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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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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An exclusive excerpt from Anne Elizabeth Moore's "Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes."
The Coronavirus. People who aren’t worried about the coronavirus. People who are too worried about the coronavirus. The possibility that I am not worried enough about the coronavirus. Case counts. The reliability of case counts. The vaccines. People who aren’t vaccinated. The reasons people aren’t vaccinated. Getting vaccinated. The mRNA vaccines. My thyroid gland, thrown into disarray by the mRNA vaccine and apparently increasing my blood pressure to dangerous levels. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster that is not an mRNA vaccine. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster at all. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county that the coronavirus is real. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster as an immunocompromised person. Explaining to a pharmacist in a rural red county what being immunocompromised means. Convincing my doctor that the mRNA vaccine caused my thyroid disruption, the first I’ve experienced in over a decade, occasioned exclusively and to the day by my second mRNA vaccine booster. A new coronavirus strain. The effectiveness of masks. Buying more masks. Masking at outdoor gatherings. Transmission at outdoor gatherings. Outdoor gatherings. Being around other people. Not being around other people. The large and embarrassing zit that emerged on my cheek a few days back despite the fact that I am an adult, wash frequently, and do not consume sugar. My autoimmune diseases. The medications for my autoimmune diseases. The vitamins and supplements I take to counteract the medications for my autoimmune diseases. The likelihood of accruing more autoimmune diseases. The likelihood of accruing other diseases because of my autoimmune diseases. Being immunocompromised during a pandemic. Buying clothes during a pandemic. Going outside during a pandemic. Remaining inside during a pandemic. My left forefinger, currently swollen. My blood pressure, still high. My concentration, largely shot. Oh man, a buncha stuff. So much stuff!
What comes flooding in when I have a moment to breathe. The dead tree outside my window, and the path it will take when it falls. Mowing the lawn. Trimming the lawn. The survival of the monarch butterflies. What will happen to my cat if I don’t take her to the vet soon. What will happen to my cat if she keeps eating leaves from my fig tree. What will happen to my cat if I have a heart attack. Writing a will. Finding someone to sign my will as a witness who won’t freak out about my impending death. Refinishing my furniture in a pleasing enough manner that the beneficiary named in my will won’t just throw it away. The calcium supplements I have been taking, triple the recommended dosage, which turns out to cause high blood pressure. New lab results. More lab tests. Where to drop my sharps container. Paying for lab tests. My dwindling grant funding. Inflation. Winter heating bills. Utilities costs. Author-website maintenance costs. The cost of a new computer. Word processing software subscriptions. Book prices. Food prices. Cat food prices. Finding time to run. How running will affect my achy right knee. How running will affect my left leg. Not finding time to run. Where I can go to swim. Where I can go to swim during a spike in case counts. Focusing on my personal physical health during a global health crisis. Going out to eat with my food restrictions. Going out to eat during a period in American history where setting boundaries around personal health is unwelcome. Cooking for myself, again. Another new coronavirus strain. A new vaccine. Getting the new vaccine. This sore throat. This persistent cough. This fatigue. This diminished capacity to smell. This negative coronavirus-test result. Coughing in public after a negative coronavirus-test result. Coughing in public for any reason. People casually mentioning that they just tested positive for the coronavirus but feel fine. People who would never test for the coronavirus but clearly do not feel fine. This essay. Other essays. Writing. Not writing. Publishing. Not publishing. The publishing industry. The state of this nation’s democracy, such as it is. The avowed white supremacist who lives down the road. The Civil War reenactor up the block. The guy at the edge of the village with the flag outside his house that reads, “TRUMP 2024 FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.” The guy on the internet who tells me my feelings don’t matter. The guy on the internet who tells me I am stupid. The guy on the internet who responds to every post by telling me how hot I am. The guy on the internet who tells me he knows where I live. That my house sits on a hill that is visibly eroding. The oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The environmental repercussions of the oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The social repercussions of the oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The sheer volume of oxycodone that passes through this village. The sheer volume of guns within a five-mile vicinity of my home. How the vast majority of gun owners in this village fundamentally disagree with me on most basic matters. Not owning a gun. Owning a gun. A civil war. The current Democratic president. Any potential future Republican president. My blood pressure, now both too high and too low. Weaning myself off blood pressure medication. Getting enough calcium in my food without consuming dangerous supplements or dairy. The vitamin D supplements I have been taking too frequently, another cause of high blood pressure. How to get more vitamin D without supplements. Finding time to google every single thing I need to know more about just to survive the week. Remembering to google everything I need to know about to survive the week. Google knowing too much about me. Amazon. Amazon’s influence over publishing. Amazon’s move into housing. Amazon’s move into healthcare. That the calcium supplements I was taking at three times the dose I ordered and which substantially contributed to my high blood pressure were due to an Amazon shipping error. My Amazon rankings. Sales numbers of my current book. Sales numbers of this book. Sales numbers of my next book. Finishing my next book. Finishing this book. Writing books. Reading books. The surprise bill I just got for something that should be entirely covered by my insurance. Calling the insurance company, who tells me to call the billing department. Calling the billing department, who demands I call my RN. My RN, who was fired for refusing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and then rehired after a couple of months out of desperation and who never got vaccinated. Calling back the billing department, who failed to file my paperwork with the insurance company because they were “too busy” and who asks me to file it myself. That my very complicated disease- maintenance program relies entirely on a medical facility who will charge me three hundred dollars for a fully covered five-minute doctor visit because they’re “too busy” to send the same paperwork to someone else. Dobbs v. Jackson. The women I know who will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. The nonbinary and trans people I know who will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. All the people I will never meet because of how severely their lives will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. Whether my political organizing in response to Dobbs v. Jackson will impact my own political career. Whether or not I can have a political career in a world where people with uteruses have no bodily autonomy. Whether or not I want a political career in a world where people with uteruses have no bodily autonomy. Whether or not I want to live in a world where some people have no bodily autonomy. The kind of people who want to live in a world where some people have no bodily autonomy. Republicans. Democrats. Being told to vote in response to bad policy. Being told to vote by a political party that has more money than god. Being told to vote by the people I voted for. Being told to vote in a world where voting rights are being stripped away from increasing numbers of people. That two out of four times I have tried to vote in this village I have been told I could not. This sudden, inexplicable grief that has no identifiable origin and no end, but some days recedes while I am in the shower and stays in the background for a while, perhaps days, but at other times emerges while I am washing dishes or doing yoga or placing a forkful of salad in my mouth and causes intense chest pain and sudden tears and colors everything gray and that no amount of crying or meditating or talking to friends or sitting in the woods can alleviate in any way. Why my sunflowers have not yet opened. What is going on with my beans. The organic content of the soil in my garden. Why my herb bed isn’t filling out. Why my plum trees keep dying. What to do with all this compost. Where to get more raised beds. Wild parsnip. Buying a chain saw. Using a chain saw. Accidentally killing someone with a chain saw. And then wanting to do it again. Purposely murdering someone with a chain saw. Running for elected office. Running for elected office and then having nude pics unearthed on the internet. The kinds of people who run for office. The kinds of people who will never, ever run for office. The weird tendency my left leg has after I’ve been walking for a mile or so to sort of peter out, to stop performing at peak function, to bend less easily and not lift as high with each step, and how this appears to be a neurological, not a physical, symptom of my medications. Any neurological disease or symptom. Long COVID. Catching the coronavirus as an immunocompromised person and passing along a mutated strain. Accidentally killing someone—oh wait, that’s already listed. Mpox. Pretty much all straight white cis men. Straight white cis men who want to play devil’s advocate. Straight white cis men who just want to ask me one question about feminists. Straight white cis men who assure me they’re not racist. Straight white cis men who speak only to other straight white cis men. Introducing straight white cis men to one another in a professional capacity given the likelihood that they will develop some kind of lucrative project together, leaving me out entirely, often forgetting they ever knew me, that I introduced them, that I used to be their friend. Introducing straight white cis men to music I like. When straight white cis men express interest in my work because they are working on a similar subject. People who too aggressively want to befriend me. Obviously also people who have no interest in me. Engaging with elders in the community during a pandemic. Engaging with elders in the community in a collegial manner and immediately being treated as a sycophant. Becoming an elder in the community. Aging. Trying to behave as normal. Behaving as normal. Trying to remember what normal was. What normal was. The inexplicable knot in my stomach when I wake up every day that takes several hours to dissipate but seems really out of place because actually right now everything is fine, you know, relatively speaking. My dreams, which are often just more of the same. Sleeping, therefore. What will happen next. What will not happen next. How we will recover. Who will recover. Who will not recover.
Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance.
In the opening scene of 1999's cinematic classic 10 Things I Hate About You, guidance counselor Ms. Perky (Allison Janney) sits pert in her cardigan and pearls, tip-tapping away at her computer. "I'll be right with you," she tells a student, turning back to her PowerPC…on which she is crafting a magnum opus of a romance novel. In the film, Ms. Perky’s novel is played for laughs—a running joke, with key words like “pulsating” and “bratwurst” used to portray the luridity of her side hustle. But around that same time, in real life, an administrator at a New York University dormitory was living out a similar scene: tucked away in her office, tapping away at romance novels in between wrangling angsty students. Only this time, she was the main character.
Her name was Meg Cabot.
"It was exactly like that," Cabot told The Conversationalist shortly before Thanksgiving. Over Zoom from her longtime home in Key West, Florida, she talked a mile a minute, the charming, real-life embodiment of the chatty early-aughts heroine she's most known for: The Princess Diaries’ Mia Thermopolis. "All the kids in the dorm knew that was exactly what I was doing. I'd be on my computer when they would come in and they'd be like, 'I don't want to interrupt you, but there's a fire.'"
Cabot would put out the fires, of course. It was from that desk, though, in her tiny corner of NYU, that she'd write her first "ten or eleven" novels. At the age of 31, she’d begin publishing steamy, “pulsating” adult historical romance, before breaking into the public consciousness in 2000 with the back-to-back publication of her first young adult novels, The Princess Diaries and The Mediator: Shadowland. The rest is history. Following Disney’s smash hit movie adaptation of The Princess Diaries, Cabot's name fast became synonymous with the fun, romantic "chick lit" of the time. You an Anne Hathaway fan? You also have Meg Cabot to thank for her breakthrough role.
More than twenty years (and over 80 published novels) later, and with another Princess Diaries bookandmovie on the way, Cabot remains a powerhouse. That's not just because she's more prolific than Stephen King, who's published a comparatively paltry 65 novels in more than twice the amount of time. And it’s not just because The Princess Diariesstill makes headlines. It’s because she created something that made waves for an entire generation. For those who came of age during the early 2000s, Cabot helped redefine what books for girls and women could look like: She wrote them funny, messy—and so horny they're still getting soft-banned all over the country.
To get there, though, Cabot had to push past the judgment that's long hovered like a cloud over women's literature. At Indiana University in the 1980s, while working towards her degree in studio art, Cabot started taking creative writing classes, where professors and peers alike passed judgment on the topics she was interested in writing about. "People really looked down on romance," Cabot said. "I was writing commercial genre fiction and [my classmates] were writing literary fiction. Theirs had a lot of suicide and mine had lots of going to the mall and meeting boys." Now, she jokes that those who once mocked her choice of genre were just jealous: The kind of books she'd been working on forever turned out to be lucrative. But at the time, their response was frustrating.
The reaction, though, was nothing new. For as long as there's been literature marketed towards women, there've been people looking down on it. Because of this, Cabot kept her work to herself for years. Her first published novel, a steamy adult romance called Where Roses Grow Wild, came out in 1998 under a pen name: Patricia Cabot. She’d go on to write seven more under the same name. "I was worried about the smut factor and my grandma finding out," she remembers. From the start, Cabot proved expert in writing women and girls who were not just strong, but varied and complex; which was precisely what drew her to the genre in the first place. "Romance novels have really strong female characters, and that was hard to find [for a long time],” she said. But her entry into life as a romance author proved revelatory. Unlike those college classmates, romance readers and writers welcomed her with open arms. "It was really fun, such a supportive community," Cabot said. "That was where I belonged."
Her grandmother did eventually find out about her secret second career, too, but the smut didn't bother her. "She loved it," Cabot recalled.
For a long while, Cabot kept her day job at NYU. It was stable, and offered health insurance. She made great friends, many of whom she's still tight with to this day. Then, right as the century turned, The Princess Diaries changed everything: When Disney came knocking, Cabot knew it was her chance to jump full-time into life as an author. She took it.
"There still weren't a whole lot of funny books for girls," Cabot said about the late '90s, when she first started writing for teens. She name-checked exceptions, like Judy Blume, and Cabot's contemporary Louise Rennison, whose hilarious Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging came out in '99. But at the time, she says that most of the genre “was very message-y”: "There really wasn't this idea that YA could just be for entertainment and be fun." Cabot saw an opportunity to help shift that. Her characters weren't without morality: Cabot's books contained messages, in that they had characters with a point of view. At the same time, though, those characters got to be awkward, swoony, and feminist as fuck, too. Her characters felt real.
Cabot's adult work is well worth exploring—sharp, comedic, with a deep love of banter—but it’s her first works in YA where she really found her stride. It's also where she's had the most impact, acting as millions of millennial readers' introduction to romantic comedy, many of them through Mia Thermopolis. In The Princess Diaries series, Mia is a teen outcast who finds out she's heir to the throne of a small country called Genovia. The character went mainstream in 2001, when the Disney adaptation introduced the world to Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of her as a dorky and sweet girl just trying to survive high school. But while the movie version of the character is rightfully beloved, it's worth remembering how Cabot originally crafted her. In the books, Mia is a sunny bleeding heart, who only agrees to undergo "princess lessons" after the monarchal side of her family agrees to donate $36,500 a year to Greenpeace. The Mia of the books is progressive, a kid with a massive political streak, whose big desire—aside from kissing Michael Moscovitz—is how badly she wants to help push the world into a better place.
But while Mia had staunch political values, The Princess Diaries was never about them. Mia was just a girl flailing her way into adulthood. Just like her readers, she was deeply insecure. She was also chaotic, and yearny, and horny as hell—a wonderful throughline for many of Cabot's most memorable characters. There’s ballsy psychic Jessica Mastriani, who works with hot, motorcycle-riding bad boy Rob to track down missing children in 1-800-WHERE-R-U. In Cabot’s popular The Mediator series, we’re introduced to tough, leather-clad Suze Simon as she solves murders while flirting with the 19th Century ghost haunting her bedroom. There's also Katie Ellison in Pants On Fire, so-titled because its heroine 1) can't stop lying, and 2) can't stop cheating on her boyfriend to make out with new boys.
Cabot’s most sexually liberated YA novel, though, is Ready Or Not, the sequel to All-American Girl, in which a teen girl named Sam Madison saves the president from an attempted assassination. She falls for the president's son, and in the sequel, they decide to have sex. The book follows Sam on her path to readiness—including securing contraceptives and learning to masturbate with the bathtub faucet.
"Still to this day, All-American Girl and Ready Or Not are my most-banned books, because they deal with sex very frankly," Cabot said. "It's surprising to me, because my mom was a Planned Parenthood volunteer. In my house it was very open." Sexuality, after all, is part of every coming of age in one way or another. And who in this world is juggling those thoughts more than a teenager?
Of course, the now-56-year-old wasn't the first in YA to portray horny teen girls. "If you read Judy Blume, you know that's been going on for years and years," she said. But Judy Blume’s books also weren’t adapted into blockbuster movies by Disney, and part of the backlash for Cabot may have come from how ubiquitous she was for romance-loving teens of the early 2000s. The Princess Diaries adaptation became an instant classic, funneling an eager audience towards her books.
"People started buying the books expecting them to be G-rated like the movie," Cabot recalls. They were not—and some parents didn't love that the book version of The Princess Diaries' first scene involved kissing.
Still, for plenty of young girls, Cabot's work was (and continues to be) vital and illuminating. Her novels are chatty and personable, her characters flawed, and her stories casually sex-positive. Even when her young characters weren't actually having sex, the acknowledgement of desire affirmed something bigger, something deep inside. A feeling that her readers, like her characters, were still exploring. And if those readers were so inclined, Cabot's adult novels were right there, full of the "smut" she once feared would disappoint her grandmother—but also so much more.
Romance is often written off as empty-headed porn for women, a stereotype Cabot wholeheartedly rejects: What the form's critics ignore is everything that surrounds the lust. Romance is about yearning, sure. About sex. Cabot's books, though, are also about dynamic friendships. About history—she's written plenty of historical fiction—and mystery. About the way women and girls are seen by their society, and the effects that has on them. Ultimately, all of Cabot's novels are also about the inner lives of interesting young women navigating challenging times in their lives.
This is something Cabot knows intimately. Though her family home growing up was frank about sex, in other aspects, her childhood was "very dark." Her father was an alcoholic, and to escape, she buried herself in books. "There were many times I felt there was no hope," Cabot recalled. "Romance was always where I could turn to. Those books, where there was an empowered woman who got what she wanted in the end, guaranteed."
"That's what pulled me out of despair," she continued. "Knowing I can put that out there for someone else is the greatest thing." To Cabot, writing is the skill she has that she can share with people. “I'm not going to be a brain surgeon,” she joked.
But even if her books were just a horny escape, wouldn't that be OK, too? "It's just misogyny," Cabot exclaimed when asked about naysayers of her genre. "People look down on anything that women like, and anything involving women."
For her younger readers, Cabot's work was an education—not just in sex, but in how rewarding it can be for readers when an author is skilled at seamlessly blending genre. Wrapped in a shiny "chick lit" package—books more recently known as "beach reads" because, well, the former had been so dragged through the sexist mud that it needed a rebrand—Cabot’s work is multi-faceted and wide-ranging. She’s written epistolary novels, murder mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, middle-grade, YA, adult, historical fiction, and more. Fittingly, she has no patience for those who try to one-dimensionalize her corner of women's fiction. She often hears from readers afraid to be seen reading "chick lit" in the office because coworkers make fun of them. "I tell them to tell their coworkers to go fuck themselves," Cabot said. "Those people have clearly never read it."
These days, Cabot and fellow children's and young adult author Rachel Vail challenge each other to write five pages a day. The stakes of failure keep them going: If they don't hit their page count, they're forced to donate $5 to Donald Trump. "It's very motivating," Cabot said. Like her most famous character, Cabot is disturbed by the current state of the world. She’s even contemplating leaving Key West, where she's resided with her husband and cats for almost twenty years. She loves her town, and often blogs about her life there, but has been turned off by Florida’s ongoing political turmoil.
It’s there, too, that Cabot's born witness to a new wave of challenges levied against authors and readers alike: angry right-wing parents for whom the problems don't stop at french kissing. “It's a very small percentage of the population, but they're very loud,” she said. It's a nation-wide issue: The New York Times reported in January that parents hell-bent on banning books have become "more organized, well-funded" and "effective" in recent years. The Guardian characterized the efforts as "moral militancy."
"They don't want any reference to sex, race, gender fluidity…," Cabot said of recent attempts to pull books from the library system. "It might challenge the very Christian, neofascist way they want to raise their children.”
Pushback to the kind of books that have defined her career hasn't stopped Cabot in the slightest, though. Most recently, Cabot has published the Little Bridge Island series, an adult series set in her community of Key West, and next up is a new, COVID-set Princess Diaries book, as well as a lot more children's and middle-grade fiction. (Proceeds for The Quarantine Princess Diaries will go to VOW For Girls, a charity aimed at ending child marriage.)
And thank goodness for Meg Cabot. Her naysayers—whether politically lecherous or simply snobby—have no real way to stop the flow of stories from Cabot's brain to readers' hands. Cabot doesn’t take her role lightly. A cornerstone of young adult fiction, she’s no stranger to the pressures of shaping young minds. It's impossible to calculate, in 2023, just how many authors coming up today have been influenced by her work. It’s even more impossible to calculate how many women and girls have become voracious writers and readers as a result of her work. And twenty-five years on from her debut novel, both Cabot and her books remain chatty and cheerful, effervescent and gutsy—an escape from a hellish world, just as she intended. Given all that's happened in the interim, that's certainly a crowning achievement.
[post_title] => Thank Goodness for Meg Cabot
[post_excerpt] => Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance.
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Nothing bristles against whorephobia and class shame like a bunch of fierce strippers unionizing a strip club and then becoming a union collective.
"You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History."
—Robert Penn Warren
I stripped in nude clubs before I could legally drink. It was the early nineties, in San Francisco, and my friends were unkempt, chain-smoking queer punks who wore beat-to-shit ripped slips that looked like they were stolen from some grandma’s dumpster. I wasn’t chic grunge like Courtney Love, who stripped on Hollywood Boulevard at Jumbo’s Clown room back then. I was broke. I was undone. I worked at a used clothing store on Haight Street for minimum wage, which, in 1992, was $4.25 an hour. I spent my lunch break selling T-shirts I found in trash piles on put-out night, hoping to make enough for a burrito next door. If I lucked out, I scored a burrito and bus fare. When I couldn’t afford bus fare, I walked straight to the Century, a grubby nude club where drugs were plentiful and twenty-dollar bills were rare.
Some of the strippers at the Century gave grand performances, with boas and whips and choreographed moves like in Fame. I merely darted to the dressing room before my stage set to put on something I could take off. The dressing room was down many narrow steps and through a low door, a smoker’s basement with a dirt floor that we called “the Crypt.” Luscious, Micky, Destiny, and I ashed our cigarettes on loose planks of wood. I was addicted to meth, but heroin was big then. My coworkers slid in the dark theater from lap to lap, or nodded off, or went to law school.
The Century was where I fell for stripping. Stripping is a hard, taxing job. It entails waiting, hustling, and negotiating personal physical boundaries in a place where strangers assume access to your body. As an art form, stripping is joyful, magical, and adrenaline-inducing. But it was also emotionally and politically confusing. Stripping contained that tension for me and has held me in its grip for twenty-nine years.
On the one hand, stripping was a public-facing revolt against demure femininity and heterosexual norms. Monetizing straight desire and performing as patriarchy’s plaything was fun and lucrative; lap dancing was fast money earned in the dark. At the time, feminist performance artists like Karen Finley, Laurie Anderson, Diamanda Galás, and Lydia Lunch challenged second-wave feminist ideals by performing desire and rage as a poetic disruption. They used their bodies as a site of protest against sexual shame, misogyny, and homophobia.
Stripping felt powerful back then, but not every second was an empowering feminist orgy. The job was not something I advertised to my friends or family. Deeply puritanical ideas about sex and class informed our cultural lives and affected dancers’ feminist visions of ourselves as deviants, artists, or societal failures. Among my peers, my life as a queer stripper was considered sleazy, even if it was rebellious. Dykes I dated were skeptical or downright disapproving of the sex industry, and they let me know it. Deep down, they believed the patriarchal party line that sex work was intrinsically wrong, even if they refused to admit it. One of my girlfriends threatened to break up with me if I continued full-contact lap dancing; she preferred my tenure in the live peep show behind glass at the Lusty Lady. She followed through with that promise eventually—but not before I joined a group of startlingly intelligent live nude girls who began unionizing the Lusty Lady in 1996 and eventually became the Exotic Dancers’ Alliance.
Stripping is a working-class grind.
Over the next decade, my customers became regulars, which turned me into a professional stripper who had the audacity to keep a schedule. I stripped on holidays, on weekends, and during sports events. I squirreled away cash in envelopes under my bed. My lust for financial security and love for travel led to many road trips on the search for gold mines; I stripped in Las Vegas, Hawaii, and New Orleans with only the tips and tricks of other stripper friends to guide me. This was five years before Facebook and nine years before the creation of the iPhone, which granted every sex worker the ability to screen a client in the palm of their hand.
I learned everything I know about where and how to strip by talking to seasoned strippers I befriended on the job. Strippers know where to find the money clubs and which shifts are the best ones there. They know how the fees and fines work and which managers to avoid. They know which clients to talk to and who is a time waster. I highly recommend talking to veterans in person, at work, about what they’ve learned. They are a part of my history, just as I am a part of yours.
Not only did we not text back then, but we also communicated without apps, websites, email, or the terminology strippers now use to accurately discuss the complexity of client relationships that progress outside the strip club. The fact was that I simply trusted certain clients to take me shopping or out to dinner. I indulged some of my clients in their fantasy that I was their girlfriend, their human vacation. And I charged as much as I could while maintaining a straight face.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2004, I searched the vast whorescape that is the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood for a strip club to call my home—to no avail. Clubs in Los Angeles County were miserable, empty places with no use for a chubby, tattooed thirty-four-year-old with a women’s studies degree from Mills College. I did strip briefly at Cheetahs, Pleasures, Knockouts, and Nicholas, but the hustle baffled me; Los Angeles clients were cheap, unreliable, and awful. Unlike in San Francisco or New Orleans, where strippers are culturally relevant VIPs, Los Angeles treats non-famous strippers like the least favorite gum grabbed on the way out of the gas station. Perhaps this is due to the cultural prevalence of the porn industry that dominates the field here, rendering strippers an afterthought.
That same year, my mother was diagnosed with aggressive bile duct cancer. I was panicked and stressed, untethered by her illness. I constantly drove back and forth from LA to where my mother was hospitalized in my hometown. I switched from stripping to other types of sex work that required less of me, timewise and commitment-wise, where I could snatch as much cash as possible and still answer my phone in case my mother called.
Stripping outside the club entailed risks that were hard to anticipate, like depending on strangers to pay when they say they will and having no security whatsoever from violence. One night I stripped as “Ginger” at a Gilligan’s Island–themed fortieth birthday party. Shit-faced party guests grabbed my friend, a petite, impeccable “Maryanne,” and threw her in the pool, despite her frantic, screaming pleas that she couldn’t swim. I jumped in the pool after her, carried her out fully clothed, and scolded the organizer. I told them the least they could do was pay for her lost contact lenses and vintage clothing. A woman wrote me a check, and we left. But what if my friend had drowned? I had assumed the gig would be an easy one-off. No one knew where I was that night.
The next day, the check was canceled.
~
In 2007, at the age of sixty-two, my mother died. That same week, I attended my first class in an MFA program she had encouraged me to apply to before her illness. “Get that degree,” she said. I was heartbroken, and I was alone, but I got my MFA.
Around this time, the club in Pasadena where I stripped shut down. I was out of options and broke as fuck. My friend Kara told me about her lucrative “massage” hustle. She showed me how to put up photos and ads on sites like Backpage and Eros and—lickety-split—I was a hand job whore. At first, we mostly saw her regulars, like CJ, a chipper guy in his sixties. He’d eat her pussy while I jerked him off, and he always said the same shit: “What exemplary customer service.” Eventually, he gave Kara trichomoniasis. I had to convince her to get tested, which was not easy, because she believed she was in a constant state of orgasm—sex cult stuff she said she learned from OneTaste, an orgasmic meditation retreat up in San Raphael. It was also not easy to tell my ex, whom I was still fucking, that we had been exposed to trich. Soon after that incident, I saw CJ at Trader Joe’s piling lunch meat into a shopping cart. “Hey, CJ,” I said, before I could catch myself or think twice.
Kara had faith in her ability to stack cash safely. I did not, but I didn’t care. Blind faith, dumb luck, good timing, and magical thinking are markers of the sex trade. Similar to gamblers or stand-up comics, sometimes we lucked out. Sometimes we were on fire, sometimes we tanked. Unlike gamblers or stand-up comics, though, sometimes we got arrested. Sometimes we got STIs from our coworkers. Sometimes we got robbed or thrown in a pool. Sometimes we went missing. Sometimes we were murdered.
Class shame and whorephobia are rampant in our culture. Institutions, banks, and media platforms are denied to sex workers as punishment for trying to survive late capitalism in resourceful, clever ways. Sex workers and strippers themselves are not immune to whorephobia, in the same way that Black folks are not immune to anti-Black racism. I want to communicate the specific ethos of the deeply abusive landscape of strip clubs in order to unlearn it and to stop it.
Some commonalities in every strip club that I’ve witnessed and/or have experienced directly: the business model of theft, wage theft specifically; tip stealing; the acute lack of safety from violence inside the club; racism; anti-trans antagonism; whorephobia; anti-worker hostility; extortion; coercion; the negligence of any bookkeeping by employers; sexual assault; blame casting; misclassification; drugging of workers; unfair termination; racist hiring and firing policies; harassment. Nothing bristles against whorephobia and class shame like a bunch of fierce strippers unionizing a strip club and then becoming a union collective. The tide changed in 1996, but the labor war has dragged on since we won that battle.
I haven’t stripped inside a club since 2020; I’ve stepped away due to Covid-19 and the fact that I’m in a PhD program for literature that fills my time and pays me to show up. Clients and friends sometimes ask if I’ve retired, as if I long to quit the one job that has supported my life for nearly thirty years.
I miss stripping. Not just pole tricks and sliding from lap to lap, but being good at a thing and getting paid well to do it. Watching dancers twirl and fly on the pole like muscular ribbons. Ripping on clients and talking shit. Making money hand over fist, mid-shift. Counting dances and money under my breath while strippers pull customers from their chairs with a yank. Locking eyes with other dancers while they grind and guessing how long they will last on certain laps. I miss the grubby red theater chairs with gum residue, the zigzag carpet. I don’t miss the migraines, the wage theft, or the tired two-hour drive home.
Since April 30, 2018, I’ve been trying to organize strippers, sex workers, and allies from California to New Zealand to fight for safer and more humane working conditions. I will continue to fight for this cause because I answer to my community. My coworkers over the past twenty-nine years are a collection of intersectional, dynamic people, and my life is better for knowing them and their stories.
I was still in high school when my friend and mentor Lizzie Borden premiered Working Girls, a fictional film that shows the complex relational field sex workers navigate while also exploring class differences and queer relation ships within the industry. When I met Lizzie, in 2015, she mentioned an anthology of memoir pieces she was collecting that centered on strippers. I was delighted that she chose strippers as the group to focus on, because strippers are usually depicted as mere background, as invalids awaiting rescue, or as sociopaths. I think the best stories and films are ones where strippers/sex workers try to do right by one another, which has not happened much since Pretty Woman.
The essays and interviews Lizzie Borden has curated and collected here were written with a burning desire to share honestly about the landscape of stripping, the camaraderie and artfulness, without delighting in our demise; to celebrate our small and large triumphs, our rage, our sadness, our hope, and our love for stripping. We are living in the truth of our shared experiences together as strippers. We share that truth, and so we share our stories here. When we share our stories, we build our collective archive. When we share our collective history, we articulate our presence. And when we articulate and assert our presence, we can attempt to change our lives for the better and change the future we create. This is my history, which is part of yours. This is our history.
An exclusive excerpt from "It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror."
In My Skin / Dans ma peau
IT WASN’T UNTIL I got pregnant that I finally saw how distant I was from my own body. This was late 2016, early 2017, and I was about to turn thirty-five, a late age for a first baby. I spent half my day reading pregnancy manuals and websites, baffled and embarrassed by their maniacally chipper tone, which seemed to be aimed not at parents of small children but at the actual children themselves: Baby is the size of a grape! A papaya! A spaghetti squash! It’s all right to be nervous. But more all right to be happy! Mom (the pregnant person is always addressed, in these texts, as “Mom”) is getting ready for a big change!
I was not getting ready for a big change, I was in the midst of one. My personality shifted with my hormones, giving me new tastes and interests and a terrifying ability to cry in public. I swelled and rounded, changed shirt sizes and pant sizes and shoe sizes, puffed up at the joints until I had the tree-trunk legs of a brontosaurus. In the more scientific manuals, I learned that my body had doubled its amount of blood; that the baby’s cells were mingling with mine, and would stay there after I gave birth, rendering me a biological chimera; that I was growing a new organ, the placenta, and when I gave birth, I would both expel and (the manuals strongly encouraged) eat it.
The teenage edgelord in me delighted in this information. A parasite turns you into a mutant and forces you to eat your own organs; what’s cooler than that? Yet, when I tried to talk to other people about how disgusting pregnancy was, I was met with baffled politeness, not only from the world at large but from pregnant women. This experience of being lost at sea in my own body, held captive to its processes, seemed to be mine alone. In fact, if the expressions on people’s faces were any indication, it was mildly crazy.
Yet the more I sat with the feeling, the more it seemed to me that my body had never belonged to me. There were whole areas—my hair, my breasts—that I was keeping around primarily because they got a reaction from people. There were processes that had always felt unwelcome; as a teenager, my periods were so distressing that I once passed out in the middle of a McDonalds because I felt one coming on. I could never figure out all the little things women were supposed to do, how it was that they managed to look adult and female and put-together. It seemed easy, or at least manageable; a necessary life skill, like cooking dinner. I just couldn’t do it. My body was something I needed to manipulate, a weird, soft machine I was never quite sure of operating correctly. I fed it like a pet, washed it like a car, exercised it... well, no, I didn’t exercise it, because that would require getting in there and fucking around, and I spent as much time reading or drinking or otherwise getting out of my body as I could.
It never would have occurred to me to call these feelings “dysphoria.” I pushed through them the same way I’d always pushed through the pangs of shame and panic I got when I tried to do girly things or present as convincingly feminine, telling myself it was just internalized misogyny or poor self-esteem. Yet it seems clear to me now that my pregnancy was the beginning of my coming-out process as a nonbinary transmasculine person. It called my body to my attention. It made me realize that I could successfully and intentionally undergo a big change.
Now that I’m out, my former alienation from my body seems normal. I wasn’t “put together” because I was trying to put together the wrong thing. It’s like I bought a coffee table at IKEA and spent thirty-five years trying to assemble a couch with the parts. Frustration was inevitable. Yet in the moment, before I knew any other name for my experiences, my only comparison was body horror—specifically, the body horror movie I loved most in the world, and have loved ever since I saw a crappy VHS copy of it in college: In My Skin, the 2002 independent movie by French writer-director Marina de Van. In My Skin (Dans ma peau) is one of those movies that frequently makes lists of the “most disturbing movies ever” or “toughest horror movies to watch.” The college boyfriend I rented it with noped-out by the second act, telling me he was just too uncomfortable to keep going. I’ve always enjoyed the nerdy flex of watching a horror movie that is too much for some cis guy, and yet it pains me that In My Skin is remembered primarily as a gross-out feature. The violence here is nowhere near as graphic as the average Saw or Hostel movie. In My Skin is scarier than those movies precisely because it reaches the viewer on a level that soulless splatter porn can’t; the injuries feel real and painful because they’re grounded in a frighteningly believable portrait of one woman’s self-destruction.
We open on a heroine, Esther (played by de Van, directing herself), who seems to more or less have her life together: she’s got a job at an advertising firm, with a promotion in the near future; she has a boyfriend who wants to move in together; she’s putting him off, but it seems clear where things are headed. It’s a recognizable white, upper middle-class, postfeminist, heterosexual trajectory. It’s what she’s supposed to want, even if some key elements, like the boyfriend, don’t excite her as much as she’d like.
One night, at a drunken party, Esther manages to rip her calf open on a piece of jagged metal in someone’s yard. Due to some combination of shock and nerve damage and alcohol, Esther doesn’t feel the injury, and goes through the whole night without realizing that her leg is gushing blood. She only sees what’s happened when she goes to the bathroom; she gasps, and fingers the edges of her wound, and begins crying. It’s not clear whether she’s in pain or simply horrified by what she’s seeing.
I mean to say: Esther is betrayed and traumatized to see her body shedding blood from a hole that shouldn’t be there. You can see where the transmasculine viewer might connect. It is also bizarrely relatable to see how Esther tries to deal with the injury, which is, at first, by pretending she doesn’t have one; she goes over to her friends and casually mentions that she might need to go to the hospital, but she wants to stop at a bar for one last drink first. The doctor who eventually stitches Esther up is baffled by her dissociation: “Are you sure it’s your leg?” he jokes.
Esther doesn’t laugh. She also doesn’t answer. Esther becomes obsessed with her injury, and with the numbness that seems to be spreading out over her whole body. She begins trying to re-create the thrill of getting hurt; first pinching and picking at herself, then cutting herself, then doing several things so gross that one hesitates to spoil them, except to say that this one woman somehow becomes both the perpetrator and the victim of an entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre before the credits roll.
The gross-outs are real, but never cheap. Esther’s self-harm addiction mounts slowly and realistically; the brief relief of a cutting session in the break room slowly giving way to more sessions, more extreme injuries, entire weekends spent alone in a hotel room, doing things to yourself that you have to explain later as the result of a car accident. Some scenes are uncomfortable precisely because de Van’s slack-jawed, compulsive pleasure as she works on herself feels like watching someone masturbate. It’s that kind of problem: an urge you can’t get rid of without indulging, a gross but pressing need.
Esther’s self-destruction is a symptom of alienation: from capitalism (during a business dinner, Esther has to forcibly restrain her hand from skittering around the table) or from womanhood (after one cutting session, she watches a female friend apply moisturizer, baffled by the concept of feminine self-care) or from heterosexuality (her boyfriend tries to “cure” her by fucking her while asking if she can feel him; he does not get the answer he’s hoping for). Careful viewers will have noted that de Van’s heroine shares a name with Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Like that other Esther, she self-destructs in part because meeting the expectations placed on women already feels like a kind of self-harm.
Most importantly, though, the cutting is symptomatic of Esther’s alienation from Esther. She doesn’t hate her body, she tells us, but she also doesn’t think of it as her. Her self-injury is exploratory, almost clinical; she’s a scientist, testing the foreign object of her flesh, trying to see what it can do. In fact, there is no part of Esther’s life that is truly hers: her friends are not really her friends, the man she fucks isn’t someone she particularly wants to be fucking, her professional success is maintained at the cost of disappearing into back rooms and wine cellars and coming apart at the seams. She takes her body apart because she is trying to get back inside it. She’s not trying to kill herself. She’s trying to prove she’s alive.
~
It’s dangerous, I know, to connect transmasculinity or gender dysphoria with a movie about female self-mutilation. The idea that transmasculine people are self-harming “women” is currently one of the main talking points TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) use to try to argue us out of existence.
As I write this, the number one book result on Amazon for “trans men” is a book called Irreversible Damage. The title is splashed across the page in big, bloodred letters, with a subtitle promising to expose the “Transgender Craze That’s Seducing Our Daughters” in the same tone 1950s horror movie posters used to advertise a “Terrifying Monster of the Ages!” or some “Students Made Victims of Terror-Beast!” Beneath the titles, there’s an illustration of a little girl, or possibly a baby doll, who is still alive and conscious despite the gigantic, red-rimmed, perfectly circular hole scooped out of her stomach.
The message is clear: transmasculinity is body horror. The average trans boy, according to Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier, is “psychologically alienated from her [sic] own body, and headed toward medical self-harm;”she predicts that medical transition will leave such a boy “angry, regretful, maimed, and sterile.”Give or take a “sterile,” he sounds very much like Esther from In My Skin.
Other TERFs have resorted to putting transmasculine bodies on display, hoping that the supposed freakishness of top surgery scars or testosterone-squared jawlines will scare the public away from supporting us. Photographer Laura Dodsworth has published an entire series of seminude portraits of “detransitioners,” women who formerly identified as transmasculine. Dodsworth was inspired, she says, by the horror she feels when she thinks about trans men’s bodies: “For me, the idea of having my breasts, ovaries, and womb removed, and then wanting them back, creates a feeling so unnerving that I cannot occupy it for long.”
She can, however, ask other people to occupy it in front of her while she takes pictures. It’s not clear whether Dodsworth informed her subjects that she would accompany the photos of their naked bodies with commentary on how scary and disgusting they are; nor is it clear how Dodsworth’s “unnerved” feeling is different from the pleasurable disgust carnival-goers feel at freak shows.
First things first: The posttransition body is not a mutilated body. It’s a healed body. Transition is not a symptom of psychological distress but a means to cure it. That “unnerving” feeling Dodsworth imagines—the horror of looking down at a body you don’t recognize, one which can’t do what you want or need it to do—is already felt by many people who are uncomfortable in their assigned genders, and it is spectacularly cruel for someone to use her own imaginary dysphoria as an excuse to deny transpeople treatment for theirs.
Yet the rubbernecking dread transphobic “feminists” have for trans bodies—Shrier, or Dodsworth, or J. K. Rowling, for whom trans boys are merely psychologically damaged and self-hating “girls” who’ve succumbed to the “allure of escaping womanhood”—is not unfamiliar to me as a horror fan. Whether these women know it or not, they’re talking about transpeople in the same way that sexist men have historically talked about the bodies of cis women.
The body horror genre is deeply rooted in cis men’s fear of femininity, and considers cis female bodies to be inherently freakish, flawed, and deformed. In particular, body horror often focuses an obsessive disgust on cis women’s reproductive cycle, either in a sideways fashion—like the exceptionally vaginal face-hugger in Alien, or that franchise’s many chest-bursting images of “child-birth”—or directly, as in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, where a woman’s fertility dooms her man to a life of tending the foul horror she’s produced. Body horror king David Cronenberg spent much of the ’80s explaining why he was scared of vaginas. There was the pulsating external uterus of The Brood, where a (cis) woman’s capacity to reproduce without a man led to countless hammer-based murders, or the “mutant women” of Dead Ringers, with their insatiable sexual needs and triple-headed Cerberus vaginas. Both movies feature a woman chewing through an umbilical cord with her teeth, I guess because no one told Cronenberg about the placenta thing.
This is how horror is used by the dominant culture: to justify fear and violence toward the Other, the Alien, the Mutant—and in a patriarchy, that title will always belong primarily to people who aren’t white cis men. Whether it’s David Cronenberg’s umbilical phobia, Laura Dodsworth’s close-ups of top-surgery scars, or the countless ways that cis-directed comedies and slasher movies have trained us to fear the bodies of trans women, horror is always located outside, in the marginalized person, in the body that doesn’t look like the person behind the camera.
I’m not interested in this type of horror, to put it mildly. Yet I still describe my own experiences in terms of body horror, because I am my own person to describe. I still hold out hope for body horror stories told by marginalized people, stories that are not about demonizing or destroying the Other but confronting the least comfortable parts of yourself. (It’s significant that when David Cronenberg discovered male anal penetration in the ’90s—Naked Lunch, eXistenZ—his gross-outs were improved.) There is a difference between feeling uncomfortable with your own body and having others proclaim how uncomfortable they are with you, between the horror felt by a person and the horror caused by a monster. Few movies understand this as well as In My Skin.
Marina de Van spends a lot of time naked in her own movie. Esther is perpetually taking clothes off, putting them on, hanging out at home in her underwear, taking showers. The camera encourages us to study her body in detail; here are her hands, here are her legs, here’s the odd fold of skin gathered at her right hip. The nudity has a strange dissociative effect, like catching your reflection unexpectedly in a mirror—de Van is both the object of our gaze and the subject directing it, somehow behind the camera and in front of it at the same time. All this serves a very practical purpose: de Van wants us to understand the architecture of Esther’s body before she destroys it. She’s laying out the parameters of the crime scene, giving us a tour of the house before she tears it down.
These points were missed by the film’s early (and nearly all male) critics, who invariably took the sight of a woman’s body on screen as an invitation to rate her looks: “Ms. de Van, who resembles a feral, gap-toothed version of the young Leslie Caron, is at once beautiful and ugly,” runs a representative assessment from Stephen Holden’s New York Times review. Dennis Lim at the Village Voice praised her “arresting screen presence” while also calling her “pale, flared-nostriled, and gap-toothed.”There are just so many more interesting things you could say about Marina de Van’s teeth in this movie—like, for instance, the fact that she uses them to eat her own leg like a chicken wing. Even in a movie about how women’s bodies are treated like meat, these men can’t help but leave three-star Yelp reviews for hers.
Cis men seemed incapable of understanding that a woman’s body could be put on screen for reasons other than objectification. We’re not meant to want Esther—we’re meant to be her. The movie is effective precisely because de Van blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, person and object, audience and action; when viewers of In My Skin scream or flinch at some gruesome injury, it’s because we’re so connected to Esther’s body that it feels like we are being injured. In the moment, as he squirms and averts his eyes from the bloody screen, the cis male viewer of In My Skin has become the very thing he’s spent his whole life trying not to resemble: a woman.
It’s that invitation to occupy the marginalized and monstrous body, to feel what it feels, that makes In My Skin unique. The power to make our oppressors share our perspective, to make them see the world as we see it—to bring them inside our skin, as de Van puts it—is one of the most potent tools any storyteller has. In My Skin is not an overtly feminist movie, but it makes the still-radical assumption that we will be able to identify with a woman enough to take her suffering as seriously as our own.
It worked. I’m not a woman. I feel my own pain, and Esther’s, when I watch this movie. What I relate to is not the cutting, though; the TERFs are wrong on that. What I relate to is the suffering the cutting is intended to relieve. It’s the baffled sense of being locked out of your own body; unable to connect with the person that is supposed to be you. Esther’s desperate need to get back inside herself, to have even one moment of being fully present in her own life, is something I’ve felt many times. It’s something I stopped feeling only when I transitioned.
I got so used to pushing past discomfort in the first thirty-five years of my life. I maintained my disconnected body in a manner that pleased others, gritted my teeth through periods and pregnancy, suppressed the flashes of anguish and shame and self-disgust that arose at predictable moments, but for no reason I could name. It’s only now, when the discomfort has lifted somewhat, that I realize I was hurting myself every day of my life. The injury was there. I just didn’t let myself feel it. I covered it up, mopped up the blood, went out and asked if anyone wanted to grab a beer.
When we cannot put ourselves together, we tear ourselves apart. This is true no matter who we are, no matter what reason we have for not fitting into the lives we’re given. Esther never explains why she needs to destroy herself, yet the answer is always right there in front of us. Why does any animal chew its own leg off? Because it’s trapped.
A round table with a few members of the Abolitionist Library Association.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by then-police officer and now-convicted killer Derek Chauvin in 2020, a large swath of people who’d never paid attention to systemic, anti-Black racism began, for the first time, to acknowledge its existence. Something shifted. Folks who had never spoken out chose to engage; to actually do something. While the Black Lives Matter movement had existed for nearly seven years before Floyd’s death—and abolitionism for many years before that—the widespread protests of 2020 seemed to give these movements new momentum. At the height of a raging pandemic, during a time of mass isolation and fear, hundreds of thousands of people across the world took to the streets, standing up against racist police violence and the prison-industrial complex it fuels.
In the two years since, the greater outrage has waned. Those privileged enough to not have paid attention before largely went back to not paying attention; while the people who had already been doing the work continued to do the work. But that initial uprising—that newfound awareness, and solidarity, and, in some cases, radicalization—was nonetheless significant, and provided necessary support for longtime activists to realize long-held needs, giving community spaces and organizations more resources to work towards collective liberation and even, perhaps, some policy change.
One of those spaces was the library.
In the spring of 2020, the Library Freedom Project published a piece on Medium titled, “It’s not enough to say Black Lives Matter—libraries must divest from the police.” The post set the library world ablaze, and before long, a group of library workers gathered over Zoom to discuss what they could do to further their message and their agenda. From this meeting—and from decades of work before it—the Abolitionist Library Association, or AbLA, was born.
More than two years after AbLA’s inception, we sat down with four of its members*—Lawrence M. (they/them), Megan R. (she/they), Jen W. (she/they), and Les D. (they/she)—to discuss the intersection between abolitionism and library work, the importance of creating safe public spaces, and the power of the collective.
*In respect of their privacy both online and off, we’ve opted to include only their first names and last initials.
~
Gina M.
To kick things off, I feel like an obvious question, but an important one, is: What is an abolitionist library worker? What does that mean, in action?
Lawrence M.
I think it's important to foreground abolition as a specific political ideology that stems from the Black radical and Black revolutionary tradition. Dr. Joy James talks about the plurality of abolitionism, right? So I'll speak for myself: When I think about abolition, I think about this long tradition that started with the desire and the demand to end Black chattel slavery. Today what that looks like is seeing how carcerality permeates through our social structures here on occupied Turtle Island, or the United States. Abolitionists are committed and dedicated to disrupting and ending the way carcerality works, and really carcerality in general.
Megan R.
That's a really good starting point and really important background that not necessarily everybody is conscious of when they're coming to abolition. Recently, I have been doing a lot of reading around the idea of the carceral habitus, and just the structuring of society in this punitive, carceral way, and how it presents itself as a natural occurrence, or a natural way of being a society when, in fact, it's not. By human nature, we're not necessarily punitive. Our interactions don't have to be based around punishment. So I think that abolition just offers such beautiful possibilities for life outside of this carceral framework, and that's the attitude that I try to bring to my library work.
Jen W.
Yeah—this is work that Black women have been leading for a very long time, and so all the work of our association is really built on their shoulders. That's important to acknowledge. You also might not necessarily think abolitionist and librarian go together. But the library world is not immune from carcerality. I mean, the stereotypical image of a librarian is literally someone shushing people. And I think that there's a lot of ways that people are policed in library spaces, or that libraries play into the prison-industrial complex. There are very practical issues that come up in all library spaces, not just public libraries, where you'll have a security guard be the first person you see when you walk in. Some libraries have security gates that literally beep if you didn't check out a book.
Megan R.
I want to really quickly touch back on the archetypal image of the librarian as shushing or performing some sort of policing behavior. Because I really want to emphasize that that archetype, or that archetypal image, is usually a white woman. So it's really crucial to be aware of the history of libraries as institutions that continue to uphold white supremacy through this policing of behaviors, and their role in the Americanization of immigrants and inculcating the youth. Even if you're not necessarily thinking about it in terms of penal abolition, just thinking about the ways in which social reproduction happens in libraries, especially public libraries, and who is allowed to be in those spaces, and what behaviors are allowed to occur in those spaces.
Gina M.
All of you are touching on something that I was going to ask, which is, if there’s a Venn diagram, right, between library work and library spaces, and abolition work and the prison-industrial complex, what's in the in-between? Libraries, at their best, should be these incredible public spaces and resources for people—but even they have been subjected to the carceral state that we exist in. Which leads very nicely into the origins of AbLA. I would love to hear a little bit more about your origin story. And, out of curiosity, was it a conscious choice to lead with abolitionist in your name?
Lawrence M.
So, Alison, right?
Jen W.
Yeah. AbLA got started in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings. Alison Macrina and some people from the Library Freedom Project had written a piece that was published on Medium. And that was kind of the birth of this association. The reason that it's the Abolitionist Library Association—as Lawrence said, that'swhat we want to foreground. And also, a little bit of mockery of ALA [American Library Association]. There's also the fact that the Abolitionist Library Association is more inclusive to library workers who might not necessarily be a degreed librarian.
Megan R.
Yeah, we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to call ourselves. Because, like Jen mentioned, not everybody who works in the library is a librarian. I tend to use the term library workers, just to be as inclusive as possible. But we also wanted it to be a space where library patrons and community members can get involved, as well. We jokingly called ourselves the "good ALA" for a while, which was not really sustainable—which is how we ended up with AbLA.
Lawrence M.
We still are the good ALA, by the way.
Megan R.
I feel like maybe [Alison] put out a call on Twitter or something along those lines. I don't remember exactly. But I remember that we all ended up on Zoom.
Jen W.
I think we called it a town hall, to discuss the Medium article, because it had gotten a lot of attention. And there was clearly a need for a space to talk about it.
Lawrence M.
Yeah, no, we can't talk about AbLA without talking about Alison. The call went out on Twitter, and we were looking at this uprising, and everyone was thinking about the field—or, everyone who gave a shit was thinking about the field—and it was like, Okay, well, what the fuck are we going to do?
And that was the first time we all got together, reviewed the statement, and went from there. But I don't know—there's a part of me, a big part of me, that wants to be like, that first meeting was not so much the origin but the culmination of a lot of things. Gina, you brought up the library being a public space, right? Well, just seeing historically how that public space wasn't available for Black people specifically, and Indigenous and racialized non-white people in general—for me, it was a start, but also the apex of what was going on during spring 2020.
Megan R.
On that note, I feel like the town hall and then the subsequent meetings that eventually morphed into AbLA, what also facilitated it, in a lot of ways, was COVID forcing everything to be online. So all of these different organizing projects that have been running parallel to each other in a lot of ways—like Cop-Free NYC and things like that—people all had a chance to connect with each other.
Gina M.
What has the work looked like so far? Or, put another way, what are the biggest goals of AbLA? I’ve read your website, of course, and the four tenets you laid out. But in your own words, what do you hope to accomplish with it?
Lawrence M.
You know, I think first and foremost, AbLA is rooted in a liberatory ideology. That's in our mission statement, if I'm not mistaken. So off the bat, reforms to liberal approaches to carcerality—I won't say we’ll outright reject, but we'll heavily scrutinize.
Megan R.
I really quickly want to backtrack to AbLA’s origins and mention that the listserv, I think, has been one thing that's really kept momentum going. Like, it's being used in ways that I didn't anticipate, including people sharing job openings and things like that. So that's been really helpful. I like listservs—it's kind of old school, but I think it's helpful.
Lawrence M.
About AbLA and the listserv, too: We have “Association” in the name, but we're not an association. Like, I think the term that could best describe us is a political formation, and I’m not even loosely using that term, [that’s] as accurate as I can be. And in terms of listservs, I'm typically not a fan of them, but AbLA is the only listserv that I know in which the conversations that are happening on this listserv—I don't see those conversations anywhere else.
Gina M.
Your listserv is open to everyone too, right?
Lawrence M.
Yeah, it's open to everyone.
Megan R.
Which you know, is a double edged sword in that everything that is happening there is essentially public.
Lawrence M.
It's open to everyone, but not cops. I will say, for sure: If I find out there's a cop on the listserv, they're gone. You can put me on the record for that!
Gina M.
It sounds like it’s this public resource in itself, the listserv.
Jen W.
The listserv is certainly very active. There are probably like 1000 people on our listserv at this time. And I think the listserv has been a great space for people who are dealing with specific in-the-moment issues with policing, to come to our group and be like, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get my administration to realize this is bad, and to be able to find support and practical advice for how to divest from policing in our spaces.
Megan R.
I mean, this idea of community self determination and working towards liberation is really important. And what goes hand in hand with that for me is rethinking what we mean by public safety in public places. Obviously not just for patrons, but for workers.
Thinking on the recent news, I don't know if you saw that there was a retired cop that shot and killed a library—what do they call them—a special library police officer, in the DC Public Library during a training yesterday. And I was just seeing so many comments on Twitter, like, Wait, there are cops in libraries? Why are there cops with guns in libraries? And I think it's one of those things that's not even flown under the radar, it's just that, in the United States, the presence of police officers goes so unremarked upon, that trying to foreground the “Abolitionist” in the Abolitionist Library Association is really important in even just becoming aware of the ways in which the carceral has intruded into public space, or shaped public space.
Jen W.
On a practical level, just to give a general overview of some of what the work has looked like: There were a couple of divestment campaigns that really got off the ground in 2020. And as a group, we were able to support those campaigns throughout the country. And then we also have some specific working groups, [which] will have their own meetings and their own agendas. We have a special collections working group that is very active—you might have seen the Ivy+ divestment statement that came out from there. And then we also have our working group focused on information access for incarcerated people. That group was born out of a specific attempt to ban one of Mariame Kaba's books in Washington, but has since become a place for people who are doing work to make information accessible, to come together and talk about the challenges that they're facing.
I think the exciting thing about libraries is that we do have the possibility of being liberatory spaces in a way that many spaces don't. But we aren't inherently liberatory spaces. Because we are state institutions under capitalism, we replicate the same oppressive dynamics as other institutions. But having the space where we can come together, and be real about that, and find other people who have the political goal of abolition, to talk about like, Okay, we're doing this work at my library, how do I do it through this lens? I think especially with prison library work, it can be hard, because you're often doing it through the state library, partnering with the state Department of Corrections. And it's like, how do you do that work in a way that is abolitionist?
Les D.
Speaking to what Jen was saying as far as sharing notes, and that sense of community and support—it especially meant a lot to me when I was in my last position, in western Kentucky. You kind of feel alone out there, and this is a space that I could turn to to get the feedback I was looking for and build some strategies and carry through and such. From my rural organizing background, [I] definitely see the importance of decentralized social spaces on the internet. We have people involved with AbLA who are from all over, and being able to exchange notes has been really crucial. Those of us who've become friends through the work, as well, that's just as important. Because not only are we achieving and winning battles, and pushing for these wins, but we're also supporting one another.
Megan R.
You're [raising] a good point of not just [providing] mutual support for one another, but the idea of joy and play and friendship in this work, as well, because so much of it is really heavy. And a lot of it is done on our own time, as volunteer work—like those of us who do reference by mail for incarcerated people, that's usually volunteer work with PLSN [Prison Library Support Network]. Just being able to—the work itself isn't necessarily fun all the time, but that you can find joy as a result of it.
Gina M.
It’s really interesting to hear you talk about the community aspect of it, which feels so essential—being able to be in community with each other, both on the abolitionist side, and on the library work side. Especially because, all of you keep bringing up this idea of the promise of the public space versus the reality of the public space. Lawrence, I think you were saying, traditionally, libraries were not actually that inclusive at all. You could argue a lot of library spaces still aren't, to unhoused people, and to Black and brown and Indigenous people. And in spaces where the work is very heavy and very difficult, there is—to your point, Megan—value in having people who are in the boat with you, and to feeling like you aren't alone in the work. Has that been a driving force for AbLA?
Les D.
I was going to add to that. Like, some of us have pushed back in ways that did put our jobs at risk. I mean, we are fighting for abolition under capitalism, and health care is tied to employment. So we are building power in this formation to be able to push for things, while still balancing [the fact that] we work for the state. And there's a tension there, right? And it's dangerous at times. So to varying levels, there is some risk, and being able to be in relationship with one another in that strategy and building that strategy accordingly has been really powerful.
Megan R.
Yeah, I think this idea of tension is a really important one, too, because that's working on a lot of different levels. Especially these days, with the current political climate around libraries, and the very real possibility of physical danger, not just job security. Les mentioned the decentralized formation that we use for AbLA. But at the same time, because we have a name now, it validates us [and] our work in a way, in that we have been cited in some academic pieces, or at conferences and things like that. So [there’s] this tension between being a formal organization, but then at the same time, at least for me, this resistance to this formalizing and institutionalizing of the work that's being done.
Jen W.
I want to piggyback off of that. Because we have built a network, we were able to mobilize to support Amy Dodson, [for example]. She had to go before her library board for a hearing to determine whether or not she was going to lose her job, and we wrote a letter that was presented to the board. And, you know, I don't want to give AbLA too much credit here, but we did a lot to really make sure that there was public outcry and that it was very clear that she had a lot of support, and not just in her county or her state, but nationally. Having been able to have that kind of collective influence was very valuable, and we've been able to replicate that a couple of times. Recently, we had some of our members who put together a statement pushing back on the Michigan Department of Corrections' decision to censor language learning books, and not allow Spanish or Swahili language books to be sent to their prisons. And again, I can't necessarily credit AbLA for reversing it. But I think that we did help to make sure that there was a lot of public attention, and that people across the country saw what they were doing and thought it was bad. Thankfully, the Michigan DOC has also walked back the policy.
Gina M.
What’s next for AbLA? How do you want to see it grow? What’s the ideal for you of what AbLA can do and what it can become?
Lawrence M.
Ideally, our way of seeing the political structures that reinforce the library becomes the norm, right? Just in my work alone, I'm seeing more and more people who are new to the field, realizing the same shit we've known. And [I want] AbLA to continue to be a space for new library workers to feel welcomed into. But also, I'm going to do what I always do and quote Fred Moten, because once you get rid of the police, you have to take care of policy, because all the police are is just an embodiment of policy. So in terms of growth, that's what I would like: I would like for more and more people to just be like, No, AbLA is the fucking standard. You're getting into this field. You're committed to making things better for everybody except cops and capitalists and fascists.
Megan R.
I agree with what Lawrence's saying. Even thinking about policy, within the library world—Emily Drabinski winning the election for ALA president is really exciting. Because she's somebody that I know has done reference work with incarcerated people. She's really strong on labor, which, I feel like you can't really talk about safety and library work without also talking about the labor aspect of it. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of AbLA people—not necessarily in the context of AbLA—were involved in [that] campaign. It's hard to say how that's gonna turn out because ALA is such a large organization and pretty conservative, but building power is important however we can do it right now.
In terms of where I'd like to see AbLA go, it feels like a lot of people's energy has become focused on their working groups, which is really good, because when we first started having regular meetings, I think people were really fired up and ready to go, but it becomes an issue of sustainability and burnout. And it seems like it's settling more into a place where people have a better understanding of their own capacities, with the work that they can do in a way that is going to keep the work going. For myself, really just focusing more on the information access for incarcerated people working group has felt really sustainable for me, and encouraging other folks to participate in ways that feel sustainable to them is the best way that I would like to see it grow.
Les D.
Yeah, the sustainable engagement is really important, especially to longevity of the movement and actually making sustainable change. That's how it's looked for me, as well. Also doing some research on deescalation tactics in libraries, in order to avoid calling the police—that's something I've been working on. But knowing everyone's out there doing the work, and that solidarity there, is pretty powerful. Having the support and the tools to do that work is really important. More skill sharing, as we have been doing all along, is a key concept, I think.
Jen W.
My answer would probably just echo a lot of what everyone else has said. [But] I also want to say that, I think we're in a moment where, every day, fascism's stronghold is growing. And we're seeing that in libraries a lot, as well. We’ve seen a lot of push for censoring collections; we've seen fucking white supremacist militias showing up to drag queen storytime and interrupting; and people trying to destroy pride displays or make sure that those books aren't available. And ALA is nowhere to be found.
Often, more bureaucratic or conservative organizations like ALA, or library administrators, the people in power in libraries—their default response to a fascist attack is to be like, Okay, well, we need [more] security, we need police. Like, the answer is basically more fascism. So I hope that AbLA will continue to be a space where people can see that we can push back in ways that are still centering the safety of our Black and brown patrons, that are still keeping libraries a space that is open to everyone, except for cops and Proud Boys. I feel a little corny because everyone quotes Mariame Kaba all the time, but her words are so valuable, and she always reminds us that hope is a discipline. In this day and age, it can be really easy to feel hopeless and to feel like we don't have the power to push back. And having a space that helps us remember that, actually, there is hope, and we can push back, and it doesn’t have to default to carceral solutions—I think that's incredibly valuable. I hope that people will continue to see that value and continue to keep that space alive, so that we can continue to collectively push back.
Gina M.
How can people who aren’t library workers best support your work?
Les D.
I can run with this one because this is what my research work is on. As far as just anyone goes, building conflict navigation skills—deescalation skills—are really important. In [the] public library context, what I'm working on is toolkits for library staff to use to not only deescalate a situation where a patron is having a bit of a mental break, and is being loud or argumentative—being able to engage with them in a compassionate way to then bring down the situation and make sure they're taken care of in that moment, as well as deescalate surrounding patrons so they don't react in a way that makes the situation worse and thus more unsafe, all with the intention of discouraging calling police because we know how dangerous police are in mental crisis moments. All that to say, if anyone wants to engage with this work, learning how to do bystander intervention, learning how to even just breathe through a moment, calm down people around you, and approach tension with compassion [and] patience. If everybody in the space can agree, Okay, we're gonna try to get through this as smoothly as possible, that makes it a lot easier for library staff.
Jen W.
Libraries are institutions that are meant to serve our community. So I think encouraging our community to show up and tell us what they like and what they don't like; white people [especially] have to have a voice in helping us push back on having cops or security in the library. You know, if enough people say, Hey, this doesn't feel great, then maybe administrators will listen and be willing to make a change. Showing up in solidarity—a lot of people have already been doing that—[and] showing that, as a community, we can protect ourselves, we can take care of each other, we don't need the cops. I hope that we, as library workers, can make it clear that the stereotypical power dynamic of that white lady librarian shushing people—that's not how we want to be, that's not what libraries want to be, and we want to know how we can make these spaces better for everyone. We want people's voices to be heard.
Lawrence M.
Yeah, off the top of my head, what can people do? Your library has a Friends of the Library—see what they're up to. If you want to join, it'd be cool to join. I mean, shit, get on the Library Board of Directors, if your library has one.
Megan R.
Run for your local library board if you can. I know that’s not something that everybody feels comfortable doing but if that’s something in your capacity, go for it! Otherwise even just attending the meetings and letting your library board know that people in the community are invested in what happens with the library is really powerful. And give public comment, if you feel so inclined. But I think probably the most basic is learning about abolition and what that means and what it entails.
Lawrence M.
The type of person I am, I just want [people to] study. I think analysis is key in this specific historical moment, because what we know, what informs our ideology, affects how we move [and] defines our praxis. Read Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? Read Mariame Kaba's We Do This Until We Free Us. Specifically looking at abolitionist texts, and committing to an abolitionist praxis, will help people figure out where they best fit in. So you know, the typical person who's reading this, we can always put out great suggestions, but at the end of the day, figure out where you stand politically and who you want to be in this moment, because you, dear reader, are ultimately going to know where you best fit.
Jen W.
Libraries have lied to you about neutrality being a thing. It's not a thing.
Lawrence M.
Yep. Essentially, pick a side. Going back to the start of our conversation, we are part of a long historical tradition here that is still ongoing. And I think study and analysis is key.
Gina M.
And get those books from the library?
Les D.
Yes, please. I was gonna elaborate as far as tactical, action steps, if you can get something submitted—like good feedback that can go on someone's record, in-house—that's a structural way to have our backs. I've been in those situations where the record comes up, and if you've got good marks [as a library worker], then you have a little bit more wiggle room to push back. So giving good feedback about your library, on paper, is a great move for just regular ol' library users, because it does matter. You do have a lot of power as the user in that situation.
Gina M.
My last question for all of you, just to end things on a joyful note—I imagine you were all drawn to library work for your own personal reasons. I'd love to hear why.
Lawrence M.
I'm just good at it. And I figured I may as well get paid to help people find information. And also, I've seen the consequences. I've seen the consequences when people, especially marginalized people, do not have access to the information that they need. I used to work with teenagers in Long Beach Unified School District, talking about, like, missed deadlines for college applications, or lost opportunities for scholarships. But also, deportations, just because somebody didn't know that ICE needed a warrant to come into somebody's place. I'm good at finding shit (information), and I'm good at communicating it and conveying it to people. So I just figured I should get paid for this. And I am and it's great.
Gina M.
Do you like the work?
Lawrence M.
Oh, yeah. I mean, what I love most is disrupting fascism. It's great. I sleep comfortably at night, knowing that ICE has a few less people to surveil online.
Gina M.
Jen? Les? Megan?
Megan R.
I started library school back in 2011, right after undergrad, mostly because I didn’t really know what to do with my Comparative Literature degree. But I dropped out after a quarter, and ended up working for a while, and then went back seven years later—and I’m really glad I waited, because it gave me a lot better of an idea of what I wanted to do with my degree. I just got really interested in precarious labor in libraries and archives. I considered myself an abolitionist prior to library school, [and] I think library work just has so much potential in terms of realizing, or working towards, a more radical, liberatory vision for our communities and collective liberation. And that just feels like the right place for me to be right now.
Jen W.
So, I don't have my MLIS. I don't even have a bachelor's degree—I'm working on that now. But I tried to get a library job out of high school, because of romanticizing the idea of working at a library. Like Lawrence said, I love information. And once I started working in a library, I realized it was such a perfect intersection of my favorite thing—information—and an opportunity to hate cops. I wanted to stay in it. I've had a lot of jobs, and I always tried to find work that felt like it fit with my values, and was often disappointed. And certainly, libraries can also be disappointing in those ways. But I've been so energized by finding community and having found AbLA because I didn't start working in libraries until 2019. And when I was able to find these like-minded people, that has really kept me wanting to do this work, because it feels like there is possibility—there's opportunity—to transform these spaces. And like Lawrence said, as well, you can really change people's lives by making sure that they have access to information.
Les D.
I got into library work because it was a part-time summer job, and I fell in love with it, took a break to do community organizing for a bit, got burnout. I did a political campaign in western Kentucky, and that was rough. Working in community organizing nonprofits was like, I'll fight like hell, but it just never ends. The burnout was not manageable. So I ended up coming back to libraries. I ended up in outreach, and I realized I could fight like hell but more subversively, especially being able to call shots on how resources are allocated. One of my favorite projects that I was able to push through with grant funding was our reentry toolkits. It was an expansion on our digital toolkits program, [where] people could check out hotspots and laptops that we reworked to meet the specific needs of people who were coming out of jail. We added a phone, added a resource booklet. And it was mostly just a way to respond to needs in our community, and build up that relationship with folks who were impacted by the carceral state. Even though it's a nightmare at times, especially how entrenched neoliberalism's veins are—it's a good lane to fight in. As Lawrence mentioned, [it’s] the very tangible daily ways that people get their needs met: We can keep them out of ICE's claws, get them fed, get them housing, all those daily things. Just little needs met by the community or for the community really keeps me in the game, and is why I fell in love with it.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
*The Footnotes
Editor’s Note: At The Conversationalist, we understand that no story exists in a vacuum, and every story is built on the work of others before us, whether in ways big or small. We are likewise dedicated to spotlighting the voices of those who have been or continue to be oppressed, disregarded, and/or otherwise silenced, in an effort to reverse centuries of often intentional erasure. Because of this, we have opted to include “footnotes” on certain stories to give readers additional context and reading material where it feels relevant and beneficial.
Summer doesn't officially end until September 22. Here's what to read before then.
Whether or not it's factually true, I have always been of the belief that September feels like the hottest month of the year. This could be because I live in Los Angeles, where there is rarely a meaningful difference in weather once we cross the threshold of August. (A problem that only gets worse each year.) Or maybe it's just some latent, adolescent part of my brain that associates September with school and, therefore, with fall, thus making the heat feel like a punishment—the sun taunting me, the same 80-degree day sitting differently with my body than it did in July.
Either way, early September has always felt like purgatory to me; and while I like summer just fine, come September 1, I often forget it isn't technically over yet: This year, the fall equinox begins on September 22—another three weeks away. With that in mind, I asked a few cool folks to tell us what they're reading until then. (But I think it's a list worth devouring year-round.)
This is my favorite book to bring to the beach. Many books have tackled reimaginings of the classics, and it’s been interesting to see a hearty subgenre emerge within that category of same-sex romance. But for me, Anne Carson did it best with this poetic take on one of the labors of Heracles: Instead of slaying the red monster Geryon, he breaks his heart.
The story is told from Geryon’s perspective. He is soft, sensitive, and insecure. So, you know. Gay. I found that relatable to begin with. The most beautiful parts to me are the passing mentions of Geryon’s wings, which exist, but most people don’t seem to pay much mind to. Love, flight, Greek mythology, being different, the erotic—it’s all here, rendered so splendidly and with such tenderness. It’s an incredibly quick read. It will only take you an afternoon or so to fall in love.
I’m a bit burned out on media about women in their early 20s living their messiest lives—but when I started Sarah Thankam Mathew’s debut, I felt excited by its fresh approach. In a coming-of-age that considers capitalism, queerness, and cultural identity, recent graduate Sneha lands in Milwaukee during the Great Recession thanks to a corporate job that offers free rent and enough money to support her family in India. As funny as she is frustrating, with that naive mix of knowing nothing but believing everything deeply, I saw a lot of my younger self in Sneha, and I appreciated the chance to spend a rainy weekend in the world of her and friends, knowing I’d return to the stability of my late 20s after I finished it.
Personally, summer tends to either be a blossoming time of creativity, or I feel like a raisin withering on a vine. The fact that I’ve mostly spent the summer reading screenwriting guides, I can say this one was the former. One memoir has become the center of my practice, however: Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel. A quick read, Misfits refuses to sit firmly in any genre. Coel shares stories from her life, explores her creative ambitions, and provides guidance for Black people trying to survive in the entertainment industry. Reading about Coel’s process and life has inspired my own work and the risks I take.
The linked stories in John Keene’s Counternarratives took me a month to read and will take years, I’m sure, to weave through my thinking. This is the kind of book that makes me return to what Toni Morrison and Stephanie Smallwood have said about imaginative literature as a necessary part of the history of slavery (and, I would add, indigenous genocide and survival). How else? In these pieces of the quilt we have an interior monologue from Huck Finn’s Jim (who now belongs to himself), we have a deckhand from Hispaniola on the uncolonized shores of Manhattan, we have conversos in 17th century Brazil. We have Langston Hughes in bed with his translator, Xavier Villaurrutia. We have so many forms and their wild reformations. I was already a fan after reading John Keene’s experimental memoir Annotations, but now he’s a top five fave.
I find summers to be catastrophic for reading, but recently it's been a nice salve. Mostly I have a hard time reading when it's too hot, and of course, the world is the hottest it's ever been. The heat in Toronto has broken just a touch, so I can sit in the shade and finally enjoy a few pages. I'm very lucky to be able to get sent novels all the time, and recently I've been reading the novella by Sam Cottington, People Person, and Allie Rowbottom's new novel Aesthetica. If you know me, I am always buying out of print books and trying to find certain titles. I just got the novelization of the film The Way We Were by Arthur Laurents. I think the story of The Way We Were is one of the best portrayals of romance, ever! I'm hoping reading the novel will be instructive...
When I think biography, I think dense. I was delighted to find Odell's bio of Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour to be the opposite. It flows nimbly through decades of media, culture, and fashion history, all told through the lens of one powerful, embattled, iconic, often deeply contradictory woman. Perhaps most impressive is that despite Wintour's fame, Odell manages to neither valorize nor villainize the notorious editor. Her reporting is fair, the book's voice compelling. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes of what makes Wintour a powerhouse—the privilege, the skills, and above all the survival instincts that may make or break her in the years to come.
I just finished reading Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, a novel that somehow manages to pack horror, queer romance, and comedy elements all in one book, perfect for readers who love reality dating shows (whether ironically or not). This fun read follows the contestants—and producers—of a Bachelor-like reality show called The Catch as their experience filming on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest turns more Stephen King than Nora Ephron, all because of an uninvited guest lurking in the background. The relationships between the women vying for the attention of the titular “Catch” created legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, only to be followed by suspenseful twists and turns that kept me turning the page. Those who watch reality TV will truly appreciate the way Allen has written these characters, though you don’t have to be a devotee of dating shows to appreciate this book. It’s honestly just so much fun, and a great summer read.
I must start off this recommendation by admitting that I am not a sports guy in any sense of the word; as a Philadelphian, I will defend the Birds and all of our other rambunctious sports teams until my dying breath, but that is only because to do otherwise would be deeply unwise in terms of my personal safety (and would severely piss off my neighbors, who own a meat smoker and like to share its bounty). However, Sam Anderson's sprawling, ingenious, lovingly crafted narrative nonfiction debut about Oklahoma City, its messy frontier history, and its oft-beleaguered basketball team not only got me to care about sports, it made me want to look up the (living, breathing, balling) characters in his book to find out more about them. It scratched my eternal itch to learn about places that seem overlooked and written off, the way that Oklahoma City and its Midwestern brethren often are; it made me consider listening to the Flaming Lips, and taught me a hell of a lot about tornados and the benign cult of the local weatherman. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you do not care about any of the things I've listed here, trust me—Sam Anderson will change that, and teach you a thing or two besides.
A cult book is a bit like a cat, in that it has many lives, and you never know when you might encounter it. For Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a squirrely novel about a slacker named Maria—a close friend told me it was absolutely her favorite book, then emailed me a PDF. I read it quickly, as one tends to do with anything on their computer screen, and found it to be the rare, actually-funny New York novel, more possessed by the grime of the city than its glitz. But it’s the book’s surprising second act that takes place in the state of—well, you can guess—and the way it swerves past the obvious ending that has stayed with me.
Nevada was reissued this summer by FSG, giving it a new audience and me a reason to read it again. This time, as a handsome paperback, I told myself I would consume it more slowly. No such luck. The book is too funny! I read the whole thing in a single afternoon at the park.
I just re-read J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. As the story opens, a hyper-modern tower block welcomes its new tenants. The building offers them every imaginable convenience, from an onsite supermarket and swimming pool to automatic trash chutes and a rooftop children’s garden. Well-heeled women walk pedigreed poodles across the building’s pristine elevator concourses. By the end of the novel their feral husbands are hunting those same dogs for food and roasting them on improvised spits over pyres of burning furniture. The housewives, themselves, have turned to cannibalism. The most alarming thing about this calamitous fall is that absolutely everyone in the building sees it coming—which makes this novel an unsettling read in the early days of our climate apocalypse. It’s easy to call Ballard prophetic, but he was just attuned to the human subconscious and fascinated by the ways in which our desires could be set loose by architecture and technology. In High-Rise, the building itself gives shape to the worst of humanity. I can only hope we imagine some new shapes to avoid such a fate ourselves.
I believe summer reading calls for books that either tap into a refreshing deep freeze or enhance the heat and entropy of the season. Mary Robison’s first novel, Oh!, mixes these effects—it’s the ice in your tea on a blazing afternoon, a pristinely funny account of a Midwestern family, the Clevelands, who seem dysfunctional to outsiders but may be living more authentically than the rest of us. Underneath the booze and bickering is a love strong enough to sustain them through the disasters that, besides the tornados, are mostly of their own making. I felt right at home.
I spent the last year researching, writing, and promoting a book. It’s been transformative, exhilarating, and frankly exhausting. My goal this summer was to be as lazy as possible. My tolerance for holding a book, as well as my attention span, are at an all-time low, so I turned to audio books (yes, I realize I am decades behind!). Listening to Emily Wilson’s lively, lean, and rhythmic translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, narrated by Claire Danes, is the perfect soundtrack to lying down, on my bed or warm grass, my preferred summer activities. It’s a fun reminder of the physicality of words and storytelling, and Wilson’s accessible language lets me focus on all the human drama—like I’m eavesdropping on some hot, ancient gossip!
I feel like I read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less whenever I’m traveling or trying to write—which, I suppose, is all the time. The book follows Arthur Less, a “minor author” and “magniloquent spoony” pushing fifty years old, who skips his ex’s wedding by going on a round-the-world trip where he writes and teaches and meets a sparkling cast of life lessons masquerading as humans. I have four big trips this summer (Manila, London, Sewanee in Tennessee, and Tuscany; writing through all of it), so I’ve kept Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning baby in my carry-on this whole time. It’s been nice having a friend with me for the long layovers, for the writer’s blocks, for the reminders that this burning world is something to love.
I regret to open my first ever blurb for this wonderful publication by triple-bypassing its single instruction and recommending a book that I actually read in the dead of winter, but I devoured The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård, and you should, too. I had never read him before but, based on the man’s healthy ego and reputation for excruciating minutiae, I half expected to give up almost immediately. Instead, this haunting, imaginative, at times philosophical, and at times humorous collection of loosely interconnected stories gripped me from the first page. What can I say, Knausgård can write!
This is a book about being Vladimir Nabokov and wanting to flex with language. Some would say it’s a book about love, or that it’s a family chronicle, but really it’s Nabokov dancing giddily across the page. There’s wordplay galore, with the title itself being an example—”Ada,” the author notes, when pronounced with a “long, deep Russian a” sounds like “ardor,” and so a person can be construed as a tribulation.
There’s a plot to be traveled down, should you need one. But the point of reading the book, to me, is to remind the reader that prose can be pursued so rapturously and with such confidence. It’s a great book to read if you’re experiencing writer’s block. Watching Nabokov shape language like a master ceramicist is inspiring, if you can push past the confusing names (there are two different “Van Veen”s) and, well, the incest. There are plenty of beautiful descriptions of bugs to distract you, at least.
The whole thing also takes place on an entirely alternate Earth called Antiterra, for some reason, which to me gave the austere trappings of the book an alluring sci-fi sheen to it. It’s truly an imagination, run amok.
This new adult contemporary romance is the debut novel of the author of Love in Colour, a master of the love story. Set at a university in the UK, with an exclusively Black cast of characters, Babalola's crafted a world with such care and attention to detail that it rises from the page to greet the reader. You are invited in, summoned to come play with some of the best romance tropes in existence (Enemies to lovers! Fake dating!), and also to bear witness to their reinvigoration.
I devoured this book beachside, taken over by rich characters who by book's end settle into your heart like old friends. Most incisive, to me? This book is ultimately about how hard it is to open your heart: the pits that form when you fear hurting or getting hurt, and the rewards that come when you do the work to do better and be open. A tribute to the "babygirls" and "babyghels" of Babalola's life, the novel's a love letter to all kinds of love, not just the romantic.
This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in trans history, queer history, or any kind of history at all, really. In 1912, Ewan Forbes was born to an old aristocratic family in Scotland; assigned female at birth, he was nonetheless very clear about his identity from a young age, and that resolve (and his mother's love) led him to seek out an early version of gender affirming care. All Ewan wanted was to become a family man and live a quiet, decent life; he achieved this for a while, until a grasping younger brother came knocking, and Ewan's entire world—and identity—was turned upside down. What happened afterwards led to a pivotal, precedent-setting legal ruling that was summarily buried and kept secret for decades, until now. Ewan's story intersects with many different moments and movements throughout his long and eventful life, and as Playdon deftly illustrates (backed up by years of intensive research), the roots of the UK's current abysmal plague of transphobia do not run nearly as deep as its hateful proponents would like us to think. Her thrilling, warm-hearted excavation of Ewan's life and legal battles unravels a fascinating tale that challenges modern ideas around gender, healthcare, human rights, the British legal system, and even the aristocracy. Read it.
I loved Elaine Castillo’s novel, America Is Not the Heart, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from her first nonfiction release. Ostensibly a critique of reading and how we, as readers, can do it better, it sounded esoteric. But Castillo makes a strong argument that reading isn’t just for books, but also the reading of the world: the broader consideration of other people, and ourselves in relation, using topics like Joan Didion, Watchmen, and the films of Wong Kar-Wai as a lens. Her essays are so honest, funny, and sharp in their criticism that after just a few of them, I felt like some of the stuck gears in my thinking had come loose and I felt immediately motivated to write.
This contemporary young adult novel is aMamma Mia remix of the finest degree—and it knows it. The book's main character, an eager Manhattan theater kid, makes frequent reference to the musical, but somehow the novel is never bogged down by its origins. It's a fun read, gripping and gratifying. I found myself looking forward to the end of my workday so I could keep going and find out what happens in both the novel's winning romance and in its mystery. And here's a non-spoiler: That end is as gratifying as you'd hope.
—A.B.
[post_title] => What a Bunch of Interesting Humans Are Reading This Summer/Fall Purgatory
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[post_content] => No one is forbidding anyone from using the term 'woman' or 'mother.'
On October 15 Rosie DiManno, a Canadian journalist, wrote a contentious column for the Toronto Star, in which she claimed that women were being “erased” because British health care providers were introducing gender-inclusive language to accommodate nonbinary people and transgender men. The practice of referring to a menstruating or pregnant person instead of a menstruating or pregnant woman was, DiManno asserted, tantamount to “blotting women out” and bore a “whiff of misogyny.” DiManno’s grievance mongering, with her anger directed at transgender people, follows a pattern we have come to expect from TERFs—the acronym stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”—and their enablers. Almost invariably, they invoke problems that do not exist as a means of preempting the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people.
Whether the imaginary problem du jour is “men in dresses” invading public bathrooms or, as in DiManno’s op-ed, the supposed erasure of language that captures quintessentially female experiences, this tactic embodies reactionary politics of grievance and scapegoating. The subtext is that transgender women are “really” men, transgender men are “really” women, and nonbinary people don’t exist. DiManno’s views are widely known to Canadian newspaper readers, and rarely elicit a response, but this particular column received international attention because Margaret Atwood promoted it approvingly on Twitter. This is indeed disappointing. Even more disappointing is that Atwood refused to listen to those who alerted her to the trans-antagonistic nature of DiManno’s commentary. Instead, she doubled down.
Before exploring these developments and the key issue of inclusive language in more detail, let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, no one is forbidding anyone from using the term “woman” or “mother.” Secondly, I’m not here to “cancel” an 81-year-old literary icon, even if I had the power to do so. I taught The Handmaid’s Tale in 2018 for an arts and humanities theme course on apocalypse and dystopia in the University of South Florida’s Honors College; and, while I am not planning a return to the classroom, I would teach that book again. Atwood’s novel is an immensely important exploration of what can happen when religious extremism runs amok, with the harm disproportionately falling on women and queer people (“gender traitors” in the terminology of Gilead), and for that reason it is painfully relevant in our time.
As a trans woman, I have no trouble discussing access to abortion care as a woman’s issue, although it doesn’t fit exclusively under that rubric because it also affects trans men and some nonbinary individuals, which makes it also an LGBTQ issue. Nor is access to abortion an issue that affects all women. Cisgender women who are unable to conceive, have had hysterectomies, have gone through menopause, or who have certain intersex conditions, are not personally affected by abortion access issues, but no one would get defensive about applying the word “woman” to people in most of those categories.
I would like to pause here to point out that I unabashedly typed “woman” or “women” five times in the above paragraph, because in each case that was the most fitting term. In addition, in my recent commentary on Brittney Poolaw’s horrific manslaughter conviction in Oklahoma for suffering a miscarriage, I used the word “women” 10 times; by contrast, I used the inclusive phrase “anyone who can get pregnant” just once.
To the second point above— i.e., the issue of “cancel culture”— it should go without saying that criticizing the views of a public figure is not censorship. A highly visible public figure should expect that the expression of their opinion on political concerns will elicit a variety of responses and should be prepared for criticism. Even if one is not a public figure, the right to free speech is not the same as an exemption from consequences for expressing hateful or bigoted views.
In addition to the degree of offense, power dynamics should be taken into consideration. This should be axiomatic for feminists. And yet, when it comes to these issues and “cancel culture,” anti-trans self-described feminists are suddenly unable to understand that women (see what I did there?) like Atwood, gazillionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and DiManno are not vulnerable people who have to worry about financial insecurity or access to healthcare. They all have white and cis privilege, and they have far more power than the average woman. Trans people, by contrast, are disproportionately poor, highly vulnerable to “cancellation” via scapegoating, likely to face barriers to healthcare access, and, especially in the case of Black trans women, disproportionately subjected to violence up to and including murder.
There is one issue DiManno raised on which I agree with her and, by extension, Atwood: the anatomy of the female reproductive system has historically been erased due to patriarchy and puritanism. Encouraging girls and, indeed, all of us to have a better understanding of the vulva, the clitoris, the cervix, the uterus, and so forth is something our society needs. Jennifer Gunter’s 2019 bestseller The Vagina Bible was a much needed intervention, and I am very glad it exists. At the same time, there is something very odd about women who identify with feminism, a movement that has sought to decouple a woman’s value from reproduction and childrearing, to suddenly wish to define women precisely in those terms so long as it means not having to accommodate “those people.”
Regarding inclusive language, I disagree with DiManno and Atwood’s claim that using it as a means of accommodating some people who can get pregnant undermines the goal of increasing literacy about female anatomy and reproduction. DiManno completely misrepresented the facts to make her case, by referring to an article in The Lancet about UK hospitals using gender-neutral language to accommodate transgender men and nonbinary people. As Stacy Lee Kong points out, rather than prescribe that language across the board, “What did happen is Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust announced in February that it would be adding new trans-friendly terms including ‘birthing people’ and ‘chestfeeding’ to its existing vocabulary as a way to become more inclusive. The hospital was careful to note that it would only be using gender-neutral language in its internal communications and meetings, and that staff would use patients’ correct pronouns while caring for them.”
Intentionally or not, there is a great deal of dishonesty among the handwringing “why can’t we say woman anymore” crowd. That Atwood would throw in her lot with them is more disappointing than surprising to those who have been paying attention, since, as Kong also highlighted in her commentary on the current dustup, Atwood has previously reveled in being a self-described “bad feminist.”
The evolution of language, which is often pushed along by activists and advocates for marginalized communities, is understandably something that can make people uncomfortable. And indeed, activists sometimes go to excesses, though trans rights activists have so little power that the issue is mostly a red herring. Meanwhile, discomfort is sometimes necessary in order to learn and grow. And there is simply no excuse for distorting, exaggerating, and lying about what is really happening when healthcare systems, which often discriminate against trans people, begin to move toward understanding and accommodation. That thoroughly reactionary response is antithetical to the spirit of feminism as I understand it. Atwood seems uninterested in addressing her critics in a serious way, but if she should happen to read this column, I would ask her to look at the actual facts rather than the distorted version found in DiManno’s column, to sit for a while with her discomfort, and to consider leaving the politics of fear, scapegoating, and scarcity to the reactionary Right.
[post_title] => Margaret Atwood's opposition to gender-inclusive language is disappointing, but not surprising
[post_excerpt] => Self described feminists who oppose the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people are ddisregarding the facts in favor of a position predicated on fears and biases.
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[post_content] => But can radical inclusion be accomplished without silencing white feminist allies?
I was a first-year student at a prestigious U.S. women's college, back in 1989, when the college's alumnae association invited me to speak at a large event about my experience in coming to America. It wasn't very long into my first semester, and I'd just arrived from Karachi. I was 17 years old.
Karachi had been wracked by ethnic violence for more than a year, with student groups clashing all across the city and the entire province of Sindh. That was a very frightening time, with the media reporting daily death tolls and the military enforcing 24-hour curfews. It is still fresh in my mind.
There were two other speakers at the event, both women: one was a youth organizer and peace activist in her troubled Black urban community; the other had survived a slave camp in Southeast Asia and had been subsequently adopted by an American family. The audience, however, was composed almost exclusively of white American women, many of them rich, older, well-traveled, and educated. Yet for all their worldliness, they seemed unaware that they had propped us up on a stage as though we were exhibits on display.
The three of us stood and told our stories in turn, while the women in the audience looked sad and sympathetic. I don't remember much of what I said: I do remember being in tears as I said I wanted to study and to live in peace, but that my city didn't provide much opportunity for that. Afterward, we joined the audience for dinner. We three speakers were overwhelmed by all the attention from the alums, who came up to us to tell us how "brave" we were. But while I stayed in touch with the other speakers, never again did I hear from any of the alums or from the association.
That I had been asked to perform my story of misery and woe for an audience of white women was a realization that came only years later. Those women meant well and obviously cared about our stories, but they used my life and the lives of my fellow speakers to make themselves feel better about their comfortable American existence. Not only were they more fortunate than a girl from troubled Pakistan, a former child slave from war-torn Southeast Asia, or a Black girl from a rough urban neighborhood, but they were also providing them with a platform to amplify their stories.
Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption reminded me of this uncomfortable experience, now more than 30 years old. Indeed, the author describes an experience that felt remarkably familiar to the one I describe above: in her case, Zakaria believed she had been invited to a 2012 feminist event in the American Midwest as a speaker—only to be told, upon her arrival, to sit at a stall in a “global bazaar” and sell Pakistani trinkets.
It was a cathartic read, which helped me place my experience at the alumnae association against a backdrop of a white feminist agenda that is oftentimes self-serving, and which leaves behind women of other ethnicities, countries, experiences, faiths, and societies. Beyond just leaving us behind, this type of feminist activism uses us in order to leave us behind: by demonstrating the inferiority of our lives, white feminists continue to play the role of “expert” in the gender development establishment.
Zakaria deftly deconstructs the modern conundrums facing mainstream (white) feminism, with insightful examples, such as the lack of inclusivity at the 2017 Women's March; while the organizers were Black and Brown, the vast majority of attendees were white middle-class women. More broadly, she points to issues of intersectionality and how class and color affect women who struggle to make it out of poverty, but who cannot access essential tools like legal assistance. She also examines the pitfalls of addressing issues like so-called honor killings and female genital cutting/mutilation through a culturally limited white feminist lens.
In the first instance, she draws a parallel between honor killings and “crimes of passion”: while the crimes are similar, she points out, only one serves as an indictment of an entire culture and religion— i.e., Islam, eastern, “foreign.” About female genital cutting, she points out there is no attempt to understand the nuances and complexities of the issue or to distinguish between a ceremonial “nick” and an outright excision of the genitals. Zakaria does not defend honor killings or advocate for FGM. She challenges the idea that there is an innate moral superiority to Western culture, which presents itself as exclusively on the “right” side of these issues.
Zakaria, an attorney and author who lives in Indiana, intersperses these chapters with her own experiences as a young Pakistani-Muslim woman. Born in Pakistan, she consented to an arranged marriage with a Pakistani man in the U.S. when she was 17. It was an unhappy and violent union that she escaped at age 25, fleeing with her toddler to a women’s shelter. She went on to law school and a job with a Black-owned law firm, and to helping immigrant women make their way through the American justice system. With this life story she establishes herself as the opposite of a white feminist, but one who possesses, as the result of her lived experience, a deep understanding of the phenomenon.
Against White Feminism turns middle-class white feminism inside out, like a garment, so that we can view the weaknesses of the seams and the sloppiness of the stitching. It's eye-opening for anyone who identifies as a feminist but has not thought about how strongly its prevailing principles, tenets, and history are rooted in systemic racism and capitalism.
The book is probably strongest, however, in its analysis of how the U.S. justified its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by claiming they were partly motivated to save women from Taliban oppression. American feminists threw their weight behind the war effort, and the ostensible goal of saving oppressed brown women from oppressive brown men. In doing so, they lent their voices to the American military industrial complex, which visited untold suffering upon Afghan women with bombings, drone attacks, massive displacement, and the destruction and displacement of their families.
Certainly, the situation of some Afghan women—i.e., those in urban areas—improved immeasurably after the coalition forces routed the Taliban. Over the past 20 years, a whole generation of women attended university and built careers. But with the Taliban now back in power and female journalists, teachers, artists, and activists having fled or gone into hiding, the long war seems futile. With reports in The New Yorkerand from the Brookings Institution showing that the U.S. presence made rural Afghan women’s lives a hell, white feminists are now forced to confront the limitations of their support for the 20 year Afghan project and the putative gains in women’s empowerment that it touted.
A debacle like the invasion and withdrawal from Afghanistan does not happen without important historical context. Zakaria looks at the British suffragist movement of the early twentieth century, pointing out that the women who fought for the right to vote ignored the suffering caused by their country’s colonialism and imperialism in places like India. Zakaria also examines how contemporary white feminists engaged in “development” work abroad design aid programs that ignore activists on the ground who would provide crucial cultural and sociological moorings to any program for lasting, deep-rooted change.
The result of this failure to include local activists: campaigns and interventions that are myopic and deeply racist, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program that gave sewing machines and chickens to poor women in the Global South. These programs endow women with the white feminist’s fantasy of what a simple livelihood in undeveloped countries looks like, instead of envisioning creative solutions that enable women to access complicated and complex power, as well as agency and respect in their communities.
For the most part Zakaria makes her arguments lucidly; at other times, however, they are a stretch. For example, she dismisses Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom's attempt to introduce feminist foreign policy as empty promises from a disingenuous white feminist. The truth is more nuanced than that: Wallstrom tried very hard to stop Sweden from selling arms to Saudi Arabia because of its poor record on women’s rights, but her government, influenced by powerful arms traders in the Swedish military-industrial complex, overrode her efforts. Zakaria glosses over these facts, perhaps trying too hard to find case studies that conform to her arguments.
In another section of the book, Zakaria refers to a letter signed by Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2002. However, the source for this claim is a 2015 article that Zakaria wrote for Aeon, in which she made the same claim. The original article on the Aeon website does not have a source, and there is no trace of the open letter anywhere on the internet. This, I suspect, is a consequence of sloppiness rather than malice, but it does not serve the book well in its call for a higher kind of feminist ethics.
Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming, however, is Zakaria’s failure to offer a proper definition of the term “white feminism” until close to the end of the book; she should have laid it out at the beginning, since her entire argument is a response to white feminism. Zakaria describes it as a system that excludes the needs, voices, and expertise of brown and Black women, "a set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery." But there is a danger in using “white feminism” as a shorthand for the entire system Zakaria is calling out. Pitting brown and Black feminists, a minority in America (the book is written very much for an American audience, which is an unavoidable shortcoming), against the "white" feminist majority is momentarily empowering, but, in the long term, dispiriting and exhausting. It can leave everyone feeling like there's no point in trying to come together because the gap created by past divisions is too vast to bridge.
Zakaria’s indignant refusal to make excuses for white feminists is satisfying, but it leaves very little room for allies among white women. It also leaves little room for brown and Black women who want to work in solidarity with white women, or for those who want to access the networks and power structures that white feminists have benefited from for decades. Instead, Zakaria advocates a further splintering of the feminist movement into "Black feminisms, Muslim feminisms, queer feminisms." Will this breakdown into feminist specializations lead to a more effective global feminism— one that accomplishes the goals of women’s equality? Zakaria does not say.
It's important to point out the injustices and weaknesses of the dominant feminist movement vis-a-vis women of color. It’s certainly not the job of non-white women to provide the roadmap to reconciliation, and there is nothing in Against White Feminism to make white feminists feel more comfortable—rightly so. But the balkanization of feminism is hardly a movement from which women of the world, brown and Black, can achieve true gains. Power-sharing between all women, white, brown, and Black, under the current system, seems impossible if we are to take Zakaria’s perspective to heart. Surely we can envision a system where no woman has to step down in order for everyone to step up, together.
[post_title] => Rafia Zakaria's 'Against White Feminism' is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist
[post_excerpt] => 'Against White Feminism,' by Rafia Zakaria, successfully challenges the idea that western culture holds an innately superior attitude to women.
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[post_content] => To break down the structures of racism and oppression, start with an act of radical solidarity: listening.
A memorial gathering for David Graeber, the activist-anarchist and anthropologist who died unexpectedly in September, was held on October 11 in Berlin. The invitation described it as part of an intergalactic memorial carnival. In memory of Graeber’s activism, the masked attendees shouted “off with their heads!” while gleefully popping balloon heads of Trump, Erdoğan and Bolsonaro, who represented “kings to topple”.
They also chanted against patriarchy, imperialism and racism in the direction of the nearby Humboldt Forum, a controversial project to repurpose the former Prussian Berlin Palace as a museum for ethnographical collections from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Opponents of the project say it perpetuates Germany’s legacy of colonialism with a collection of stolen objects housed in a building that symbolizes European imperialism.
In Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Azoulay, an artist, critical theorist and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, describes the institutionalization of these “kings”, or the manifestations of political, social and economic control through physical violence and cultural erasure, as part of an interconnected system of imperial oppression stretching back to 1492. She proposes the urgent, imaginative task of unlearning these structures.
In many ways, this aim to rethink imperial societal structures is present in the global wave of demonstrations inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests that started in the United States last spring, sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black American, by a white Minneapolis police officer. Black Lives Matter protests have been ongoing since the 2013 founding of the group after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The recent protests, which also build on the decolonial and antiracist efforts against institutions and monuments by groups such as Decolonize This Place, Museum Detox and the Monument Removal Brigade, have triggered a renewed debate on the imperial legacies of Western Europe and the United States, especially the perpetuation of these histories via the institutionalization of material culture.
In June, the King of Belgium responded to a mass Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels by apologizing for his country’s brutal colonial history in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Activists emphasized that this apology was informal, lacked concrete political action and came sixty years too late. In the United States, Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, D.C. toppled a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike after Juneteenth rallies. In September, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza staged a widely-reported protest with his attempt to take back a nineteenth century African funeral pole that was on exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. In October, London police arrested eighteen-year-old Benjamin Clark for tagging a statue of Winston Churchill with “racist”.
Diyabanza, the Congolese activist, is part of the pan-African Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, which has enacted similar actions in the Netherlands and southern France. For the Quai Branly intervention in June, he worked with other activists to live-stream the event; in the video he calls for the French government to stop collecting stolen colonial objects. But the judge who presided over his case stated that it should focus only on the specific funerary pole and not the broader context of ongoing colonial reparation efforts. Diyabanza argued that the museum action should not be considered a crime because, “We get our legitimacy from the perpetual idea of trying to recover our heritage and giving our people access to it.”
In Potential Histories Azoulay stresses this idea of legitimacy in which stolen material culture is often used to prop up state, colonial and imperial actors as a basic premise that underlines the (fraudulent) idea of History. While she draws on her scholarship and activism in Israel and Palestine and research on slavery in the United States, Azoulay’s aims to illustrate the international embeddedness of such imperial and colonial structures.
Azoulay’s ongoing critical photographic theory research plays an important role in unpacking this History. She suggests that the “shutter” of photography, which dates back to the late nineteenth century, was a technology that aided imperial conquest. The shutter “acts like a verdict” in that it initiates a linear before and after and results in a document narrating a specific historical vision—i.e., the vision of the (colonial) photographer and the ruling institution that he represents. She describes the use of photography as a means of recording the attempted erasure of native cultures, which were and are territorially separated and ruled. The photograph is a format in which these results were used to create linear historical knowledge, such as how the creation of new borders renders some “undocumented” or “illegal aliens” and some “citizens.” This is upheld by institutions ranging from museums, universities and archives to contemporary formations of nation-based sovereignty and governance.
[caption id="attachment_2232" align="alignnone" width="1920"] From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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[post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth. Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?
A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”
This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.
Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.
Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”
Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.
Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:
ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
While these definitions do fit uncannily well with the present political climate, some of the concepts of Láadan and Native Tongue feel outdated. The stark divisions between gender, for example, fit more with 1980s second-wave feminism in which gender essentialism was a big discussion. There’s also the glaring idea that all women are dominated by all men, which fails to take into account configurations of race, class, ability and non-binary gender identities. The questions posed by Native Tongue feel more relevant to our contemporary situation when “male domination” is replaced with “patriarchy,” which is defined as an unjust social, political and economic system harmful to all who do not hold power within it. In this line of thought, “women’s language” could be replaced with “intersectional feminist language”—i.e., a language that expresses the views of those who, for a variety of factors, experience discrimination and oppression.
Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy with a ten-year timeline, aiming for Láadan to be adopted by 1994, but this never happened. While scholars such as Ruth Menzies point to the difficulty of learning a detailed new language, it is tempting to agree with Elgin, who argued that Láadan failed because women were reluctant to speak a language that forced them to parse their feelings so thoroughly. One additional detail about Láadan is that its structure makes the speaker state the emotion and intent behind everything they say. Necessary speech act morphemes, such as bíi (“I say to you, as a statement”), bóo (“I request”) and bée (“I say in warning”) are paired with suffixes, such as -li (“said in love”), -ya (“said in fear”) and -d (“said in anger”). Thus, in every sentence, the Láadan speaker must clarify their position with words such as:
bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
The type of emotional involvement in constantly analyzing one’s position, intention and feelings seems completely at odds with how English is spoken by those given the most attention, time and money to speak it. Imagine a society in which every politician, but also every citizen, must state their feelings of love, fear or paranoia in every sentence and choose from numerous words for comfort, community and wrongdoing.
In her epigraph to chapter thirteen of Native Tongue, Elgin writes that, “For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction.” Perhaps, as Gessen has warned, this implosion is in the not too distant future, in which the damage done by this era of American politics will leave us with few words that still hold meaning. Native Tongue provides a glimpse of how linguistic repair could be not just a tool to alter reality, but to mold it anew.
[post_title] => In her 1984 science fiction novel 'Native Tongue,' linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch
[post_excerpt] => A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen.
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From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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