethnicity, she was also commodified for her disability. Although there's overlap between the two.
Yeah. Well, it's clearly stemmed from a fetish in Chinese culture that it was more attractive to have a really small, tiny foot, to the point where everyone was maiming themselves—or each other, with the help of older women—to achieve this strange fetish. You could argue foot binding in China was also a commodification of women, because you're making women into an object that's appealing to men. I think it's a pretty abhorrent custom, in that it limited women's ability and mobility to do so many things. Now the tricky thing is not exceptionalizing or exotifying that custom as morally better or worse than other customs that other people have done to women in other cultures all around the world. It's disgusting, but I also would argue that there's a lot of disgusting things we do to ourselves to make us interesting to men that we'll all look back on in different ways, to different degrees, that become more or less acceptable depending on what's in fashion. You could argue weight loss and disordered eating is a different version of self harm and mutilation for men. Or attempting to stay young. And some people hurt themselves to do that.
I was going to say, binding feet in an attempt to keep them as small as when you were a child—could also be a means of sexualizing youth, in an extreme way.
Yeah, totally. I just view it as another norm that was really brutal, but that still has parallels to norms that we live in at the moment.
What else do you hope people take away from the film?
I just hope people think about Asian Americans in history, and how that pertains today. And also their complicity within a capitalist system of exploitation, and not in a self-flagellating way. There's a bit too much of that in our current society, and I don't think acting out of shame for the past or the present is going to resolve how our system works. We have to shine a light on things that are horrible, but also have empathy for ourselves, and for people in the past—that they're doing the best they can because of systemic factors instead of trying to look at everything so individually. That's not going to be how any of our current crises get solved. Climate change, for example, won't be solved by one person. It's going to require and necessitate collective action to fight back against the system that we live in, and it's going to require sacrifice from a lot of people that don't want to sacrifice, and questioning why do we place some lives above other lives?
I don't know. Those are just the things I thought about while making it, but I'm also fine with people taking away whatever they want, because I do think as artists, we aren't able to really control how our work is interpreted, and we have to let that go. White men love the movie, actually—I get the most compliments from white men, weirdly.
But I mean, I made it for us. People are like, "Who did you make it for?" Other Asian American women.
[post_title] => What Did Afong Moy Dream About?
[post_excerpt] => An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.
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When my grandad died, I didn't know how to process it. Then I met others who felt the same.
There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I think about often, still as gut-wrenching today as it was when it first aired. “The Body” follows the immediate aftermath of the death of Buffy’s mother, Joyce: her cold face, her stiff limbs; the crack of her ribs when her daughter attempts CPR. It also follows each character’s individual response to grief, a reminder that there is no right way to process death. I cry every time I watch “The Body”, moved by everyone’s outpouring and quiet devastation. But I perhaps relate most to Anya, an ex-demon who is new to human mortality and feeling, and unable to process what has happened. She seems to be clinical, cold even, when asking if the group will see the body. Buffy’s best friend Willow gets upset by this, believing that Anya isn’t in pain like the rest of them.
Anya loses it in response—her first outburst ever. “I don’t understand how this all happens; how we go through this,” she says. “I mean, I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid!” It’s the illogical nature of death that has shaken her; that death is constant and permanent, as is the pain and need to go on no matter what. The very fact of being human is unpalatable and beyond comprehension to her—and when my grandad died, I felt exactly the same.
I do not handle grief well. Autistic people, much like ex-demons, are often assumed to have no feelings at all—but the reality is the opposite: We often feel things very deeply, on a cellular level that impacts every aspect of our functioning. Because of this, it can take us a while longer to process things, or even just to express them outwardly. Death and grief are no exception.
When my grandad was dying, just weeks before he was due to walk me down the aisle, I thought I had a handle on it. I dropped everything, avoiding work and most people, so that I could take the time I needed to try and process it. It was futile. Death is illogical, and unfair, and stupidly mortal. I know a person is not their body, but when their body dies, they are no longer here, no longer able to get back into it. My grandad was here, and then he was sick, and then I could no longer call him to talk about the birds in his garden. I couldn’t accept it.
After speaking with a few other autistic people, it seems many have faced a similar struggle when processing the death of loved ones, sometimes grieving long before the death itself, in hopes of better preparing for it. “With my grandad I grieved years before he was even ill, when [it was] just a hypothetical,” Reb, 23, told me. “When I was a kid I imagined what it would be like when he died. I knew it was inevitable and something I couldn't control, so I tried to prepare for it.” With my grandad, I’d done the same: His death was my greatest fear, and I wrote about it constantly, in hopes it would help lessen the sting when it inevitably happened.
These attempts at preparation for future heartbreak, often at the expense of present joy, make sense to me. I read once that autistic people experience all time simultaneously: the past, future, and present, all wrapped up in the current moment. I can’t let myself enjoy the fact that the people I love are here, because I know one day they won’t be. It’s like an unconscious self-preservation. Sitting at dinner with my grandad before he died, I would hurtle through time, the inevitable pain becoming stronger the closer we got to its reality. I knew, even then, it would destroy me.
Autistic people experience everything in our bodies to an extreme extent—every sound, every smell, every touch. We often get sensory overload, which can lead to meltdowns and burnout. There are ways to mitigate this. My biggest trigger in public is sound, so I often wear earplugs. I can’t tolerate most fabrics, so I wear cotton. But over the months after my grandad died, a sensitivity stronger than anything I’d felt before crept up on me and made it impossible to do anything. I couldn’t go to restaurants, the gym, or even supermarkets without teetering on a full-blown meltdown. I spent most evenings curled up in a ball playing Zelda, but every day, it got worse, until inevitably, I was in my first burnout in years. I’d completely shut down.
I wanted so badly to grieve well, to process healthily, but my body disagreed. “My autism is getting worse,” is how I put it to my husband, but how I would never want anyone to put it to me. I felt angry, and weird, and mean. I didn’t feel like myself, but I did—I felt like the kind of person I fear I am. At some point, I realized that what I was experiencing was grief, that I wasn’t just angry or “wrong” or struggling for no reason, but that my loss had sunk into my bones.
It was only with time, and some recovery, that I realized this. Tess, 26, told me that she experienced a similar shut down while grieving. “Stressful situations like bereavement can disable our usual coping mechanisms,” she says. “I’m upset about losing this person, so now the floodgates have opened because I’m too fragile to block out sounds and feelings from other things. It makes you want to withdraw, and it’s very isolating.”
For many autistic people, these feelings can develop into more extreme difficulties to function. Anwen, 31, shared that when she lost multiple members of her family in 2019, she became a “sensory mess.” “My short term memory was shot. I have issues with that on the best of days, but I started having to make lists of everything, printing out itineraries, texting myself reminders,” she says. She was used to hiding her sensory difficulties, so she was able to seem fine to those around her, but for months, she was so distraught she couldn’t even eat. “All of my texture issues ramped up tenfold and I just ate chips for a year because anything else made me feel sick,” she says.
Grief affects every single person differently, and sometimes even for allistic (non-autistic) people, that might mean a similar, complete cognitive shutdown. But autistic people, particularly women, already spend a lot of time “masking”: concealing any difficulties they may have with existing in a world not built for them. When we experience grief, this urge only compounds. The subconscious need to display grief in a “good,” appropriate way means that we might not express it at all, and if we aren’t dealing with it privately, it’ll sneak up on us through our ability to function, obliterating any and all of our coping mechanisms.
For much of this year, my first without my grandad, I felt very angry. Seeing litter on the ground was enough to send me into a spiral, my preexisting grief coalescing with climate grief and a general distrust of humanity. Someone FaceTiming in a restaurant? Always enraging, but with my increased sensitivity, enough to ruin my entire night, leaving me curled up at home with the screech of the offending iPhone speaker still rattling around in my ears. I couldn’t look at anyone I loved without thinking about death, without thinking, What is the point? They’re going to die. They could die now. Why build these bonds, spend this time together?
As an autistic person, I am prone to forming incredibly deep connections. I know how to love and how to nurture relationships. But to love someone at all is to anticipate grief, and I don’t have the tools to manage the inevitable loss. I’m not confident that I ever will. But speaking to other autistic people for this piece, I finally feel, if not normal, at least not wrong for how I’ve processed my grief. As Tess put it to me, “Autistic people have the most special bond [with each other], because it’s like you spend your whole life thinking you’re so bad at being a goose, and then you find out you’re a duck.” We are all victims of the same mortal rules, but it is a relief to have found other ducks, and to not be alone in how I experience death in life.
[post_title] => How Grief Affects Autistic People Differently
[post_excerpt] => When my grandad died, I didn't know how to process it. Then I met others who felt the same.
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Before reading this novel, I’d somehow missed that Shakespeare had a child named Hamnet, who died of the plague in 1596 at the age of eleven, four years before Hamlet was written. Seems relevant! Only the bare bones are known about Shakespeare's wife, Agnes/Anne, and their kids, and Hamnet is O'Farrell's lyrical recreation of their 16th century family life in Stratford-upon-Avon. The storytelling is so vivid and captivating, you won’t miss their most famous relation.
Like everyone else in New York, I flew through The Guest when it came out last summer. A story about a woman in her 20s after she's been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house in the Hamptons, she pleases her way through strangers’ homes, grasping onto the life that she once had. She was in no way a relatable character—but it was fascinating to me how this woman could so easily sell a narrative and transform herself into what various people want.
My favorite book this year was How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow. It’s a story about women friendships, the heartbreak of breaking up with those close friends, and Kyoto. Throughout the book, Leow weaves their personal experiences, like of being a tour guide and making jam from a thriving persimmon tree, as metaphors on loss and the joy of finding yourself despite it. I have never read a book that so beautifully put the feelings of losing a female friend on a page (including the painful grieving process). Every word felt refreshing and I kept repeating to myself, “This is me.” But as much as it’s about friends, it’s equally about Japan. With every page, I yearned to explore Kyoto and soak up everything it has to offer, even if my heart breaks a little in the process.
If you are interested in how identity and childhood shape our experiences of the world, you will love Max Porter's Shy, a novel that begins with its young protagonist leaving a boarding school for troubled boys in the middle of the night and heading for the river with a backpack full of rocks. What I loved is that Porter continuously disrupted my expectations of what would come next. The author—who holds a masters degree in feminism and performance art—writes about boyhood, toxic masculinity, and the existential crisis of growing up in today's gendered world in a way that incited an emotional and visceral reaction in me, offering the flip side of my own experience growing up as a girl in the US. It made me question and look at things with a new light; and the ending was so cinematic and powerful that I cried in public reading it!
I hate to say it, but it's much rarer these days that a book really knocks my socks off. I blame myself for this. My attention span has waned, my burnout has deepened—both things that have made it harder for me to really sink myself into a good book. This was not the case with Easy Beauty. It was kismet: Entirely by chance, I started reading it while in Italy, where a large portion of the memoir takes place, making it an especially vivid read. But even if I'd been in the middle of the Pacific, I would have devoured this gorgeous memoir. Chloé Cooper Jones' writing is just sumptuous; her memoir equal parts sharp, tender, brutal, and funny. A breathtaking exploration of "otherness," and how each of us is complicit in upholding it, even as the "othered"; but likewise how we might be able to push back and subvert the narratives given to us.
—Gina Mei
[post_title] => The Best Books We Read in 2023
[post_excerpt] => (For you to add to your 2024 TBR pile.)
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“That’s an awful lot of money to go into a shop,” my friend, a creative director and no stranger to event planning, mused as we traded Paris Art Week VIP passes like baseball cards. In a single, whirlwind long weekend last October, we wended around the aisles of no fewer than five art fairs: The Paris Internationale, THÉMA, Design Miami/, Offscreen, and, the main attraction, Paris+ par Art Basel, having its second-ever iteration in France. Had we not shared and swapped those passes, we each would have been out upwards of €500, to say nothing of the fact that some of the passes were invite-only—priceless bits of currency during Art Week, where €500 is more or less considered pocket change. It is a rigamarole that would be repeated in another couple of months, at Basel’s next iteration, which would bear a striking resemblance to the version we’d seen in Paris. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Basel just stayed put in Basel.
Before we go any further, “Basel” here refers to Art Basel, an art fair held in Basel, Switzerland each June. But these days, in addition to Paris, Basel is also in Miami, where there was another art fair earlier this month, and in Hong Kong, where there will be another fair in March. Indeed, like the British Empire, the sun never sets on Basel, a town of 171,000 otherwise known principally as the home of Roger Federer and Erasmus. And Basel isn’t alone: Miami’s Art Week empire has expanded, too. The sinkingtax haven—where, Lenny Bruce once said, “neon goes to die”—has its own Basel, Design Miami/, which now, in addition to Paris, meanders annually to Shanghai and, aber natürlich, Basel itself. At first glance, Basel (the city) and Miami (the city) might not seem to have much else in common, except for these never-ending art fairs—and, of course, the money required to go into the proverbial shop.
Why should any of this matter? Why should we care if largely the same group of egregious polluters—art collectors with private jets, influencers, hangers-on, DJs of inscrutable provenance—stomp their carbon footprints across continents to attend art fairs perennially named after the city they just left behind? As the old saw goes, it’s always five o’clock somewhere—and now, apparently, Art Week, too. Globally, Art Week now happens somewhere about as frequently as Independence from the British Empire is celebrated. And while the world that populates it might seem insular and frivolous to the point of farce, the sort of top-down, endlessly replicating model of speculation and monetization it represents should worry all of us: Those art fair carbon footprints are a garish harbinger of the death of a creative class, and of a wealth gap that will likely never close.
Like Fashion Week, which now takes place approximately 30% of the year, Art Week is inhabited by its own roving “world”—quite literally, a moveable feast—but the homogeneity of the art world is more profound than its cast of characters might suggest. Contemporary art, like high-end fashion, is largely the same in every major city on the planet, thanks in part to the strangle-hold of blue-chip galleries like Gagosian and Zwirner. None of it is really about art anymore. It’s about luxury. It’s about branding.
The point of all this globetrotting is the maintenance of a robust marketplace—and, at least as importantly, the very flashy appearance of one. The 2023 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report makes for some eye-watering reading:
Global art sales increased by 3% year-on-year to an estimated $67.8 billion, bringing the market higher than its pre-pandemic level in 2019…[but] there was also divergence in market segments, with the highest end continuing to be the driver for growth. In the auction sector, the highest-priced works of over $10 million were the only segment to show an increase on aggregate, while in the dealer sector, those at the higher end performed significantly better than their peers in the lower tiers. These trends continued to dampen any hopes of significant restructuring of old hierarchies in the post-pandemic art market, and sales continued to display the more familiar pattern of outperformance at the high end, buoying aggregate values but creating a denser concentration at the top.
Perhaps these numbers account for some of the manic laughter in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, when video artist Knox Harrington picks up the phone and announces to Julianne Moore’s Maude, “It’s Sandro, about Biennale.” And it’s only gotten crazier in the 25 years since the film came out. The art market is still behind luxury fashion’s $111.5 billion annual take, but not by all that much, especially when one considers how many fewer galleries, art fairs, and auction houses there are in the world, as opposed to the sheer number of luxury fashion stores and online platforms.
This wasn’t always the case. We have come a long way from the progenitor of the contemporary art fair, the so-called 1913 Armory Show, an exhibit designed to introduce Americans to Fauvism and Cubism, and artists not yet well known in the US, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The show was a watershed cultural moment, modernizing and commercializing an outdated European salon model. It also could only have happened in America. Originally hatched during the Royal Academy shows of the 17th and 18th centuries, the salon model had already matured into something more commercial during the 19th century, commensurate with the acquisitive tastes and expansive budgets born of the Industrial Revolution. Presciently, during this era, British art dealer Joseph Duveen observed, “Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money.”
A total of 87,000 New Yorkers saw the show before it decamped to Chicago. It heralded the ascendancy of art that pushed beyond the academic and the staid—where concepts of beauty and even the purpose of artistic expression were called into question. (Fashion Week would not come to the US until 1943.) At the New York fair, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” sold for $324, or $10,172, adjusted for inflation. At Art Basel (Basel) this past June, one of Louise Bourgeois’ “spider” sculptures sold for $22.5 million on the first day of VIP previews.
So what caused the over 2,200% increase? To quote James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The percentage, while jaw-dropping, mirrors others with which we are all too familiar, such as executive compensation and urban real estate. Quite simply, it’s yet another manifestation of an incomprehensibly large and probably irreversible wealth gap. However, the art world cut a slightly different economic curve. After the contemporary art market crashed in the early 1990s—slumping in a series of scandals along with the rest of the country—large and institutional collectors shunned the sector. But by century’s end, it had begun creeping back, after the Clinton Years (featuring a star turn by none other than Carville) saw the first dot-com boom and bust: Not incidentally, works of art, beyond serving as status markers, are also fabulous places to hide and launder money. At around the same time, auction prices went up in late 19th-century and 20th-century art to unprecedented numbers.
It wasn’t until 2002 that Art Basel, an industry staple on the calendar since 1970, launched a fair in Miami, in part to nudge contemporary art back into the spotlight, financially speaking. (Some also credit the establishment of new major contemporary art institutions, like the Tate Modern in 2000, with the comeback.) And it worked. This resurgence of the market was so robust that it survived even the 2008 crash largely unscathed, reaching new heights with the emergence of an online market in the 2010s. The fair phenomenon only grew from there, naturally migrating to Asia as new billionaires were minted amid China’s boom—just as Joseph Duveen might have predicted.
Which brings us back to Art Week, the brand. Luxury is predicated on branding, and branding must maintain a consistency that, when achieved, is known as an “identity”—a handy euphemism for what Walter Benjamin famously defined as the aura of a work of art: equal parts authenticity (or uniqueness) and locale (within a physical space or culture). In fashion, Chanel sports its iconic chains and camellias; in contemporary art, a Gerhard Richter canvas damn well better look like a Richter. This identity, regardless of product, fulfills the Benjaminian equation: authenticity + locale = aura. The market then determines what price tag it can bear.
In 2023, the proliferation of locales (via the cultural and commercial context of an art fair) and the authenticity of the work it draws (a unique yet consistent group of A-list galleries and artists) creates an aura for the art world to the tune of many billions of dollars, if UBS is to be believed. To merit that sort of return on investment, the commodity must be recognizable; its identity, or aura, must be strong. This is attained through predictability, which—you probably don’t need Walter Benjamin to tell you—is rather inimical to artistic expression. And the easiest way to make the aura predictable is by an onslaught of art fairs, with little time between them for artists to actually create—well, art.
No matter what way you see it, there is great currency in this homogeneity for those who can afford to trade in it. Ultimately, the art, much like the people at each of the art fairs, is pretty much the same. Commodification demands it. Fittingly, the VIP attendees often turn out in regalia from the same dozen or so luxury fashion houses whose brick-and-mortar presence signifies a wealthy neighborhood anywhere in the world. As for the fair-goers, the barrier to entry is high at these events, too. Aside from travel, a gallery must put up around $20,000 for even a medium-sized booth at Art Basel and even more for shipping fees—and do so at multiple fairs per year. And you probably don’t need Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan to tell you very little of this money is trickling down to the artists themselves. It’s a content farm, with souvenir tote bags and champagne. (And, as my companion at Paris Art Week likes to note, the champagne sponsor for the art fairs is almost always the aptly named Ruinart.)
This exhausting, transcontinental treadmill has led to a contemporary art market that varies little fair to fair. How could it not? Who would spend all those millions on an unknown commodity they won’t be able to offload down the line? What kind of an investment would that be? The art world has never shied away from being self-referential, but a market is iterative. If one were dropped blindfolded into one of these art fairs, the chance of being able to tell in what city or at what event they had found themselves would be a longshot.
And that’s the point: Basel is everywhere. It’s all the same.
When will we as a global community say enough is enough?
Recently, an incident occurred that should not be common but is: A woman—we will call her Ada—was assaulted by her husband. The couple had not been able to conceive a child, so her husband beat her, shouting insults while he did. Then, he threw her belongings out of the house into the night and told her not to return.
One of their neighbors who had heard the shouting came over, and convinced the husband to allow Ada back into the house. She remains there still, because like so many women suffering intimate-partner violence, she does not have anywhere else to go. The issue is exacerbated by her disability: Ada uses a wheelchair as a result of polio. With no job, Ada is dependent on her husband. Finding work is challenging because of her mobility issues and because she is uneducated. In Cameroon, where she lives, they do not believe sending girls with disabilities to school is necessary or worthwhile due to social stigma.
But what happened to Ada is far from an isolated occurrence. Violence against women and girls with a disability occurs around the world at astronomical rates. The UN estimates that women with a disability are at leastthree times more likely to experience violence from a partner, family member, or caregiver than women without a disability. The United Nations Population Fundestimates that between 40 and 68 percent of young women with a disability experience sexual violence before the age of eighteen.
To be a woman or a girl with a disability—physical, visual, intellectual, or multiple forms—is to always be vulnerable. We know this, because we both have a physical disability, from polio and scoliosis, respectively. We’ve both experienced various forms of discrimination and violence as children and women. And we both now work with survivors of violence with disabilities and their families.
One of the most painful realities we see in our work is that the violence perpetrated against a woman or girl with a disability is often done by someone who is supposed to care for them—a partner, a spouse, a caregiver, a teacher. These perpetrators have the advantage because they know their victims, or their families, are dependent on them. Like Ada, millions of women are forced to face the question, What do you do when the person you should be able to turn to is the one perpetrating the violence?
The difficult reality is that justice for these women is elusive. Women’s stories are often discounted, but a woman with a disability faces additional barriers to even having her story heard at all. There is an added layer of discrimination against them, as well as more practical hurdles. A deaf person who is unable to share her story without an interpreter. A woman in a wheelchair who needs transportation assistance to the police station or courthouse. A woman with an intellectual disability who may not even have the language to share what happened to her.
The complexity and scope of the problem are why we sent an open letter signed by more than 400 disability rights activists and our supporters to UN General-Secretary António Guterres, calling on him and his colleagues to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) specific to ending violence against women and girls.
As we write in our letter: “With violence against women and girls in the spotlight, the specific and unique needs of violence against women and girls with disabilities has a chance to be seen and addressed in a larger and more comprehensive way.”
Nations’ familiarity with CEDAW—one of the most ratified treaties in the world—makes a new Optional Protocol the most sensible and expedient path to a binding framework that protects women and girls around the world, including and especially the most vulnerable, like us. An Optional Protocol to CEDAW would mandate various interventions proven to lower rates of violence, including legal reform, training and accountability for law enforcement and other professionals, comprehensive services for survivors, and violence-prevention education programs. Implementation could be monitored through a metrics-based system that would hold nations accountable for meeting clear benchmarks specific to States’ duties.
In other words, an Optional Protocol would require nations to address all forms of violence against all women and girls, in all spheres and under all circumstances—including better protection for women like Ada.
The alternative is to allow the violence to continue—an unconscionable alternative where women and girls around the world will continue to suffer. How many more women and girls must be harmed before the issue is taken seriously? It horrifies us to think that the men who perpetrate this violence will continue to get away with it, and go on to harm another woman, another child. When will we as a global community say enough is enough?
We know there is a solution. The international community has been working on this issue for more than 30 years, and it is time to take the next step.
As we write in our letter, “We have it within us to change the course of human history to one where every woman and girl lives a life free of violence.” The safety of women like Ada, like us, depends on it.
[post_title] => How International Law Can Better Protect Women and Girls with Disabilities
[post_excerpt] => When will we as a global community say enough is enough?
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How botanical tattoos help me immortalize what is impermanent.
In both Spanish and Portuguese, one word for “season” is “temporada.” When I started learning both languages at once, I noticed their similarities and differences, the way they seemed to weave together and diverge, never on truly parallel tracks. It makes it difficult, sometimes, to pick the right word in the right language at the right time—but anyway, not here. Temporada; temporary. Lasting for only a short period of time. This is what a season is: The winters, however crushing, will end; the summers, however beautiful, will, too.
It’s a truth I think I can outrun every year.
So, I create permanence in other ways. I got my first tattoo at 24, the word “crybaby” as a direct response to the grief I felt after the rapper Lil Peep died. I had met him, written about him, and was so devastated that such a bright, sweet light had been snuffed out. It felt like a way to memorialize him, a permanent reminder of his own ill-thought-out face tattoo. After that, I got more tattoos: first, my sister’s name in a loveheart on my upper arm and my now-husband’s first initial behind my ear after a few months of dating. Then, I refined the process, getting small, botanical tattoos based on flowers and plants I’d seen in my life as a way to preserve them. The habit has become ritual.
Despite my aversion to impernance, I’ve always loved plants. As a child, I helped my grandad cultivate his garden. As a teenager, I spent a week doing work experience at a flower shop, leaving with a short-lived desire to become a florist myself. As an adult, I’ve combined the two: filling my home with fresh flowers and caring for an ever-growing army of plants. When I go out, I see flowers and plants everywhere, noticing the way they change day to day. My camera roll is filled with hundreds of photos of them that look identical to an outside eye.
But flowers, like seasons and people, are temporary. Losing them, the sight of abundant leaves on my street, is a grief that comes with each painful autumn, a reminder of the temporada. Which is why I found a way to immortalize them, to avoid that loss, with tiny needles and pots of color. My body becomes a map of the places I’ve been, and a memorial to the things I have lost.
Now, I hunt for the ones that feel right to make permanent, collecting them like mental notes—recently, a peony-flowering tulip that I bought at the side of the road in the Netherlands, a jacaranda in a Lisbon spring, a sprig of desert lavender in Joshua Tree. I won’t get them yet, because I live seasonally, per the temporada, and they would get in the way of the life I enjoy living. I am a summer child, a water baby most alive in the sun and sea. In the summer, I swim and I sit outside and I get dirty—all things you can’t do with a fresh tattoo. But in the winter, when I can’t do the things I like, when the flowers have long died, I immortalize the summer past on my skin.
CALIFORNIA
When I was 25, I lived in Los Angeles for three months with my now-husband and small dog. I love being in California—least of all because the seasonsnever change—because I have friends, a life, things I love to do there. When I visit, I try to spend as much time as I can exploring the mountains, the desert, the ocean. When my three months were up, I knew I wouldn’t be back for a while. That home was temporary, never truly mine. I got my first botanical tattoo on this trip, at the studio of June Jung, a legendary Korean artist, to remember the plants I had seen in this place I couldn’t permanently call home. I commissioned a guest artist to dedicate a small strip of my forearm to LA: palm leaves, a succulent, a rose, a California poppy. It started my journey of botanicals, but it wasn’t quite permanent enough—a run of taking NSAIDs without realizing they thinned my blood meant I had to return again to have it topped up by June herself in November.
It felt like an excuse, really, to do things over again, if only for a few days.
WEDDING BOUQUET
For my wedding, I’d always wanted dried flowers. We could keep them forever, I reasoned, and wouldn’t have to throw them out after watching them slowly die in our living room. We asked a local flower artist to do everything in pink and white preserved roses, gypsum, and snapdragons: buttonholes, centerpieces, my sister's bouquet. But I asked her to add some fresh flowers to mine, to make it a little different: seven pink roses. The florist put them in tiny vials of water so they would last, even though I knew they would die—they always do. On the day of our wedding, they looked so beautiful, so fresh and alive that they were worth the loss after we left for the honeymoon. I took tens of photos, already knowing I would show them to my tattoo artist when I got home. Before leaving, I removed the roses from the rest of the bouquet so they couldn’t rot onto the dried gypsum. In February of 2022, almost six months after the roses had died, I got the full bouquet tattooed on my upper arm. The rest of it, the gypsum and snapdragons and dried fan palms, sits on a shelf, forever preserved.
CHERRY BLOSSOM
In early 2020, I had a trip booked to Japan, in part to finally see the sakura trees. I first fell for them after seeing them in the anime Cardcaptor Sakura as a child, and they have always been the most painful representation of impermanence. You can’t really plan to see the blossoms—but you can spend thousands of dollars trying. The trees might only bloom for a couple of weeks, and when those weeks are is dependent on so many factors, changeable year to year.
The trip to Japan was canceled. I do, however, have a few apple and cherry blossom trees on my street, and I keep an eye on them every year, knowing that when I see tiny buds start to form, the frost of winter is ending. Better days are coming, days when I might walk without a jacket or swim in the sea that sits cold and close to my home. I always knew I wanted those trees on my body forever, I just wasn’t sure where—and then, it was chosen for me. In March of 2021, I got a pretty serious injury when my dog fell in the gap between our train and the platform as we were disembarking. Without thinking, I threw myself on the ground, dove into the gap, and pulled her up. I felt fine in the moment, but I soon saw blood blossoming on the knees of my blue jeans. As the adrenaline wore off, my collarbone started to hurt so badly that I couldn’t move without crying out. Later that week, a physiotherapist told me that I had torn my rotator cuff. A short while later, I asked the same artist who’d later tattoo my wedding bouquet on me if she would give me a cherry blossom branch on my collarbone, near the site of the injury. I wanted the branch dotted with buds and blooms, little chances to grow before the petals started to fall. Not long after the tattoo was done, my street was littered with pink, and my sakura healed into my skin.
OLIVE BRANCH
As the myth of Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, goes, Hades, the God of Death, was so taken by her beauty that he tricked her into marrying him, dragging her to the Underworld to make her his queen. Her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of the Harvest, was so distraught by the kidnapping that she allowed everything on Earth to die. When Persephone’s father Zeus found Persephone and tried to take her home, Hades tricked her into eating six seeds of a pomegranate, tying her to the Underworld so that she had to stay with him for three (or, in some versions, six) months of the year. To me, the story is the ancient Greeks’ way of understanding winter, of coping with the fact that we have to live for so long in darkness: a symbol of Demeter’s grief at losing her daughter, year after year.
On our honeymoon, my new husband and I visited Demeter’s Temple on the island of Naxos and learned more about the ways her followers paid homage to her, in part through vegan sacrifices where they let the juices of fruit and vegetables run. Along the path to the temple are olive trees, some of the brightest, greenest, healthiest I have ever seen. I took photos and brought one home—the olive is shriveled now. But my husband and I brought the photos to the artist who’d given us our first matching tattoos four years earlier, and now Demeter’s olives sit on my forearm and his collarbone, never to die, no matter what tricks Hades pulls.
MY GRANDAD’S FLOWERS
From whom did I inherit this fear of flowers dying, of the changing seasons? My grandad always told me that he loved flowers, but that they were “pointless,” that they always “just died.” It made him sad to watch them wither, so instead, he cultivated more practical things: tomatoes, onions, a compulsively well-trimmed hedge. Things that “made sense,” that “did something,” that could nourish us.His partner, on the other hand, preferred to plant flowers that she could look at and enjoy, that could nourish her in other ways. He was tasked with caring for those flowers after she died, and he did so, proudly, while memorializing her with a fake orchid in his home. When he was in the hospital dying, I went to spend some time in his house, a home that I had come to know as my own over the years I’d been visiting it. Down the side of his front garden, impossibly, there were roses and snapdragons blooming in his absence. His neighbors had taken over the work, and the flowers had kept living despite the ever-changing conditions of their care. I took photos, surprised to see two of my favorite flowers together. I used to joke with him that there was one way of keeping flowers alive—–the tattoos that were starting to cover my arms. A few months after he died, I sent the photo of the snapdragon and rose to my artist and asked her to drill them into my ankle, a permanent reminder of the flowers my grandad had kept alive despite believing he couldn’t. The tattoo is just one way that I keep him with me, too.
[post_title] => My Body is a Bouquet
[post_excerpt] => How botanical tattoos help me immortalize what is impermanent.
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Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind.
“I can’t get up!”
It was 5 a.m. when the dawn chorus was interrupted by a cry for help. An elderly woman had fallen while sneaking into a field with 25 other nanas, and the group rushed to her aid. “Are you alright?” one asked. They helped her stand up, brushing off her clothes and smoothing her hair. After ensuring she was fine to walk, the group pushed forward.
No nana could be left behind: These women were setting up an occupation.
It was a balmy August morning in Lancashire, a county in North West England known for its sweeping landscapes and greenery. But back in 2014, their idyllic community was facing an outside threat: Cuadrilla, an oil and gas giant and the only company in the United Kingdom with a license to frack, was about to commence shale gas exploration. If the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, went ahead, then the site beneath the nanas’ feet would soon become an industrial wasteland—and the county’s residents would be forced to live with the consequences, unless someone was able to stop it.
(Rory Payne)
The nanas clambered over fences, quickly putting up signs and wrangling tent poles. By 6 a.m., the first tent was up. The women sat on the ground, drinking tea and watching the sun rise above the field that would be their home for the next three weeks. Technically, they weren’t all grandmothers, but before long, this group of anti-fracking activists from Lancashire would be known as the Nanas, both at home and abroad. They’d regularly stage demonstrations, roadside tea parties, and eventually, even a protest outside Buckingham Palace.
And they wouldn’t be alone: In other communities being torn apart by fracking, older people around the world have also been taking the fight into their own hands, spending their golden years in protest. But what makes someone dedicate their later life to activism? To give up the dream of pottering around the garden, pushing grandchildren on swings and enjoying long vacations and their long-awaited retirement?
As it turns out, many of them felt they didn’t have a choice.
Becoming an Activist
In the weeks leading up to their field occupation, the UK Nanas meticulously planned their invasion. What would they wear? How would they get there? Who would bring tea and cake? On the big day, at 3 a.m., they secretly gathered in a hotel basement nearby. Those in charge of wardrobe revealed what would become the Nana uniform: yellow tabards with a graphic of the red rose of Lancaster, proclaiming “Frack Free Lancashire,” alongside matching yellow headscarves. Tina Rothery, now 61, looked on with pride. She was a recent convert to activism, and her role was public relations. Just before leaving the hotel, she hit send on the press release announcing the Nanas’ 21-day field occupation to the world—having no idea that their fight against injustice was about to hit headlines and dominate her life.
As the women adapted to living in a field and spending their nights under canvas, the local milkman began making morning deliveries. Neighbors arrived at the site to indulge their curiosity, bringing ice to help the Nanas keep their food from spoiling or, in some cases, Tina says, to vent their anger.
“Why would you do this? It’s private land,” some of them would ask. But Tina was ready.
“Here’s the thing: You get us, 26 women with a bunch of tents and tent pegs—that’s bad, yeh?” she'd reply. “Or, you get at least a decade of drill rigs, and man camps, and all that goes on, and the noise, and the pollution, the threat to your water and all of that. These are your choices.”
“We’re here to let you know you do have a choice,” she’d continue. “You can stand up, and you can object.”
The UK Nanas. (Rory Payne)
Besides a few naysayers, though, Tina says the protest was relatively peaceful. She recalls the police weren’t too bothered by the presence of 26 older women, and largely left them alone. She says the police were, however, very concerned about the dozens of activists who soon descended on the field next door in support of them. These new protestors were from a group called Reclaim the Power, and they were organized. They brought solar panels, wind turbines, and compost toilets. On the final day of the Nanas’ occupation, they also led a pier-to-pier march, decked out in classic Nana-yellow with placards held high.
That same day, after three weeks of sleeping under canvas, soaking up activism knowledge from Reclaim the Power, and sharing their fears with a growing anti-fracking community, the Nanas took down their tents and searched the field to make sure they’d left nothing behind. They stuck a note on the farmer’s house, whose property they’d been occupying, and notified the police that they’d left. Despite nearly a month sleeping on the scratchy ground in makeshift beds, they felt stronger than ever.
The next day, they were sued by Cuadrilla. The legal papers said they were being fined thousands of pounds for the "eviction,” despite the fact they’d left of their own accord and had informed the landowner, press, and police. One of the Nanas would need to put their name forward and take on the cost. Though she couldn’t afford the fine, Tina stepped forward.
“You can’t get blood from a stone,” she says.
Still, they tried. Cuadrilla embroiled Tina in a legal battle for two years, first serving her the court papers at the Buckingham Palace protest. They wanted more than £55,000 (over $78,000) in legal fees and threatened her with a stint in prison if she didn’t pay up. After Tina finally provided evidence that she couldn’t pay the fees, the case was eventually dropped.
Tina Rothery. (Rory Payne)
Before getting involved with the Nanas, Tina had little experience in activism. She’d recently spent a year and a half caring for her sick mother, staying by her bedside and reminiscing about when they’d globe-trotted from London to Australia to Hong Kong together. This powerful woman, once a leading business executive, was dying, and there was nothing Tina could do. The feeling of helplessness consumed her. She couldn’t help her mother, and she couldn’t change the state of the world beyond her, which at the time, felt like it was spiraling towards further and further injustice. Both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street dominated the news. She watched as uprisings against ruling parties unfolded, and looking to regain some semblance of control, Tina finally decided to join Occupy London in 2011, ending up as a de facto spokesperson.
By the time she received a leaflet on Cuadrilla’s fracking plans from a local residents' action group, Tina had zeroed in on how best to fight the whole system: You had to start closer to home. Until now she’d been trying to get to what she calls the “belly of the beast,” but this new awareness of fracking on her doorstep shifted her mindset—this single issue told the whole story of a broken system. The way she saw it, fracking was one very specific example of how the government was taking risks with people’s lives and affecting individual communities. The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore. Instead of returning to London to join more protests aimed at the government and the wider system, Tina remained in Lancashire to fight Cuadrilla.
She was right about fracking’s impact on her community. In 2019, researchers Anna Szolucha from the University of Bergen, Norway and Damien Short from the University of London carried out a study published by research journal Geoforum to examine how people’s lives were affected during the fracking planning and approval process in Lancashire—and the results were harrowing. They called what they found a collective trauma: a slow-burn shock that ripped apart social lives and damaged the feeling of community.
"You can stand up, and you can object."
“Some residents experienced severe stress and anxiety. Many reported that they lost trust in the police and democracy,” Szolucha says. Residents felt a sense of loss, fear, betrayal, guilt, and anger as the fracking consultation went through its various stages. Notably, Fylde, the area of Lancashire where Cuadrilla planned to drill, has a high population of older people. Residents feared their once quiet country lives would change overnight, punctuated by trucks, drills, and an influx of workmen. The people of Lancashire objected strongly to this, and the County Council voted against moving forward with the fracking. But the Secretary of State overrode their decision, sweeping aside resident wishes, and approved the work. Residents felt betrayed and powerless.
They mounted a legal fight, but even as the case made its way through the courts, Cuadrilla continued preparing the worksite. The locals couldn’t stay silent. They did everything they could to delay the drilling, from slowing down the trucks to showing up to the site every day. Although it wasn’t a specific part of their research, Szolucha says she noticed older campaigners seemed more traumatized than their younger counterparts.
“Older campaigners, many of whom used to be Conservative voters or simply had a pretty Conservative outlook, were often enraged or in tears when they spoke to me about how disappointed they were with their political representatives and the police, who, in their eyes, allowed fracking to happen,” she says.
(Rory Payne.)
A Big Fight in a Small Town
The residents in Fylde aren't the only ones to have experienced this collective trauma, although not every town has been so unanimously against it. In Gloucester, Australia, when energy companies AGL and Halliburton began “consulting” with the locals about fracking for coal seam gas in 2009, it splintered the community—and made enemies out of neighbors.
“Don’t come near my place,” one woman in her eighties yelled at Dominique Jacobs and her foster children during a protest. “I’m going to fucking shoot ya!”
Dominique is a 59-year-old resident of Gloucester, and for nearly a decade, she’s dedicated herself to the fight against fracking—something not everyone agrees with. Sometimes, this means being on the receiving end of her neighbors’ threats during a peaceful demonstration through the town center. She brushes off these encounters with a laugh often bubbling under her voice. But in a town where so few people speak out against fracking, she feels like a pariah. It’s a small town, a farming community of around 3,000 residents. Everyone knows everyone’s business—and many don’t like hers. Even now, there are people her husband has worked with for 15 years who won’t speak to her because of her anti-fracking activism. There are shops she doesn’t go into. People were banking on the jobs fracking had been promising, and as they saw it, people like Dominique were standing in the way. But Dominique says the fracking companies don’t actually care about the community, and that part of why she became such a vocal activist against them was to prove it.
Dominique Jacobs. (Derek Henderson)
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them,” she says.
Where Tina discovered activism in her later years, Dominique’s inner activist had been bubbling under the surface for most of her life. In her 20s, she was desperate to join the Franklin River blockade against a proposed dam, but couldn’t afford the travel expenses to get there. Instead, she and her husband spent the following years taking part in environmental campaigns and learning about climate change, but as soon as they became parents, their activism took a back seat. Three decades disappeared. Then, the protests appeared on her doorstep, and Dominique couldn’t sit back and watch any longer.
At first, Dominique didn’t know much about fracking. When it first arrived in Gloucester, she had been working in a preschool, and she recalls one of the parents who worked for the energy company trying to sell her on the benefits of allowing fracking in their town. There would be more job opportunities, for starters, they said. At the time, Dominique didn’t know any better, so she believed what they’d told her.
But soon, the big machinery arrived, care of Australian energy company AGL, drilling four wells in their once quiet town after initially proposing 110. In 2011, a group of local residents blockaded the corner of a dairy farm to prevent four more. Dominique started joining the protestors for a few hours at a time. The work slowed down, and as everyone awaited the results of a court challenge, the frackers eventually disappeared. By 2014, though, they’d returned.
“By then, we were really up to speed. We knew exactly what it was all about by then,” Dominique says. The local activists were no longer naive. They had a body of knowledge about what would happen to the landscape, the environment, and the people if the fracking were allowed to continue.
In October 2014, people gathered on the main road of Gloucester in a peaceful protest, populating the area with signs raising awareness about the negative impacts of fracking, like the contamination of land and water. As the small group of anti-fracking locals got into the swing of their protest, Dominique’s eye caught two yellow-clad women sitting on folding chairs, knitting needles clicking away. Fascinated, she walked over. The women were the Knitting Nannas Against Gas—a separate group from the UK Nanas, with similar motivations, tactics, and uniforms (but a slightly different spelling to their name). They were using what they called “gentle activism” to peacefully protest fracking.
If she wanted to join them, they told her, she should put on some yellow and get to knitting. So she did.
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
Dominique started spending three days a week manning a peaceful vigil in a little rotunda with a few other members of the community, but soon, knitting didn’t feel like enough: They wanted volunteers for arrestable actions. Dominique was fearful. She was a foster parent, and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that and lose her children. She chose to stick to the peaceful vigil, while others in the group went down to the gates of the fracking site and locked themselves onto it—a tried and true way to kick up a fuss. Dominique watched on as police arrested around 30 people.
Then, something happened that transformed Dominique from gentle activist to risk-taker; an experience that opened her eyes to the environmental devastation fracking could soon cause in her community. In January 2015, she and her family took a trip to Tara, Queensland, where fracking was much more developed than in Gloucester—and she was horrified.
“There was really no life anywhere,” she says of the ravaged areas she drove through. She describes two or three kilometers of road lined by huge ponds holding fracking wastewater. Forests were blocked off by metal fences. “Private property. No trespassing,” signs were plastered on the gates. Trailers, rigs, and grey infrastructure dotted the landscape. She was surprised by how industrialized it had become. Less than a decade earlier, it had been a farming community. Now, it was a wasteland.
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them."
Driving through Tara, Dominique thought of the image the fracking company had sold the people of Gloucester. A little well, some cows grazing out on a green field, perhaps, and everyone enjoying a peaceful life, with no discernible difference to their community.
“When you go up there to Queensland, you go, ‘Oh my god. We've got no idea,’” Dominique says.
What she saw in Queensland was bleak, and a stark contrast to the traditional portrayal of Australia, one of sprawling landscapes teeming with biodiversity. But what happened in Queensland was far from unusual. Travel to Oklahoma, where fracking first began, and you’ll find a similar picture. Drills, industrialization, and wastewater ponds abound. Phillips 66, which used to be a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips but split in 2012, fracks the land there, and has become one of the largest energy exploration companies in the world. They produce millions of barrels of oil a day and are estimated to be worth around $50 billion—and some of its residents are furious about it.
Fracking and the Ponca Tribe
Environmental ambassador Casey Camp-Horinek has lived in Ponca City her whole life. She’s an Elder and Hereditary Drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, and has recently turned 74.
When hundreds of people were arrested at Standing Rock in 2016, Casey was there. The Ponca people once lived further along the Missouri River, in a different region, and on that particular day, Casey was at a Tribal Historic Preservation Office meeting around 20 miles away. Mid-prayer, they got news that militarized police were heading to Standing Rock. They were going to forcefully evacuate the people at Treaty Camp who were standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
Casey and the other Elders from the meeting arrived as observers, and found hundreds of people peacefully praying. Over the hill and across the road, militarized police lined up shoulder to shoulder, advancing. As they came closer, Casey stood in prayer with the other Elders. Her son was in a nearby prayer circle of around 50 people. Others were singing, drumming, or in ceremony. The peace was soon shattered. Armored trucks and tasers invaded the scene; peaceful protestors were blinded with pepper spray as they prayed. A security helicopter thundered overhead. Sound cannons erupted.
“It was a scene from a horror movie,” Casey says. She speaks slowly and deliberately, frequently pausing to think. “It was like what happened to us all throughout history, going through it again.”
The police reached the Elders. Casey was pulled down and her hands zip tied behind her back. Her son called out, asking them to at least leave the Elders alone. That day, 142 people were arrested by armed police in riot gear, numbers written on the detainees’ arms. Casey was Standing Rock 138. She had to watch as her son was beaten and dragged away, unsure of when she would see him again.
In the cells, tear gas hung on their clothes. Dozens of women were bundled into what Casey describes as dog cages.
“We sang prayer songs and victory songs, and we celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery,” Casey says.
In many ways, it was nothing new. Casey’s stand against fracking and the extractive industries is inseparable from the disastrous consequences of colonialism that the Ponca Nation has suffered: the forced removal to Oklahoma from northeastern Nebraska, the children harmed at the boarding schools they were made to attend. There’s no short answer, she says, to explain how she got to where she is today.
“I guess one has to begin with the fact that I'm a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter, and a survivor of a holocaust of when the Europeans came to these shores,” she says, speaking in her calm, grandmotherly tone. While Tina was new to environmentalism, and Dominique had spent decades as an activist in waiting, the struggle forced on Casey encompassed not only her whole life, but generations before her.
"We celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery."
Casey uses strong words to describe what has been done to the Ponca Nation. She calls it a genocide. Nearly a third of the Ponca Tribe died due to their forced removal in the late 1800s. This history has been passed down through generations using oral traditions, which is how she continues to pass them on today. Many of the abuses she details have been well documented, ranging from colonizers gifting Indigenous people blankets laced with smallpox, to countless treaties made and broken, and the Ponca Nation’s 1.5 million acres being reduced to just a small township in Nebraska.
When the Ponca people were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, Casey’s grandparents were only around five or six years old. Their tribe was made to walk hundreds of miles, and many lives were lost along the way.
“At that time, Oklahoma was called Indian Territory. And it was to be the dumping grounds, the killing grounds, of all Native Americans,” Casey says. The Ponca people reached Oklahoma without their seeds and hunting instruments and were newly vulnerable to foreign diseases. Many of those who survived the journey did not survive the new territory.
And then, in 1911, the extractive industries arrived on Ponca land, looking for oil. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency designed to manage relationships between the government and Indigenous communities, made decisions about their land without their consent. She says the extractive industries created “killing fields.”
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
As it was for Dominique’s community in Gloucester, fracking was presented to Indigenous communities with a positive spin. Today, energy giant Phillips 66 describes itself as “engaging with our communities in an environmentally just way.” A sustainability web page says that they are committed to “providing energy today with an eye on tomorrow,” and that they have the highest levels of responsibility and ethics. Their 2023 sustainability report makes bold claims of supporting biodiversity and restoring park land, and even has a section on connecting with Indigenous peoples “to build meaningful relationships, honoring them and their connection to the land in the regions where we do business.” The front cover of the report shows a sprawling refinery against a blue sky, with a solitary bird soaring overhead, assessing its industrial habitat.
But once the companies arrived, a different reality emerged.
Casey had heard many sustainable claims like these before learning the truth about how water is used in the fracking process. To start, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water are injected into the earth, per well. The pressurized water, along with chemicals and sand, break open cracks below the surface and release gas. The unusable wastewater is then held in tanks, laced with fracking chemicals like hydrochloric acid, methanol, and petroleum distillates. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report shows this toxic cocktail can leak into drinking supplies from unlined pits or spills, or even be injected directly into groundwater resources. Across a six year period ending in 2012, there were 151 spills in 11 states, according to the EPA’s analysis. They don’t have enough data to definitively say how much this is happening on a national level.
In the US, an average of over 3 million gallons of water were used per well between 2005 and 2015 and at least 239 billion gallons have been used across the US since 2005. This is according to a report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, an organization which researches and educates about environmental issues. At this scale, the potential harm is monumental: A report published in Nature Communications shows that fracking can increase radiation levels by as much as 40% over the background level, putting those living within about 12 miles of fracking sites at increased health risk. Casey says she has seen countless cancer cases in Ponca families, and that many children have developed breathing difficulties since fracking began in Oklahoma. Similar symptoms have been seen elsewhere, as well, with researchers at the Yale School of Public Health finding carcinogens from fracking could be contaminating air and water, increasing the risk of childhood leukemia. The Center for Environmental Health has also warned of how pollutants from fracking might impact children’s respiratory health.
“They don't tell you that it's creating radiation that they're going to dump into your yard,” Casey says.
“We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide,” Casey says.
But however hopeless it might seem, Casey refuses to give up on fighting for this planet and its inhabitants. She is a part of nature, too, and that’s why she keeps pushing back.
"We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide."
She’s not the only one fighting back in North America. Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of Keepers of the Water, a group of Indigenous communities and environmental groups working together to protect nature, works with Elders responding to extractive industries across the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin.
“The thing with the Elders is they remember a life where you can drink water without it having to be treated; they remember drinking straight from the streams; they have lived that life,” she says. They have seen the increase in sickness, mental health issues, and loss of culture, both since colonization and during this current period of extraction. Many Indigenous communities across North America are surrounded by lakes, streams, and creeks, but they are buying bottled water: We’re living in a time now, she adds, where our children don’t know that you can drink pure water.
“The Elders are amazing because having seen all this and lived through all this, they're still the voice of reason, and they're telling people what needs to be done,” Cardinal, who is from the Kikino Métis Settlement in Canada, says. She explains how they attend the rallies, go to meetings, and participate in workshops. “They know right from wrong,” she continues. “They also know that their time is going to end soon, and they don't want to leave this behind for future generations. They're so desperately trying to make change where they can before they leave this place.”
This sentiment seems to be a universal one for fracking’s elder protestors, whether in North America or elsewhere: They’ve lived the past, and many feel they have no choice but to protect the future. The only difference is in how they choose to do it.
With a key role in the UK Nanas, Tina tries to be the voice of reason and to speak up about what needs to happen to stop fracking. She leads demonstrations and raises her voice until she can’t be ignored—but does so in a way that welcomes others to join: She uses gentle protest.
The Craft of Gentle Activism
During the demonstrations in Fylde, Lancashire, the UK Nanas would meet at the community hub every Wednesday around 9:30 a.m., all dressed in white. Together, they would walk up the hill, arrive at the gates of the fracking site, and form a long line. They would then stand in silence for fifteen minutes in what they termed the “Call for Calm.” It was a moment of peace between the police and activists: The women tied ribbons to the gate, singing groups joined, and then they broke into a choreographed dance. People brought stews, quiches, vegan chocolate fudge cake. Once, actor Emma Thompson even made an appearance.
(Rory Payne)
To help bolster their efforts during this period, Tina heavily utilized social media, where she regularly live streamed the daily lives of the Nanas and their demonstrations. Across roughly 1,000 days between 2014 and 2019, Tina shared livestream after livestream on her Facebook page, where she cracked jokes, argued with police, captured people dancing and venting, and fumbled with the technicalities of filming in a beautifully human way. Most importantly to Tina, anyone could easily watch these videos and write comments in real time—wherever and whoever they were.
“I want anyone watching to think, ‘I could do that.’ So if you're eighty, and you're sat at home, I want you to feel it's accessible,” Tina says.
While the UK Nanas relied heavily on social media, in Australia, the Knitting Nannas have so far utilized a more unusual approach to their gentle activism: They play on people’s assumptions about sweet old ladies and use it to their advantage. They turn up to work sites, politicians’ offices, and anywhere else where a demonstration is needed, and they knit. While police officers might assume the Nannas are harmless, it can be a split second before they’re caught off guard and an elderly woman has chained herself to a fence.
In Oklahoma, Casey has a different approach to spearheading change: She is using legal frameworks to her advantage. Although the Ponca Nation passed a moratorium on any future fracking on their land, Casey says this was ignored, and fracking continues to this day. She grew frustrated. Then, she learned about the Rights of Nature.
At first, Casey was skeptical. She was at a meeting of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, where around 100 women from across the world spoke and presented solutions to various environmental issues. It was the co-founder of Movement Rights, Shannon Biggs, who introduced her to the Rights of Nature: a legal framework that recognizes that ecosystems have the right to exist, in the same way that humans do. Within this law, nature is no longer treated as property, and communities could stand up in court and fight for the rights of ecosystems.
"We're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself."
Casey was reminded of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. At the time of its introduction, her brother had scoffed and said, “If religion were truly free, why would they need to put a law around it?” She felt the same way about the Rights of Nature. But over time, as Casey talked to Shannon more, she began to see its potential. With the Ponca’s ability to create their own laws within their tribal jurisdiction, it could be a form of protection.
At the time, Casey was on the tribal council. She created a resolution, the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature, and it became law in their court—the first time ever that an Indigenous community had recognized the Rights of Nature in tribal law. But Casey describes it as an old concept that’s just new on paper.
“This land is here forever. This water is here forever. These winds that blow are forever. You cannot eat, drink, or breathe that paper money or that plastic money. So the only way to go forward is for all of us, all human beings, to get on board and become those water protectors and land defenders. Because again, we're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself,” she says.
This approach to activism is a different path from the ones Tina and Dominique have chosen. While their activism is about creating impactful moments and disrupting the system, Casey’s is about finding and implementing solutions—and loopholes. But for all of them, it’s ultimately about protection. When fracking threatens the natural world, these women have felt they have no choice but to be its protector.
The Switch
In a research paper on what they term “Nannagogy,” Larraine Larri and Hilary Whitehouse set out to discover what motivates older women to step out of their comfort zone to fight for the planet they will soon leave behind.
“What we found were women who had been marginalized due to age and gender, who were determined to be productive and creative social change agents taking action for a low-carbon future. Our data show many of these women had never done anything like this before,” they wrote.
When it comes to the specifics of that activism, Larri and Whitehouse refer to the Knitting Nannas’ activities as “Craftivism,” a term originally coined in 2003 by crafter and activist Betsy Greer, the “godmother of Craftivism.” In another paper, Larri writes, “In the case of the Nannas, Craftivism emboldens and empowers older women to challenge gender and age-related stereotypes to become vibrant and central actors in the broader social movement.”
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
But are gentle actions enough? Tina says the UK Nanas all had moments where they “switched,” where they decided that they were going to become more defiant. A lot of these women, she says, grew up in an era where they had to be obedient to their husbands, and during their activism, they had this moment of realization: Enough is enough.
Tina’s moment came in 2018, when she decided to take part in her first arrestable action. Up until that point, in all of their demonstrations, Tina had never technically done anything illegal. But as anti-fracking efforts started ramping up, eventually, she was asked to take part in a lock-on, where she would physically attach herself to a static object and block the gates to the fracking site in Lancashire. This would put more pressure on Cuadrilla. It would also break the law: Jail time would be imminent for anyone blocking the fracking site.
“I had always said no because I still want to set the example that you don't have to break the law to win,” she says.
Still, she thought, what if it made all the difference? If Tina was going to do a lock-on, it was now or never. With an upcoming injunction that would prevent trespassing on the exploration site, she was running out of time. So, she and her niece both said yes. The demonstration was called the Caravan of Love, and took months of planning. A group known as The Cooks invented devices for the protestors to lock onto, using hard to cut materials like cement and elevator cable. Lock-ons often end with police cutting through similar contraptions, power tools whirring close to activists’ arms. They were hoping that wouldn’t happen by creating something too dangerous for the attempt—not that this had stopped police before.
Tina remembers hiding up at the camp near the fracking site gates on the day of the demonstration, trying to keep away from the glare of security.
The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore.
“We knew that at just after 2 a.m., someone was going to dump a whopping great caravan in the middle of the entranceway,” she says. The caravan concealed six men who were each locked onto a large household appliance, and once in place, would drop a huge cement foot from inside. The trailer was going nowhere. Its arrival was their cue. Two women ran up and thrust their arms into the vehicle, clipping themselves onto the men inside. Another pair locked themselves onto one side of the trailer together, and then, on the other side, Tina and her niece reached their arms through either end of a torpedo-shaped lock-on device with “love to my mum” written on it. They each clipped themselves onto a hook inside.
Tina stayed like that for 21 hours wearing incontinence pads and battling the discomfort of the outdoors. Eventually, she felt she couldn’t breathe, and the activists hatched a plan to help her escape. First, they’d distract the police, who were watching close by. Next, they’d make the switch.
“When you’re ready,” one of the other activists said.
“Quick, quick, I need some help with my pad,” Tina called out, doing her best to pretend that she really did need help, while the Nana who was attending to their personal care rushed to her “aid.”
This made the policeman standing nearby so uncomfortable, she says, that he walked off. Two other activists ducked under the tarpaulin covering Tina and her niece’s connected arms, taking their place as the two women snuck out. Tina stood up and tried to casually walk away from the scene. She was, of course, immediately arrested.
While Tina had been reluctant to do anything illegal in her anti-fracking efforts, however, after what she’d witnessed in Queensland, Dominique had been ready. Only a couple of years after becoming a Knitting Nanna, she traveled to the town of Pilliga in New South Wales, roughly 250 miles away from her home, to join their local fight against fracking—and jumped at the chance to escalate her actions.
“You kind of get to the point where you've done everything you possibly can do,” Dominique says. “What is there left to do except that? You've written so many letters, you've signed petitions, you've talked to your politicians, and they just leave you with no options. It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something.”
(Derek Henderson)
Early in the morning one January day in 2016, with yellow parasols in hand to defend against the sweltering heat, Dominique and two other Nannas snuck up to the wire gates outside the fracking site, unfolded their chairs, and looped bike chains around their necks, attaching the opposite ends to the gate. Dominique settled into the lock-on and got out her knitting. Each Nanna had a buddy to support her, and eventually other Nannas arrived, throwing out tablecloths and setting up a high tea.
The police eventually ordered the buddies to leave, and tried to persuade the Nannas to do the same, Dominique recalls, telling them they’d made their point.
The Nannas didn’t budge. They knew they were likely to get arrested, but they weren’t going to give in.
The police got out the bolt cutters. They gave the Nannas one more chance to leave, and when they refused, each Nanna was arrested. They walked themselves to the police van. At the station, they weren’t put into cells but sat in the main office while their papers were processed, still wearing the straw hats that had protected them from the sun. When they finally left, it was to the sound of cheers as all the other Nannas lined the path in a guard of honor.
Dominique makes light of the situation now, but makes it clear that it was a desperate measure. They were out of options. Fracking was still happening, and gentle protest wasn’t making a big enough impact. Like Tina, she felt the same mounting pressure to force someone to listen.
"It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something."
But for both women, that risk had been a choice—while for others, like Casey, even quiet protest was enough to be considered an offense. When she was arrested at Standing Rock, it wasn’t for something she'd chosen; it wasn’t for a moment of defiance. She was arrested while praying, arrested in spite of her peaceful presence, arrested in spite of the fact she was participating in the exact same vein of quiet protest that Tina and Dominique and countless other nanas around the world had participated in without punishment.
“I applaud the bravery of anyone who chooses to do nonviolent, direct actions. If that involves chaining themselves to equipment, I applaud that,” Casey says, making a particular point that she’s behind those other nanas in their actions. “I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary.”
In her younger years, Casey took part in similar actions that she describes as “pushing the envelope.” But now, as an Elder, her activism looks different. As an Indigenous woman, putting herself in the way of police would come at a higher price for Casey than it would for white activists.
“It always has,” she says. “I don’t see that as a changing trend.” Indigenous people have the second highest incarceration rate of any racial group in the United States. Casey says that if she drives her car to town with tribal tags on it, she knows she’s more likely to get stopped than if she had an Oklahoma tag.
“Yes, racism is alive. And Indigenous men and women on the front line are flagged by racist laws that are being put in place in places like Oklahoma, South Dakota, and many other places where there's large Indigenous populations,” she says. Specifically, Casey is, in part, referring to a law where anyone protesting against fossil fuels can face $100,000 fines or 10 years in prison. In stark contrast, both Tina and Dominique’s cases were eventually dropped, both still have clean criminal records, and both were treated with respect, even while getting arrested. Casey was not.
Something else happened for both Tina and Dominique and their local communities, too: Eventually, the fracking stopped. The same cannot be said for Casey and the Ponca Nation.
Gloucester. (Derek Henderson)
A Fight That’s Never Won
In summer 2019, people in Lancashire felt their homes shaken by tremors measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale. They were the UK’s largest fracking-related earthquakes to date. That November, the government halted procedures following a damning safety report that concluded there was no way to predict the probability or magnitude of future earthquakes. It finally felt like the fight was over—but Tina isn’t convinced.
“It's only a moratorium, and all we did was keep them at bay until we had enough seismic events and time to diminish their resources for it to impact them,” she says. Today, Tina stays vigilant because she still feels a responsibility to make the most of her time. “I feel like I got here really late, and so I've got a lot to do before I go,” she adds.
There are certainly still people in government who aren’t on the Nanas’ side: In the fall of 2022, during her short stint as UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss promised to lift the UK’s ban on fracking. While just a few weeks later, the new Prime Minster Rishi Sunak reversed the decision, it was definitive proof the fight is far from finished in the UK.
Meanwhile, in Australia, less than a month after Dominique’s lock-on in Pilliga, she was at home when the phone rang: The fracking in Gloucester was over. The energy company AGL was withdrawing, citing disappointing production volumes. It was so sudden and unexpected that she could barely believe it. She remembers feeling euphoric. The activists all hurried into town, gathered in the street, and popped bottles of champagne.
“No one could wipe the smiles off their faces. It was so beautiful,” she says. It was a small group of people from a small town who had fought something bigger. She says a lot of people called it the mouse that roared. But not every battle has been won.
"I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary."
In Oklahoma, fracking continues.
“We have so many societal ills caused by these colonists that it is just shameful. And that's not on us. I will not allow my people to ever feel guilt,” Casey says.
She continues to speak about solutions to environmental destruction and the Rights of Nature. She fights fracking because she has not been given any other choice. As of 2020, Oklahoma was the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the US. There are 43,232 wells in the state, according to US Energy Information Administration data from 2019. The number of rigs is falling, but slowly; and earlier in 2021, a natural gas pipeline exploded in northwestern Oklahoma. But Casey is not giving up the fight.
None of them are. For Tina, Dominique, and Casey, their work will never truly be over, even if the battles in their hometowns have been won—or will be. For all three women and the hundreds of others fighting fracking, there will always be another energy company arriving, another community being ignored, another generation facing a threat. They persist because they feel they must, because they want to leave a better world behind. They fight because they feel you must do everything you can to stop injustice, even if you might not see the change in your own lifetime.
Which is why Tina has stayed so vigilant, even four years after the last work truck left Lancashire. It’s why Casey still leads prayer walks, taking her strong and peaceful demeanor directly to Phillips 66 refineries across Oklahoma. And it’s why every couple of weeks, you’ll find Dominique stationed outside the Federal Politician’s Office in New South Wales, Australia. Fracking in Gloucester might be over, but the drills are still in the ground in much of the country, and for as long as they are, she will be there—dressed in her yellow clothes, forcing the government to listen, and knitting.
(Rory Payne)
Photography by Rory Payne, Derek Henderson, and Ryan Red Corn. Additional editing by Mariana Heredia. Fact checking by Tadhg Stevens.
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How people respond to disillusionment shapes history. Without hope, we're doomed to repeat it.
Few things feel worse than building your hopes up about something that later turns out to be bullshit. It's the profound disillusionment of being burned by someone you trusted, by a belief you held, by a foundational narrative you built your life and identity around that's no longer possible to maintain. Whether consciously or not, most of us will do just about anything to avoid these destabilizing feelings—to shut out the pain of grief and helplessness. When confronted with ugly realities that don't match our grand narratives, we can mourn the loss and adjust, or dig our heels in deeper. Many choose the latter, because the rupture is too painful.
I was already writing this essay on the dangers of nihilism in the face of atrocities and authoritarianism when the latest war between Israel and Hamas broke out. Russia-Ukraine, GOP Christian nationalism, and the climate crisis provided plenty of despairing material. I was feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, and wanted to make sense of growing instability and extremism. Then came October 7.
There's a Russian saying: Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, someone knocks from below. For the past few weeks, as I've watched the war in Gaza unfurl, the atrocities pile up, and ethnic cleansing further normalized, I've tried, and failed, not to catastrophize. It doesn't seem like the world order is going to survive this, as failing democracies disgrace themselves, and warlords clap their hands. Still, I choose to remain hopeful that something better is possible, because giving up makes things infinitely worse.
By now, most people are familiar with how the latest round of violence erupted. Early in the morning of October 7, Hamas militants surprise attacked southern Israel, brutally massacring over 1400 people, killing infants, burning families alive in their homes, and shooting ravers celebrating Sukkot at a music festival in the desert near Gaza, in addition to kidnapping around 240 hostages—children and the elderly among them. The next morning, I woke up to a text from a friend who has spent years covering wars: "The world is hopeless." I was horrified. I felt grief for the dead, and the survivors, and for Gazans, who I knew would soon suffer in retaliation for Hamas' war crimes. I felt terrified for the hostages, and for Jewish people, my people, everywhere: October 7, 2023 is now understood as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel responded to this by once again bombing the shit out of Gaza, and Gazan civilians—again, children and the elderly among them. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, as Palestinians desperately dug through the rubble to find survivors and what remained of those who’d been killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also immediately imposed a blockade, and cut off Gaza's electricity, fuel, water, and food supply—a job made easy by decades of occupation. All of it, of course, was signed off by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. By now, whatever reserves were left have long run out, and minimal aid has come in through Egypt. The humanitarian crisis is as dire as it gets. Many hospitals have run out of fuel for their generators, meaning anyone on a machine will likely die. People are starving, drinking sea water, being operated on without anesthesia. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered the siege, justified collective punishment—a war crime—by saying, "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly." Hearing those words, again, I was horrified. I felt sorrow for Palestinians, who've been dehumanized, ghettoized, and unable to escape collective retribution. I felt complicit in their suffering. Once again Gazans were dying en masse while the world watched. I felt despair at the lack of leadership, and helpless to stop the cycle of violence.
Even through all the noise, it is clear many people have felt the same. Moments of crisis like the one we're in now demand a lot from us emotionally, asking scared people in pain to hold the weight of many conflicting truths in our hearts at once. Zero-sum thinking is tempting, providing a false sense of certainty, a justified rejection of compassion. It’s also dangerous—all manner of atrocities follow when people believe they have no choice; that, in their circumstances, the ends justify the means.
It's a cliche, but it's true: Hurt people hurt people. As political scientist Seva Gunitsky tweeted last month, "You know intergenerational trauma is real because the two nationalities most victimized by fascism are currently waging two proudly genocidal military campaigns."
As both a scholar of genocide and Soviet history, and as the American daughter of a Ukrainian Jew who survived Hitler and Stalin, fled Soviet repression as a refugee for Israel, and ended up in the US, only to fall for Fox News—wow, did I feel that. My people's trauma is on full display in multiple wars, and I hate it. Despite living a remarkably secure life compared to my ancestors, disillusionment has still knocked on my door many times. It's come for all of us of late. Which makes it all the more important that we do not let it win.
As I write this, Israel's ground invasion of Gaza is underway, with all the horrors for Gazans that it brings. The day it began, the IDF blocked all communications, cutting off power and internet in Gaza so we couldn't hear or see the extent of the atrocities. Nothing in this alleged strategy to eliminate Hamas suggests the lives of the hostages or of Palestinian civilians have been given a second thought. With over 9000 Gazans dead, and Hamas leaders in Qatar and their tunnels still relatively untouched, it's hard to accept that this invasion serves a purpose beyond bloody, indiscriminate revenge—or, in the worst case, a second Nakba. I feel sick watching Bibi and Hamas drag the world into the abyss, with the US courting global catastrophe by lighting billions on fire to prolong an unwinnable armed conflict.
For Palestinians, the existential threat is immediate and ongoing, as people in Gaza cannot escape the bombs and now, the tanks. In the West Bank, there are horrifying reports of prisoners being tortured, and fundamentalist settlers armed by the state continuing to expel Palestinians from their land, and pogrom their villages; in East Jerusalem, the state continues demolishing Palestinian homes. Every day there are stories of entire families killed in Gaza while trying to flee south following the IDF's forced evacuation order, many of them with nowhere to go. Meanwhile, air strikes have only escalated. The IDF has already confirmed it has hit 11,000 targets, many of which were civilian buildings. Most recently, and horrifically, they bombed Gaza's largest refugee camp, two days in a row, killing over 100 people. There are so many dead, hospitals and morgues have run out of space, and Gazans are stuck burying bodies in mass graves.
What do these atrocities solve? Who does this free or make safe? Certainly not Israelis, who overwhelmingly blame Netanyahu's policies for leaving them vulnerable to attack, as whatever tenuous sense of security they had was pulled out from underneath them, and all the gains they'd made regionally evaporated overnight. And certainly not Palestinians, who have suffered decades of occupation and statelessness with no end in sight, only to experience the disruption of a status quo that was already killing them: Over 200 Palestinians were killed by the IDF and militant settlers in 2023 even before the war began. The threats and conditions facing each are not the same, but at base, they share an existential fear that their people won't survive to see the aftermath of this conflict. And even if they do, how much of their humanity will remain?
It's especially disturbing watching Israeli officials declare holy wars, and talk of wiping Gazans out, flattening them, or forcibly expelling them. Jews have been on the receiving end of all the above many times over, and it's sickening knowing it's being inflicted on Palestinians in my name. They heard Hamas leaders boast about cleansing the land of Jews and are itching to outdo them: Over 2 million people, half of them minors, remain stuck without food, water, fuel, or shelter in a high-density death trap as bombs rain down, including along the very evacuation routes that were allegedly to take Palestinians to safety.
As Hamas' atrocities beget Israeli atrocities, the absolute worst people are benefitting from the suffering and chaos. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are taking advantage of the chaos and using Palestinian pain for their own political ends. Iran's proxies in Yemen and Lebanon keep threatening to expand the war. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party is using Israel as vindication of their own Islamophobic ethnonationalism. It's easier for corrupt authoritarians to entrench power, hollow out institutions, and silence people in times of crisis. It also doesn’t help that Netanyahu knows people want his head when this war is over—naturally, he just announced the second phase of the war would be a long one. It's an open secret that Netanyahu and Hamas have fed off one another for years, neither wanting a two-state solution to succeed. We're seeing the results of their efforts now, and why it's disastrous to empower authoritarians who promise the illusion of security with a dose of repression. With the illusion gone, repression has skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, Arab leaders, most of whom had previously normalized relations with Israel, are facing populist rage and discontent at home. This seems by design: Israel was about to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia for the first time when Hamas attacked, and now weeks later, Jordan has recalled its ambassador. Diplomacy deteriorated early on when Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled a summit with US President Joe Biden over horrifying—but to this day, disputed—reports, first blaming Israel, then Islamic Jihad, for the October 17 bombing of Al Ahli hospital, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. It was a pressure cooker moment in a pressure cooker conflict, an outpouring waiting for a vessel. Unverified headlines about the incident led to angry protests outside Israeli embassies; Hezbollah calling for a global day of jihad; the burning of synagogues in Berlin, Tunis, and Spain; and continued violence in the West Bank.
Palestinian scholar Iyar el-Baghdadi tweeted about the hospital blast, and the furor it inspired, “This is no longer about a specific hospital and what happened there. The news [was] a watershed moment for a lot of pent up anger about a million things, bottled up for a long time, to explode. Confirming or debunking won't help. This is no longer about facts but about psychology.” The readiness of so many to believe the worst about each other, to blame entire peoples for the cynical actions of criminal, extremist leadership, to oversimplify a complex conflict, parrot violent propaganda and disinformation, and harass anyone calling for us to find our shared humanity is jarring. If anything, we've become disillusioned with each other.
The war has triggered a global backlash as dissent is quashed, and antisemitic and Islamaphobic hate crimes rise dramatically. Anti-war protestors have been arrested around the world, including in Israel, the US, UK, Germany, France, Egypt, and Bahrain. In Chicago, a Palestinian American boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was killed by his landlord. In Dagestan, a mob stormed the airport looking for Jewish passengers. Synagogues around the globe have been defaced, Jewish and Muslim university students harassed. Palestinian Israelis have been arrested for liking social media posts, and families of hostages have been harassed for demanding a ceasefire and prisoner swap. Calls ranging from pauses to peace talks and an immediate ceasefire, no matter who they’re from, have largely been ignored by the people who most need to hear them.
Also on the chopping block: international humanitarian law. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Putin's impunity for war crimes in Syria was a turning point for the international system, a pure display of might makes right. Now, Russia, China, and Iran are watching as the West actively funds and arms war crimes in Gaza. Drawing tons of criticism, the US has not laid down any red lines for Israel, like conditioning funding or weapons deliveries upon them not being used against Palestinian civilians; as well as vetoing multiple UN Security Council resolutions calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire. What good are the Geneva and Genocide Conventions when they can be vetoed into oblivion? Who actually ends up before the International Criminal Court? When the moral authority and legitimacy of legal institutions are gone, rule of law goes with them. This emboldens bad actors to do their worst, just because they can.
As I’ve watched the last couple weeks unfold, I've sought out voices of compassion and reason, for informed people who, even as they grieve, still speak with moral clarity and a sense of our shared humanity. They doexist—they're primarily Arab and Jewish—but they're outnumbered by masses of uninformed people publicly stumbling through this, and far too many racist posts, statements, and signs justifying the ethnic cleansing of one side or the other. Even outside of reporting on Al Ahli, Western media coverage has been a mess, reminding many of 9/11: Muslim TV anchors sidelined; Palestinian commentators canceled; unverified, sensationalist reports spread; internal dissent silenced. Social media, especially Twitter—once a vital source for verifying breaking news—is rampant with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and disinformation: violent propaganda, bloody videos, memed history, unchecked rage, and nihilistic, binary thinking. In short, we are collectively struggling to cope with a spiraling situation.
In all of this, many have gotten bogged down in ranking people's suffering. It's difficult but necessary to accept that cyclical violence, institutional collapse, and mass atrocities can happen anywhere, and have happened everywhere at some point in history, that no people are solely oppressors or oppressed, or bleed differently than any other. We're all capable of electing dictators, of succumbing to reactionary short-term thinking. We're also all capable of putting even the most egregious grievances aside, of caring more about being at peace than vengeance, and accepting that our safety and freedom depends on the safety and freedom of our neighbors.
Explanations for the current global crises are not an exercise in judgment or morality, especially when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Explanations, at their best, seek to understand the human condition, and how history and life experience affect people's subjective, emotional truth. Making sense of those myths, traumas, beliefs—often impervious to logic or reality—is critical to understanding what shapes and motivates people, and states, to behave the way they do. We're stuck with people as they are, not as we want them to be. You can't understand disillusionment without knowing the illusions that preceded it.
October 7 and all that has followed uprooted several stubborn myths, for better and for worse. As Amjad Iraqi wrote for +972, a psychological barrier broke with Hamas' assault:
“Israel’s mass protest movement…has consciously kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most [Israelis] still clung to the illusion that the current structures of permanent rule could deliver safety for Israelis and remain compatible with their claim to democracy. That bubble has now irreparably burst. But Israelis, who have been shifting politically rightward for years, are far from questioning or recalculating their commitment to iron rule.”
It was obvious to me, especially after a troubling visit to the military courts in the West Bank over a decade ago, that the occupation was rotting Israeli institutions from within, and that rule of law and democracy couldn't exist with parallel, unequal systems. It felt frankly delusional to think the Israeli state could repress Palestinians in the West Bank under one system, keep Gaza isolated with another, and systemically discriminate against Arab Israelis, all without the militarization and repression of Palestinian rights eventually extending to Jewish Israelis, too. But people believe what they believe.
Endless cycles of violence, democratic backsliding, and threats of institutional collapse make for scary times—and I, for one, am terrified of what’s to come. What does it look like when the bubble bursts? What fills the vacuum? The answer is rarely anything good. Idealogues are especially prone to nihilism, and the horseshoe theory, that the far-right and far-left meet at the extremes, has become a truism. The points of a horseshoe don't actually touch, though. What the extremes share is the void: "Death to Arabs" and "Kill the Jews."
Like any supremacist ideology, both are inherently anti-democratic. But people choosing between a meaningless life of suffering, and a life of suffering, but for a cause, will always choose the latter. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich documented the collapse of the USSR through oral histories of everyday people as they experienced it. There are romantics and cynics, intelligentsia and party flacks, peasants and city dwellers, many with mixed feelings about both communism and capitalism, but all having suffered under each.
In her introduction, "Remarks from an Accomplice," Alexievich describes growing up as a believer in communism: "Disillusionment came later." She writes about how people reacted to the archives opening after perestroika, when regular people finally began learning about the vast crimes committed by the Communist Party—that their heroes were mass murderers, and their neighbors and relatives their executioners.
"People read newspapers and magazines and sat in stunned silence,” she writes. “They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well." Why was truth the enemy? As one interviewee put it, "Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why…In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him."
One woman, whose teenage son died by suicide, remembers screaming at her own mother, "What did we hear from you our whole lives? Throw yourself under a tank, go down in an airplane for your Motherland. Heroic death." I see the obvious echos here of Russia's invasion of Ukraine; but I'm also reminded of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans devoted to exposing the violent reality of the occupation. The issue of complicity, especially in atrocity, is at the heart of so much of the hand-wringing we're seeing today in Gaza, and how people have responded to it. Who are the victims, and who are the perpetrators? As with all things, it depends who you ask and how far back you want to go. Two stateless people were pitted against each other by imperial and regional powers playing dispossession dominos, leaving enough valid grievances to last many lifetimes. The unfortunate truth is that Jewish people's right to self-determination ultimately came at Palestinians’ expense, and the establishment of a Palestinian state coexisting alongside Israel is the best shot we have at rectifying this and undermining groups like Hamas and their successors. The conflict wasn't always so lopsided, but insofar as Palestinians today are concerned, nuclear-armed, US-backed Israel has become Goliath.
This has created an enormous rupture in the identity of Jews around the world, for whom the existential threat feels perennial, who are scared of going to synagogue while watching masses of people gather against Israel, most of whom are protesting for a ceasefire and Palestinian human rights, but a significant portion of whom blame all Jews for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, and think Netanyahu speaks for us all. No matter our politics, we’re haunted by the knowledge that as the violence wears on, more and more people out there wish the Nazis had finished the job.
None of this excuses flattening Gaza or ethnically cleansing Palestine of Palestinians. I do still believe that Jewish people need a homeland, one country that won't expel us; I literally wouldn't exist but for Israel providing refuge to stateless Jews. But I also don't believe that right is exclusive, or that it trumps the rights of Palestinians to the same things. I deeply resent the implication that my refusal to support the genocidal policies of a foreign autocrat makes me an antisemite, a supporter of terrorism, or less Jewish. Quite the opposite: I believe and have watched the current government's vengeful, reckless, overreaching policies make Jews everywhere more of a target.
So what do we do about all this? As people process the loss of their old beliefs, they're faced with the option of hardening into something more extreme, or freeing themselves from old constraints and reimagining a better future. It's a choice between hope or revenge. But reimagining requires a shared reality, a rejection of bigotry, and people who seek complexity, not propaganda. It requires empathy, and an ability to see each other's humanity, especially when we're afraid. It requires choosing leaders who don't want to see the world burn.
There are people all over the world already doing the work to end cycles of violence, who know that as bad as things get, they could always be worse. In Israel, Standing Together is a grassroots peace movement led by Jewish and Palestinian Israelis standing courageously against the tide of war. I recently attended a Storytelling Summit hosted by Futures Without Violence at the Courage Museum in San Francisco. The museum, which opens in 2025, is built on the belief, backed by science, that when we hear each others' stories, and see each other as people, we empathize. That as social creatures, we're built to connect and be in community. That this is how we heal ourselves.
The good news is that this healing is possible. But it can only begin from a place of safety, something too many have not been guaranteed. It's up to us to demand human rights, rule of law, and freedom and democracy for all, and to push for policies that strengthen them. Because as disillusioned as I am with the institutions meant to deliver these aspirations, I still believe in people. I understand that violence comes from a place of despair, and that hope is a precursor to peace. Even knowing what I know, I choose to be hopeful, to use my voice and what power I have to push for people everywhere to live boring lives, free from violence. It’s the only way forward for all of us.
[post_title] => We Must Not Give In To Nihilism
[post_excerpt] => How people respond to disillusionment shapes history. Without hope, we're doomed to repeat it.
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One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup?
Most Americans believe that the United States Constitution guarantees equal rights to women under the law. It’s only natural. Women in the U.S. can vote, own property, drive cars, fly planes, serve in the military, get divorced, and establish credit in our own names. We make up around 47 percent of the workforce and have held senior positions in business, law, and government for decades. From 1973 to 2022, we even had federally protected abortion rights. We continue to be underpaid, mistreated in low-wage jobs, and underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, but most Americans believe that women are—and should be—equal citizens.
Under current law, however, we are not: For women to attain the legal status most assume we already have, the U.S. would need to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced in Congress 100 years ago this year, and introduced in every session of Congress since.
Depending on who you ask, American women do have some constitutional protection already. Some legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have asserted that women are “persons” and thus covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which reads, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But others disagree, and figures as diverse as the late archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee sex equality—something Ginsburg saw as an obstacle to full and lasting equality for women and Scalia saw as a fact not necessarily in need of a remedy.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the stakes are higher than they have been in 50 years. The ERA would make gender equality explicit—which has been its purpose since it was first introduced. In 1923, women’s rights crusader Alice Paul authored what was originally known as the Lucretia Mott Amendment, in honor of the Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights activist. The text declared that, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Over the years, this text has evolved, and today, the amendment reads, “Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.” But the spirit and purpose remain the same. (Supporters say that “sex” is synonymous with “gender” for the purposes of the amendment, which would apply to women of all gender identities and sexual orientations.)
It very nearly came to pass in the 1970s. Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), then the powerful long-time chair of the House Judiciary Committee, had refused to hold a hearing on the ERA for over 30 years, when he finally succumbed to pressure from a new group of younger female legislators. The ERA passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification, at which point 22 states voted to ratify it. By 1977, that number had increased to 35 of the 38 states required for it to become part of the Constitution. After around 100,000 supporters—described at the time by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, the ERA’s bitterest foe, as “a combination of Federal employees and radicals and lesbians”—marched in Washington in 1978, Congress voted to extend the original ratification deadline by three years. As supporters scrambled to reach the required threshold, lawmakers in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to rescind their states’ initial ratification. The extended deadline expired in 1982.
A major cause of this disrupted momentum was Schlafly herself. Books and television series have told the story of Schlafly, a vicious bigot who led the well-orchestrated opposition campaign that defeated the ERA, at least temporarily, at the dawn of the Reagan era. Schlafly is widely credited with having halted the amendment at a time when it enjoyed broad bipartisan support, including from then President Richard Nixon, and was all but guaranteed to pass. But the ERA foundered in that era for other reasons, too. While supporters were going on weeks-long hunger strikes and selling their blood to raise money for the cause, opponents had personal wealth and possible assistance from shadowy corporate interests and far-right organizations like the John Birch Society on their side. Motivated by religious zeal, fear, and a feeling of being disrespected, opponents of the ERA caught supporters off-guard and, ultimately, out-organized them.
Why the ERA hasn’t become a recognized part of the Constitution in the last 30 years is less well-known, but not necessarily difficult to deduce. In recent years, it has often felt like society is moving backward and forward at the same time. The election of Donald Trump and elevation of alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the cratering of women’s workforce gains and deepening of the child care crisis that accompanied a global pandemic, and the overturning of Roe have made earlier eras look positively rosy in comparison. At the same time, social media has fueled and distorted a limited feminist resurgence. This new wave delivered the #MeToo movement, a renewal of feminist organizing around abortion rights and the ERA, and a predictable cycle of counterreaction, an earlier manifestation of which Susan Faludi memorably documented in her 1991 classic, Backlash. (American women might reasonably wonder if that backlash ever ended.)
Still, there has been progress. Fueled in part by anger at Trump’s election, organizers successfully pursued ratification of the ERA in Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of states that have ratified the amendment to the required 38. (Some argue that certain states’ decision to rescind ratification means the ERA has never achieved the required number; others say those rescissions are legally invalid and should be ignored.) President Biden affirmed his support for the ERA as recently as August. While running for president, Kamala Harris vowed to get it done in her first 100 days in office. With Trump out and Biden/Harris in, what’s holding it up?
Today’s advocates believe that the ERA deadline, which only appears in the preamble and not the text of the amendment itself, can be removed or extended by Congress, or even, if the threshold for ratification has been met, ignored altogether. Yet the Biden administration—which published a new memo in 2022 essentially punting the issue to Congress and the courts—has indirectly prevented this by failing to withdraw a 2020 Trump administration memo which stated, in part, “Congress has constitutional authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment…Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired.” Additionally, there is enduring opposition to the ERA from the reactionary right, which now includes nearly every senior GOP leader; behind-the-scenes opposition from the business interests that fund both major parties to varying degrees; and the reluctance of top Democratic officials to make it a priority.
The ERA has always had bipartisan support, but in the modern era, most of its advocates are Democrats. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) are the only congressional Republicans who support it today. Yet a 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support the ERA, which suggests that the Republican Party is, on this issue, profoundly out of step with its base. Still, it shouldn’t matter: Even with the GOP’s lurch to the right and subsequent withdrawal of support, the Democratic Party—which controlled at least one branch of government from 1992 to 2001, 2006 to 2016, and 2020 to today—should theoretically have been able to deliver by now on an amendment that most Americans want.
One theory as to why they haven’t is that if the ERA is finally adopted, it could diminish Democrats’ ability to raise money and swing elections by emphasizing ever-present threats to abortion, LGBTQ, and women’s rights. Those rights are indeed under threat, but adopting the ERA would strengthen them considerably—which is why the modern GOP so strongly opposes it, and why Democrats should rally behind it. Enshrining gender equality in state constitutions has already helped protect abortion rights at the state level; New Mexico’s state supreme court recently struck down a state law banning the funding of abortion-related services, citing the state’s ERA, which guarantees “equality of rights for persons regardless of sex.” If finally adopted, it would do the same at the national level. But without the ERA, it will be difficult and potentially impossible to safeguard those rights for the long term.
While the GOP has been largely hostile to abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party has not defended them nearly as forcefully or consistently. Although many activists urged top Democrats to pass a federal law protecting abortion rights before the Dobbs decision, they essentially said that their hands were tied: Although they could and did pass such legislation in the House, it would never survive in the Senate. Right-wingers are as or more committed to banning abortion today as they were 50 years ago, while pro-choice supporters haven’t been as consistent, motivated, or likely to base their vote on abortion—although that is beginning to shift in light of Dobbs. As recently as 2019, some advocates insisted that the ERA has nothing to do with abortion rights; today, one of its main selling points is that it will protect them.
Corporate opposition to the ERA has remained steady, if covert. The amendment would make it easier to sue companies that pay women unequally or otherwise discriminate against them, which is why the insurance industry has historically opposed it. As Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, explained in 1982, “The real opposition [to the ERA], behind the visible political opposition, has been the special corporate interests that profit from sex discrimination.” In 2010, a blogger for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approvingly quoted a characterization of equal pay advocates as possessing a “Scrooge-like fetish for money.” And as late as 2019, a Chamber of Commerce spokesman declined to comment on the ERA’s prospects, citing instead the organization’s support for the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity but would not provide protection as durable as the ERA—and which continues to languish in Congress.
Other dynamics are evolving, slowly but surely. While the causes that motivate the religious right haven’t changed much in 50 years—aside from a shift from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans children—the ERA opponents of today have had to pivot from overt sexism to co-opting the language of equality. In 1970, you could say of ERA advocates, as then Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) did, “Now, if you want to convince me that ladies desire to be drafted, you send me some sweet young things in here of draft age and let them tell me that.” Today, opponents are often reduced to arguing that the ERA is unnecessary because American women already have equality under the law, or, in some cases, mimicking the language of advocates in an effort to sound more mainstream and modern. (See anti-ERA Republican Sen. John Kennedy’s recent declaration that, “Radical lawmakers cannot erase women or their rights from our Constitution,” which is, not coincidentally, similar to what a supporter might say of him.)
How can we move forward today? Modern supporters argue that the ERA has already been ratified and U.S. archivist Colleen Shogan, the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration, need only recognize and publish it. This year lawmakers have introduced two major resolutions which support that interpretation. In January, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Lisa Murkowski and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and others introduced a joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the ERA by removing what supporters see as an arbitrary and rescindable ratification deadline. In July, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) introduced a joint resolution stating that the ERA has already been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and calling on Shogan to certify and publish it. “In terms of which strategy is better, in my view, it's 100% the publication strategy,” Nicole Vorrasi Bates, executive director of the pro-gender equality nonprofit Shattering Glass, Inc., told me.
In response to questions about the best strategy for getting the ERA into the Constitution, what she sees as the primary obstacles to doing so, and why the Biden administration has not prioritized it, Rep. Pressley’s office sent a written statement which read, in part, “[T]he only thing standing in the way of the ERA becoming the 28th Amendment is the arbitrary deadline imposed decades ago.” The statement also explained that she was both a co-lead on Rep. Bush’s July resolution and had introduced her own because, in her opinion, “We must use every tool available to get this over the finish line.”
Gillibrand has said that she also hopes to compel the Biden administration to call on Shogan to act or change the Senate’s filibuster rules so that measures like the ERA would need only a simple majority to move forward. Kate Kelly, author of Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women and Queer People Who Shaped the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Rights Amendment, said the “most charitable interpretation” of the Biden administration’s foot-dragging is that the president is “waiting for the moment where enough people care, where enough of the next generation pick up the fight [and] turn it into an electoral issue, that its power and potential will be fully realized.” From the administration’s perspective, she explained, there may be some risk of creating a “constitutional crisis” if the president affirms that the ERA is part of the Constitution and the Supreme Court rejects that view. “Until the groundswell of support for the [ERA] in the modern day is equal to that potential risk, there is [from Biden’s point of view] no advantage to proceeding,” she said.
As it has in the past, a strong nationwide feminist movement with a coherent set of demands and demonstrated ability to disrupt business as usual and withhold or deliver votes could exert meaningful pressure on Congress and the White House. We don’t have that. Although support for abortion rights is strongerthan it has been in decades, the movement to defend abortion rights—a critical component of the U.S. feminist movement from the 1960s to today—remains divided on vision and strategy. The task of the coming years is to build a cohesive one. As we learned from the partially successful battle for abortion rights in the 1960s and the heartbreaking defeat of the ERA in the 70s, progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Even constitutional amendments can be undone. The ERA, like anything of value, is worth fighting for. And American women of all stripes can’t wait another century for the law to give us our due.
[post_title] => It's Time to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment
[post_excerpt] => One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup?
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I enjoyed the audiobook of this weird, charming, and on occasion deeply disturbing novel. Eleanor is a one-of-a-kind protagonist, not easily likable, yet I was immediately invested in her journey. She’ll stretch your imagination in unexpected ways. —Anna Lind-Guzik
If there's a new translation of Annie Ernaux out in the world, you best believe I'm getting my hands on it ASAP. Her first since she won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, this is Ernaux at her best: sexy, a little melancholic, complex, intimate. It's a wonderful meditation on desire, on aging, and on what drives an autobiographical writer to write about themselves. —Gina Mei
This month I reread a short story by Claire Keegan, "So Late in the Day." I heard of it on the New Yorker Radio Hour; the author George Saunders chose it and thought that Keegan could be compared to Anton Chechov. If that does not get your attention, Saunders also commented on how every line in the story had meaning, so it was worth reading once and then going back to notice its layers.
Keegan had challenged herself to come up with a story that was super tense but where that tension and suspense were not driven by the narrative. What she came up with is a story about misogyny and gender roles in relationships. I'm obsessed with it on so many levels—the writing, the craft, the message. It's a story that stays with you. —Elyssa Dole
This month, I delved into Wonderful Ways to Love a Child by Judy Ford with the goal of enhancing my relationship and communication with my daughter. This insightful book offers a plethora of practical and creative techniques for building stronger connections with children. Through relatable anecdotes and heartfelt wisdom, Ford underscores the importance of spending quality time, being an attentive listener, and maintaining positive communication to nurturing these essential relationships. Whether you're a parent or caregiver, this book serves as an invaluable guide to enriching the bonds you share with the children in your life. —Loleta Ross
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures has been one of the best books I've read this year! Sabrina Imbler explores their queer and cultural identities through shimmery life in the ocean in 10 essays. Once I started to read the first chapter, about how goldfish can actually thrive in wild waters (some growing as heavy as bowling balls!) and how this reflects their experience coming out, I couldn't put it down. This book is a beautiful reflection of life and acts as a reminder that every goldfish has the tenacity to live if only given the chance to escape their small bowl. —Kiera Wright-Ruiz
[post_title] => What We Read in September
[post_excerpt] => The staff's recommendations for your fall TBR pile.
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And why more effective climate multilateralism is how we can fix it.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released last year, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.” In other words, very little has changed from what we’ve known for decades: Climate change is real, it’s largely our fault, and we still aren’t doing nearly enough to reverse it.
After meticulous review of more than 14,000 papers published in the most prestigious journals, scientists from all 195 countries have once again firmly established that the Earth’s temperature has been steadily trending upwards since the Industrial Revolution. Climate disasters are worryingly increasing, and rising summer temperatures are already reaching levels unbearable for humans, ecosystems, and wildlife. Meanwhile, violent floods and unexpected rainstorms are ravaging cities and towns around the world. There are also the less perceptible and slower-onset symptoms, which have only further aggravated the bigger climate crisis. The North Pole’s steady decline, for example, is already wreaking havoc on vulnerable ecosystems and communities, decreasing coastal land for Small Island Developing States due to rising sea levels. Newly and acutely exposed, these nations have been forced to risk their lives and their little resources to cope without larger international support.
Echoing the movie Don’t Look Up, science is once again telling us that climatic distortions are happening, and every day the dimension and frequency of those distortions will only get more severe. Yet, despite the strong IPCC evidence and the current lived reality of climate impacts, certain segments of society, including large swaths of the media and various industries and governments, would still prefer not to “look up” at all. For them, opting for business-as-usual remains the more comfortable and profitable option, perpetuating a hazardous path of inaction. Even more concerning, these inactive groups have had a large influence in critical spaces for climate action, including recent international climate negotiations.
Since 1992, governments worldwide have convened at least twice a year, functioning under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), with the goal of increasing climate action. It is at these conferences that the states have adopted previous conventions, including the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement: The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) serves as the “supreme decision-making body of the Convention” and the key organ for the implementation of the year’s negotiations.
However, in recent years, momentum has stalled. While the urgency and need for climate action has only grown, the tide of inaction has, as well. The pace at which we are fighting climate change is too slow in comparison with how quickly severe climate effects have accelerated. After I returned from the Bonn Climate Change Conference (SB58) this past June, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated: Slow action amidst rapid climate change is only going to lead to more critical scenarios—and the only path out of it is embracing multilateralism.
The vital role of climate multilateralism
The literature on climate change qualifies it as a “common concern of humankind,” reinforcing its global nature and, therefore, the shared responsibility of every country to confront it. At the same time, climate multilateralism acknowledges that certain countries share a greater responsibility for causing it, and should contribute more resources to its solutions. Developed nations, historically responsible for the vast majority of emissions that are today heating up our planet, must take the lead in reducing them and provide more vulnerable nations with the necessary resources to tackle the climate impacts they’ve caused. Similarly, groups that are disproportionately affected by climate change—including non-party stakeholders—deserve representation when it comes to discussing its solutions, an expansion of the concept that the UNFCCC defines as "inclusive multilateralism.”
The significance of climate multilateralism cannot be overstated; it has been the bedrock for previous crucial negotiations and agreements. Without it, we would be trying to face the global climate threat as individual nations rather than a cohesive whole, leading to fragmented strategies and inefficient outcomes. But it also comes with its own problems—less with the concept of climate multilateralism itself, and more with enhancing its efficacy.
"In other words, very little has changed from what we’ve known for decades: Climate change is real, it’s largely our fault, and we still aren’t doing nearly enough to reverse it."
Slow progress in climate negotiations
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate negotiations have struggled to make major progress, due to everything from administrative issues to more fundamental challenges, like the constant obstacle of the fossil fuel industry’s interest in preventing it. But perhaps one of the biggest hurdles for progress has been how effectively time is spent at these conferences, and how negotiations are prioritized. For example, I had the opportunity to follow, as an observer, the Just Transition program negotiations in Bonn. This program advocates for a global shift “from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy,” and is one of multiple, ongoing negotiations that aims to ensure equitable outcomes when considering climate mitigation and adaptation. Initially, the discussions focused on making sure participating nations understood the concept of Just Transition, and different views emerged. Some developed countries stressed a narrow view of the program, connecting it only to labor and energy aspects, and excluding how various communities might potentially be affected by it. Alternatively, some developing countries, alongside a few developed ones, advocated for broadening the program’s framework, arguing for the necessity of fair transitions for different communities, and a more extensive scope beyond energy issues.
Having heard the discussion, and having done additional research on Just Transition, I was hopeful. These kinds of debates were necessary for global forums, and any agreements reached could eventually contribute to more commitments and implemented actions. However, my optimism dwindled during the second week, when—rather than continue with the negotiations—the negotiators chose to dedicate two days to discussing when they might be able to schedule a workshop on the topic for the parties and stakeholders interested.
While workshops are undeniably invaluable for complex issues, which in turn can facilitate agreements on more substantive matters, spending two sessions picking a date for a workshop seemed both inefficient and a waste of resources to me. Gathering delegations from almost every country is costly, so it’s crucial attendees prioritize agendas and methodologies that actually drive progress on climate action—not stall it further.
Sitting in the Just Transition negotiations, it became clear another crucial aspect affecting the efficacy of climate multilateralism is fairness. Delegations from less developed countries, often smaller in number, rely heavily on climate multilateralism in order to be heard. These nations, assuming huge efforts, send delegations to represent the voices of the most vulnerable communities from their respective countries. It is against the equity principle of the climate regime, then, to prioritize discussions on topics that while important, could be addressed elsewhere. This bureaucratization of negotiations impedes agreements on more substantive and relevant areas, and ignores the financial and operative efforts required of less developed countries, often preventing them from participating. Indeed, during the Just Transition program negotiation, it was the EU who began the debate on the date of the workshop, disregarding the efforts and budgeting of poorer countries and organizations, hoping to return to their home countries with more substantive and positive news than news of a forthcoming workshop.
Oil and gas lobbylists: Wolves in sheep's clothing
Another critical factor affecting climate negotiations is the substantive participation of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry. These lobbyists, usually sponsored by countries with fossil fuel interests, have a clear objective: to impede and delay meaningful climate action. According to Global Witness, at COP 27, 636 registered fossil fuel lobbyists participated in climate talks, representing an increase of over 25% from COP 26. The same report points out there were more fossil fuel lobbyists than delegates from the ten countries most impacted by climate change at the same conference.
Although these lobbyists have the legitimate right to attend climate negotiations, their immense financial resources and support from oil-producing nations causes them to be overrepresented and to wield too much power. In addition, many of them are not transparent about the interests they represent, often adopting environmental or government badges to camouflage their advocacy against climate action.
A paradigmatic case that highlights the potential dangers of this was last year, when BP’s chair, Bernard Looney, alongside four other BP employees, attended COP 27 as delegates of Mauritania, a country where the company holds major investments. Mauritania, meanwhile, is a country that has been dramatically affected by climate change, showing the conflict of interest between the country’s most vulnerable communities and the people sent to represent them.
Fortunately, there have been positive steps toward promoting transparency and legitimacy in climate negotiations. During the last plenary of SB58, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell announced that from now on, “every single badged participant attending the event will be required to list their affiliation and relationship to that organization.” This significant transparency measure aims to ensure greater accountability for attendees, especially regarding the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate negotiations. During COP 28, scheduled for later this year, delegates will be required to fill a form designating the organization they represent, enhancing the integrity of negotiations and potentially combating some factors delaying progress.
As the pace of climate effects exceeds the progress of climate multilateralism, it becomes imperative to rethink and improve the way that our discussions and agreements take place. Climate multilateralism is indeed the most essential instrument for attaining global agreements and actions, making it crucial to enhance its efficacy in alignment with the urgent climate crisis—and we must take steps to ensure its success.
Transparency measures, combined with continued vigilance and accountability, are a good first step to help safeguard the integrity of climate negotiations. So is rethinking how best to delegate time and efforts at the conferences themselves: Effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness are all vital to maximizing and fostering actionable commitments, strengthening climate multilateralism, and galvanizing collective efforts towards a more resilient and sustainable world. By acknowledging the urgency of the situation and collectively working towards decisive action, we can build a more secure and thriving future for generations to come. Now, we just have to do it.
[post_title] => Why Global Climate Negotiations Have Stalled
[post_excerpt] => And why more effective climate multilateralism is how we can fix it.
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