A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
At the broad, gray steps of the entrance to the European Parliament in Brussels, a group of women circle around one in particular. Most are dressed in traditional Yazidi attire—long, white dresses with short lilac or black vests, and white headscarves—but the woman they’ve assembled around is dressed inconspicuously, her long, dark hair tied in a loose knot. Everybody knows who she is: Feleknas Uca, a long-time advocate for the rights of her Yazidi community. Looking at the women around her, she calls out their names one by one, handing each a badge. With these badges, the women will be able to enter the colossal building before them, where their voices are desperately needed inside. Uca has organized this gathering, a one-day conference, to demand justice for the Yazidi genocide, ten years ago this August.
"Yazidis need to be able to protect themselves,” she says.
Those who remember the Yazidi genocide, which started on August 3, 2014, likely recall the haunting footage of Iraqi and US helicopters throwing water and food down to the bone-dry, scorching hot mountain below, where Yazidi refugees had gathered in a panic. Down the hill, ISIS, the fundamentalist jihadist group that had quickly occupied large swaths of Iraq and Syria, had begun an ethnic cleansing of their people.
Mount Sinjar (or Shingal, in Kurdish) is the center of the historic homeland of the Yazidis, and was, at the time, their last hope for salvation. As some of the helicopters touched ground, they prioritized pulling women, children, and the elderly to safety. Those left behind on the mountain either succumbed to the heat, thirst, or exhaustion; the rest were brought across the border after Kurdish militias opened a corridor to Kurdish-controlled land in Syria.
The fate of those who never made it to the mountain would become clearer in the weeks and months thereafter. Thousands of men were instantly massacred by ISIS, and thousands of women and children were abducted. Girls and women were forced into ISIS “marriages,” sold on markets, and used as domestic and sex slaves, while boys became “cubs of the caliphate,” fighters-in-training. All were forcibly converted to Islam.
Ethnically, Yazidis are considered Kurdish, and their mother tongue is the eponymous language; although some in the Yazidi community consider it an ethnic identity of its own. Others contend all Kurds used to be Yazidis, until the emergence of Islam, when many Kurds converted. ISIS considered the Yazidis to be devil worshippers, as most adhere to a centuries-old pre-Christian and pre-Islamic faith.
Uca was visiting Germany when the genocide started to unfold, receiving the news in real time on the day the tragedy began. ISIS had been approaching, but the Kurdish peshmerga forces present in the Shingal region had promised to protect the Yazidis from harm. They withdrew just as ISIS began their attack.
“A call came from a man I knew who was there,” she says. “His sister wanted to kill herself because she was about to fall into ISIS’ hands. She had a weapon. We tried to talk to her but then I heard a shot. I will never forget that moment.”
The daughter of a Yazidi family that migrated to Germany in the 1970s, Uca was born in the north-central town of Celle, which has a large Yazidi community. In 1999, at age 22, she became the youngest-ever member of European Parliament (MEP) as a German representative of the Party for Democratic Socialism, and later for Die Linke (The Left), where she remained an MEP until 2009, when she didn’t seek re-election. When the genocide began, she had just recently moved from Germany to Turkey, where her family was originally from: The Yazidis are indigenous to Kurdistan, which geographically includes regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. She’d chosen to live in Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast region, and had become a candidate in the parliamentary elections for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. Founded in 2012, HDP is a leftist party rooted in the Kurdish political movement; their main objective is to democratize Turkey and give regions and communities the opportunity to govern themselves. In the June 2015 elections, Uca was elected MP and became the first Yazidi in Turkish parliament.
From the start of her time as an HDP MP, Uca was in a delicate position. While advocating for Kurds and for Yazidis specifically, the HDP claimed that the Turkish government had been aiding ISIS, and consequently held it co-responsible for the genocide—something the government vehemently denied. The HDP, including Uca, also supported the armed Kurdish groups that fought against ISIS, including those the Turkish government considered to be terrorists because of their adherence to the same leftist ideology as the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which has been waging an armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since the 1980s. Because of this overlap, HDP MPs, like Uca, became victims of a government campaign that accused them of supporting terrorism.
Uca was undeterred by it. The author of this piece, herself based in Diyarbakır during those years, got to know Uca as a parliamentarian who was often found among her community, listening to their needs and trying to forge solutions for them in her capacity as MP. For example, many Yazidis who fled to Turkey to escape ISIS were left in refugee camps with tents that did not protect them during harsh winters and hot summers. They also lacked adequate medical care and were not receiving substantial education. As MP, Uca made attempts to increase the budget for the camps, and while she only had limited success, her presence and care endeared her to the community.
Feleknas Uca in 2008. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)
Having witnessed the Yazidis’ struggles over the years while advocating for them at high levels of government, Uca has a profound understanding of her community’s needs, wants, and fears. Today, she believes what’s most important is ensuring they are able to return to their homeland. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Yazidis left their home as refugees, resettling in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While they may be physically safe in these places, Uca tells me, their displacement is still a continuation of the genocide.
“What ISIS wanted to do, is not only to kill and enslave the Yazidis, but also remove them from their ancestral lands. One of the problems we face now is that the community is still not able to return to Shingal because it remains too unsafe,” she says.
In Shingal, where the Iraqi army and Iran-backed militias are now stationed, the Yazidi self-defense force—the Shingal Resistance Units (YBŞ)—founded by the PKK in the weeks after August 3, 2014, is under pressure to be dismantled. Like the PKK, Turkey considers the YBŞ a terrorist group, and regularly bombs them, killing fighters; in addition to targeting local medical clinics, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. Consequently, Yazidis can’t always return to their homeland, even if they wish to do so. Uca believes that Europe and the US have a responsibility to step in.
“Many Western countries have recognized the Yazidi genocide, but they don’t take any action to assist the community in building a future again in Shingal,” she says. “They don’t visit the region, they don’t help rebuilding it, they don’t hold Turkey responsible for assisting ISIS then, and letting it attack Shingal now.”
Among her many grievances are the centers that were opened in several European countries—mostly in Germany—where Yazidi women who were rescued from ISIS could process their trauma. These same services remain unavailable in Shingal.
“I have always said that if we really want to help these women, we will have to build trauma centers in Shingal, so they can process their trauma and rebuild their future and live their culture and religion in their homeland, where they were born and raised,” Uca says. “But the therapy has been transferred abroad, and with that, the future of the Yazidis. While the community can only really survive at home.”
The continued plight of the Yazidis could cause Uca great despair, but she is adamant that there are also victories, large and small. She has heard countless stories of Yazidi women, in particular, overcoming horrific circumstances and fighting back. She was able to get a visa for one of these women, Hêza Shengalî, so that she could speak at the one-day conference in Brussels. Shengalî was taken captive by ISIS in 2014 and remained in their custody for a year. After she escaped, she joined the Şengal Women’s Units, or YJŞ—the armed women’s wing of the YBŞ—and requested to be sent to Syria to join the forces fighting ISIS there.
“For me, and for other Yazidi women who have joined the YBŞ, fighting back against ISIS is a way to heal,” Shengalî says.
As a commander, she contributed to their eventual victory in the city of Raqqa, which ISIS had deemed their “capital.” When Raqqa was liberated, many Yazidi women and girls were liberated, too. After returning to Shingal, Hêza was even a part of a small delegation that handed over a newly liberated young Yazidi woman back to her family.
In large part because of the YBŞ, despite the Yazidi community’s past gender conservatism, things have started to change in the last decade, including its expectations of women.
“Hêza is normative for what Yazidi women can accomplish,” Uca says. “In 2014, and after that, even 70-year-old women have taken up a weapon to defend themselves. The community has transformed itself.”
Of course, there is still a long way to go. In early 2018, after ISIS lost the last territory they occupied, the women and their children were locked up in camps in northeast Syria and guarded by Kurdish forces. Amongst them were Yazidi women who were once held captive by ISIS. They were (and are) afraid to reveal themselves as such because ISIS ideology is still prevalent amongst the prisoners there. For others, it’s because they’ve had children with ISIS members and are afraid to lose them, as the Yazidi community does not accept these children as legitimate.
Periodically, Yazidi women and girls have been discovered within the camps and rescued by the Kurdish armed forces, but currently, some 2700 remain missing, and are believed to still be in the camps or abroad with ISIS members who managed to flee to neighboring countries, including Turkey. Others may be dead, and their remains are unlikely to ever be found.
Thousands of boys and men remain missing, as well. In cooperation with the United Nations, mass graves in different locations in the Shingal region have been opened since early 2019. Some remains have been identified by Iraqi authorities in cooperation with the UN and have gone on to be reburied with dignity. However, many mass graves remain untouched, leaving families in anguish over the exact fate of their loved ones and unable to give them a proper burial or grave. Other boys may have died in battle as “cubs of the caliphate,” although occasionally, some are found in Turkey, staying with families who belonged to ISIS, who may have distanced themselves from their ideology or who may quietly still support it. Some Yazidi boys have also been reunited with their families in exchange for a ransom.
Having visited Shingal multiple times since the genocide, Uca has been present to witness some of these reunions. She’s also spent a lot of time talking to the women, men, girls, and boys who have been liberated.
“I remember one boy whose first question was: ‘How is Shingal? Is it liberated?’ I saw hope in his eyes. ‘Yes, it has been liberated,’” she says. “And I see that hope in the eyes of the liberated women, too. They have gone through so much, but their resilience is impressive. This is what makes me feel hopeful.”
Uca knows she still has much work to do. In 2018, she was re-elected to the Turkish parliament and visited Shingal with an HDP delegation after Turkey targeted a clinic with a drone, killing eight. She gave a speech about it in parliament, demanding answers from her fellow MPs—answers she didn’t get.
In last year’s general elections, Uca wasn’t on the ballot, due to the party’s two-term limit for all parliamentarians. The end of her mandate also meant the end of her parliamentary immunity, compelling her to leave Turkey instantly because state prosecutors had opened investigations against her for “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” as it had done to dozens of Kurdish MPs, many of whom have been imprisoned. She returned to Germany, and from there, continued her political work in Europe, including organizing conferences, undertaking diplomacy work in the EU, and networking and cooperating with a wide range of Yazidi, Kurdish, and other women’s groups. She’s still keen to solve her legal problems in Turkey, however, and is also planning a new journey to Shingal; it’s been a year since she was last able to visit. And while there is still much to resolve and to heal in the aftermath of what the Yazidis have endured, for Uca, hope is alive and ahead.
“You know what comes to mind when I think of hope? I remember just walking in Shingal and suddenly seeing a lilac flower. Shingal, too, will bloom again and be the hope of humanity,” she says. “Of course, I can do a lot of work in Europe, but my heart is in Shingal. Only when I am there, working in my community, I know that I am Feleknas.”
[post_title] => The Story of the Yazidi Genocide Isn't Over
[post_excerpt] => A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
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In her new memoir "Rebel Girl," riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna reckons with her mistakes.
When I first saw Bikini Kill perform live in 2022, it felt like a long time coming. The groundbreaking feminist punk band hadn’t toured in two decades, and in the intervening years, legions of listeners like me had become devout fans, and frontwoman Kathleen Hanna something of an unwitting feminist icon. Most of us figured we’d never actually get the chance to see her, Kathi Wilcox, Billy Karren, and Tobi Vail together on stage again—at least, not like in the band’s heyday. Bikini Kill’s live shows were the stuff of legends: brash refutations of macho-dude punks, where the band tore through fierce odes to feminist solidarity, and Hanna yelled into the mic about wanting “revolution, girl-style, now”—famously demanding, at every show, that the crowd make space for young women to come up to the front of the room.
But that was 20 years ago. The three women I watched on stage in New York (Karren didn’t join the reunion tour) were not the same young punks who’d played in grungy basements in the ’90s. They were a couple decades older and wiser; still committed to their feminist principles, but changed, years of experience and new perspectives now coloring their rallying cries. At the show I saw, Hanna’s slogan—“Girls to the front!”—got an overdue, if slightly clunky, corrective. It wasn’t just girls who deserved space at these shows, Hanna explained. Nonbinary people deserved to occupy that space, too, as did trans men—anyone who usually got shoved aside. It made sense to me that Hanna would reject—or at least reframe—her original sentiment, even if it temporarily robbed the iconic phrase of some of its power. The context around Hanna had changed, and punk had, too: Where she used to look out from the stage and see only a handful of young women, their views blocked by a moshpit of guys, she now saw a respectful, diverse crowd who didn’t have to be asked to make space for each other, because they’d already done it themselves.
I thought about this shift in punk feminism while reading Rebel Girl, Hanna’s new memoir, released last month. It’s a dense, often chaotic book that careens through Hanna’s fascinating life: her difficult childhood, her entrée into the punk scene, her early days on tour with Bikini Kill, then later as a solo artist and with Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. Throughout, Hanna grapples with what it means to be an artist and an activist, and how the sexist conditions for women in rock music have—and haven’t—changed since she first started making music. Hanna makes it clear that she never set out to become a feminist icon (she started a band, she writes, simply because she wanted “to be heard”), and that riot grrrl was always intended to be an anti-hierarchical movement, without a clear, singular leader. Maybe this is why what struck me most while reading Rebel Girl wasn’t Hanna’s righteousness, or her many triumphs, but the way she acknowledged her shortcomings—and the failures of the riot grrrl movement she helped pioneer.
With startling honesty, Hanna reflects over and over on the ignorance afforded to her by her privilege, a rare thing to witness from a celebrity of her magnitude. In one incident, she writes about offending Kurt Cobain, whom she’d initially befriended over their shared feminist politics. He’d gotten icy after she gifted him a copy of an inflammatory manifesto, and Hanna realized he may have felt like she was lording her expensive college education over him—“acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt,” as she puts it, despite having worked as a stripper to make ends meet when she was a student. It was a crucial moment in her early understanding of intersectionality. “Being constantly put down as a woman,” she writes, “had blinded me to my own power to hurt people.”
Eventually, she’d witness this same lack of awareness in her peers. On one occasion, she writes about organizing a workshop called “Unlearning Racism” at a riot grrrl conference, and quickly realizing how few of her fellow white feminists had begun to think about—never mind concretely take action against—the intersecting oppressions women of color faced within the punk scene and more generally. Again, Hanna acknowledges her ignorance. “I realized that day that many BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks,” she writes. “And that was the problem…I hadn’t seen how so much of our punk feminism was really just white feminism.”
It’s not an entirely self-recriminating book. Hanna, too, has suffered plenty under the patriarchy, and more than anything else, her main nemesis throughout Rebel Girl is the unending violence she’s experienced at the hands of men: the abusive behavior of her father, betrayal and assault from trusted friends, and all manner of stalkers, creepy sound guys, and violent showgoers on tour. The book, too, is filled with moments of joy: Hanna finding her voice as a singer, witnessing her music connect with young women around the world, falling in love, starting a family. Hanna has long sat among my personal pantheon of feminist heroes, and it was enthralling to encounter the magic and power of her art throughout the book, and to peek behind the curtain of a creative life I’ve long admired.
But it’s the moments of tension, disappointment, and misjudgment in Rebel Girl that I still keep returning to. When I first fell in love with the moral certitude of Bikini Kill’s lyrics, it was easy to assume a certain kind of ethical perfection on the part of their author. These stories—laced with choices I didn’t always agree with—reveal a bigger, more complicated picture, one that was deeply humanizing and, in its own way, comforting to me as a reader. Over the years, I’ve loved Hanna’s creative output and been inspired by her commitment to feminism. But like her, I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes and failed to live up to my values innumerable times. Rather than absolution, Hanna’s confessions function as an honest acknowledgement of an uncomfortable truth: staying true to your values in a world that doesn’t always align with them means constantly making hard decisions. By her own admission, she didn’t always get it right.
When I finished reading Rebel Girl, I thought again about that moment when Hanna talked about “girls to the front” in New York. The fact that times have changed doesn’t mean the slogan had been unimpeachable in the ’90s; if anything, Hanna’s relatively tame qualifiers of today would have been far more punk if she’d said them then. But just because her rallying cry wasn't perfect doesn’t take away from the many people it inspired—and just because Hanna didn’t notice its limits then doesn’t disqualify her from seeing them and changing things now. Riot grrrl was a flawed movement, and Hanna a flawed person. Any version of history that ignores that fact erases the reality of what the feminist struggle actually looks like: exhilarating and empowering, yes, but also messy and filled with mistakes, both individual and collective. Rebel Girl feels all the more encouraging for its admissions of imperfection, as a humanizing reminder that even the most luminous icons have their flaws, and that striving for perfection at any cost can grind momentum to a halt. Instead, maybe it’s more powerful to take the mic when we have it, admit when we didn’t get things right, and make our way to the front, where we all belong.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna is available now.
[post_title] => Imperfect Feminists to the Front
[post_excerpt] => In her new memoir “Rebel Girl,” riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna reckons with her mistakes.
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I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place.
The reason why I waited so long to come out as nonbinary was because I thought it would ostracize me even further from other feminists. As a person disabled by chronic pain and fatigue from fibromyalgia, I’d already been made to feel out of place within feminism for the entirety of both my professional and academic careers. I'd also developed my writing voice during the so-called heyday of feminist blogging—a heyday that unfortunately wasn’t as utopian as people might suspect—and had experienced firsthand the complicated dynamics that arise when one’s platform makes them a target. Not wanting to separate myself further from other feminists, I chose to keep my complex feelings about my gender identity to myself. Until eventually, of course, I couldn’t.
It’s a bit of a cliché for people in the LGBTQIA community to say that they always knew they weren’t straight, or that they weren’t cis. But a part of me always knew I was nonbinary, even before I’d fully admitted it to myself. One of the defining features of my childhood and adolescence was my inner “eh…no” when people—mostly adults, but often my peers, as well—would try to label me as a “girl” or “young woman.” It would happen at school, and at home: As a child, I was prone to slouching, and my mom would encourage me to improve my posture by insisting, “Stand up straight! Like my dad used to say, ‘Be PROUD you’re a woman!’” Each time, a tiny voice inside my brain would whisper but I’m not a woman in response.
As my adolescence chugged on, I began receiving even more unwanted attention and scrutiny from peers regarding my “manly” voice—a direct quote from one of my bullies—as well as my rapidly changing body. I was not a fan of this attention, nor of the insistence that I was a girl, its implication that I should adapt myself to better seem like it. What was so great about being a girl, anyway? Or for that matter, being a boy? I just wanted to be myself.
It was around this time that I first discovered feminism. As a seventh grader, I read Dr. Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and started quietly identifying as a feminist. Despite the difficulties I still faced from being bullied, Pipher’s book, and the idea of feminism, made me feel less alone. I daydreamed about finding a feminist community that I could contribute to and feel valued by in return—one that included a wide variety of perspectives from people with different life experiences, all working together to make a world where oppressions like sexism, ableism, racism, classism, and anti-fat bias were no longer the norm. In high school, I began openly identifying as a feminist, and eventually, got better at ignoring my peers’ asinine comments. But I still yearned for something more—something I couldn’t yet put my finger on.
I eventually found a community of feminist friends when I started college and chose to pursue a major in Women’s and Gender Studies. Needing a break from academic writing, I also started my own blog in 2005. I quickly noticed that most of the feminist blogs with the largest audiences tended to cover issues that catered to young, educated, white, middle/upper class, cis women. Sexism, body image, popular culture, media representation, sexuality, and reproductive rights are, of course, all subjects that deserve coverage, but the ways in which they intersected with disability never seemed to be covered in any depth. Despite the use of the word “intersectionality” from some of the more popular feminist bloggers, it seemed to me that few actually practiced it.
As it happened, I was not the only one to notice the absence of disability from the feminist blogosphere. In 2009, I collaborated with a group of disability bloggers to form a site called FWD/Feminists With Disabilities as a response. The tipping point had come when several of us noticed that one of the most popular feminist blogs had never published a post specifically about disability and feminism; and when disabled readers had raised their concerns in the comments, other commenters had piled on, insisting disability and feminism were two separate things, and that the disabled commenters were being “bullies.” FWD ultimately only lasted for two years; the amount of threats, derailing, and angry e-stomping we received—in our comments, inboxes, and elsewhere—mostly from other feminists, all ostensibly on our side, proved to be enough to burn us out.
Having to repeatedly explain what feminism and disability had to do with each other—and that disability and chronic illness are feminist issues—was grating. It was isolating. This isolation got worse when I entered a Master’s program for Women’s and Gender Studies, where I was the only physically disabled person in my grad cohort. I faced pushback from multiple professors in the department for supposedly not being energetic enough. Another professor, the department head at the time, threatened to fail me when I missed more than the allotted two classes due to pain and fatigue from my fibromyalgia, on the grounds that it “wouldn’t be fair to the other students.” I later found out that I was not the only disabled person whom she had treated this way.
Throughout this period, I kept wondering if I was a failure as a feminist because I was not performing youthful, sisterhood-uplifting feminism the right way. I was repeatedly made to feel “difficult,” just for pointing out how feminism was leaving disabled people behind. Yet resolutely declaring I am a disabled woman, and I belong here didn’t feel right, either. I had this slippery, niggling feeling in the back of my brain that the reason this was the case was that I was not a woman at all. But at the time, I was in close contact with enough feminists eager to tell me how I was doing both feminism and academic work wrong, that keeping quiet about my weird gender stuff was easier than further othering myself.
Eventually, in my mid-30s, the discomfort of performing as someone I was not outweighed the comfort of avoiding negative attention or questioning from people skeptical as to whether the nonbinary identity is real. Surprisingly, on the other side, I became even more of a feminist than ever before, not because my core beliefs had changed, but because coming out had allowed me to be my authentic self. I no longer felt like I needed to identify as a woman to be a good feminist, because, of course, I didn't.
Since coming out, I’ve realized that I have better ways to spend my time and energy than trying to make nondisabled feminists care about disability issues. In fact, I likely would have come out sooner if I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to get (mostly white and nondisabled) women in the feminist movement to acknowledge that disabled women exist, and that many disabled people of all genders are feminists. While it’s irritating that I still get misgendered by TERFs on social media sometimes, the block button is there for a reason: I can’t be anyone other than myself, and if “feminism is for everybody,” as bell hooks once wrote, then it’s for nonbinary people, too. In a time where nonbinary and trans people of all ages are being smeared as predators, simply for being who they are—and, in the sad recent case of high school student Nex Benedict, being threatened or killed due to the moral panic surrounding trans existence, fueled by the specter of “safety” for cisgender kids—it is crucial that feminists welcome people of all gender identities in the ongoing fight for gender equality. It only benefits all of us when we do.
[post_title] => Feminism is for Nonbinary People, Too
[post_excerpt] => I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place.
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An exclusive excerpt from "The Weird Sister Collection," edited by Marisa Crawford.
I didn't deign to call myself a feminist until I was nineteen years old, in my second year of college. Before then, I just wanted to be a writer. Reading Judy Blume and the Baby-Sitters Club books obsessively as a kid, I decided I wanted to be an “author” when I grew up, and started writing my own poems and young adult novels in fourth grade (a baby poet at heart, I could never get past chapter two). “Feminist” was a word I rarely heard growing up. If I did, it was mentioned with suspicion at best and disdain at worst. My first encounter with feminism as not purely negative came at fourteen, when my friend’s dad took us to a feminist vegetarian bookstore and restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, called Bloodroot (it’s still there; please go). There, customers brought their own used dishes up to the counter in an apparent rejection of female subserviency that set off a little spark in my brain about the roles of women in the world around me, even if we sort of made fun of it after we left. I bought a bumper sticker that said “Vegetarians Taste Better,” uncertain if the sexual undertone was intended. I also bought a book of poems called Used to the Dark by Vicky Edmonds, a totally obscure small-press work, but the sole example I had at the time of what might be called feminist poetry. Of course, I wouldn’t have used that shameful word, “feminist,” to describe Edmonds’s book—maybe “writing by a woman about the dark parts of how it feels to be a woman,” like so much of my favorite music was? Weird, outspoken women artists like Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco and Courtney Love, who all my boyfriends and boy friends made fun of.
In college when I finally started calling myself a feminist—after meeting cool feminist friends who were nothing like the humorless stereotypes I had been warned about, and who told me I needed to throw out my bleached tampons and listen to Le Tigre and take women’s studies classes—I wanted desperately to make up for lost time, realizing that my whole life had been missing this essential perspective. So I read any and all feminist media I could get my hands on: I borrowed Inga Muscio’s book Cunt from a friend and read it along with every issue of Bitch magazine. I declared a minor in women’s studies and took classes where I learned about intersectionality, agency, privilege.
In my creative writing classes, we never talked about those things; in my first workshop that same year, the MFA student instructor was so infectious in his excitement about literature that I didn’t even notice the syllabus he handed out had zero women writers on it until another female student in the class pointed it out—I was too busy becoming obsessed with Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Slowly I learned about feminism on a parallel path just next to the one where I was learning about how to be a writer. But I couldn’t quite figure out how these two spaces could coexist, let alone collide, and how on earth to go about building my own life within that collision.
~
Years later, I started the blog Weird Sister in 2014 because these two worlds—the feminist world that was incisive and inclusive, and the literary world that was performative, tongue-in-cheek, and experimental—still felt far too separate to me, even as I entered my thirties. In college, I’d started to see glimpses of the intersections between them: in women’s lit courses where we read Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa. I went to see Eileen Myles read for extra class credit. I found Arielle Greenberg’s Small Press Traffic talk “On the Gurlesque” on the internet one night. Each piece of the feminist literary puzzle I learned about blew my mind all over again, and it occurred to me that there was not just one right way but many, many ways to be a feminist writer.
All these rich lineages of literary work and activism were out there, but where were the spaces outside of academia for people to come together to think and talk about them? From the mid-2000s into the 2010s, the blogosphere was where people talked about things. After college, I discovered the blog Feministing and made it my computer’s homepage so I wouldn’t forget to read it every day. That blog—along with other feminist blogs of that era like Crunk Feminist Collective, Everyday Feminism, Black Girl Dangerous, Tiger Beatdown, Racialicious, and the Women’s Media Center blog—offered supersmart, inclusive takes on politics and pop culture in an accessible, conversational tone that helped me and so many other young people better understand the world. But they didn’t often include literary content—how could they, strapped as they were with the task of breaking down the entire world for young feminists, and payment-free at that? When these spaces did cover books, they were more commercial publications, not the niche within-a-niche world of experimental poetry where I had found my home as a writer.
At the same time—but in a separate sphere—lit blogs were where my particular literary world found community and dialogue on the internet. On blogs like HTMLGiant, Coldfront, The Rumpus, and We Who Are About To Die, poets and experimental writers wrote and read about the small poetry presses and underground literary culture that rarely got covered in larger venues. I remember reading some posts that addressed feminist issues by writers like Roxane Gay and Melissa Broder, then still aspiring writers themselves, but more often I read a lot of posts by cis white men that were interesting, insightful, and funny but lacked the political analysis I was looking for about how poetry related to gender and race and the other aspects of identity and power that mattered most when it came to living in the world.
These indie lit blogs were mostly edited by men and featured long rosters of mostly male contributors, mirroring the gender disparities of more mainstream literary publishing outlets and gatekeepers of the time. Of course there were, thankfully, some exceptions. Pussipo (later renamed HemPo), a collective of 160 feminist poets, started the blog Delirious Hem in 2006, which featured feminist poetics forums, roundtables with feminist small presses, feminist poets writing about everything from rape culture to movies, fashion, and fitness (“It’s a blog, it’s a poetics journal, it’s a platform. From time to time, a post will appear,” reads the description on the now archived Blogspot website). In 2009 I was forwarded a mass email from poet and professor Cate Marvin called “Women’s Writing Now!” which began “Dear Female Writer.” The email—which explained that Marvin’s panel proposal on Contemporary Women’s Poetry had been rejected by the annual writing conference AWP, while the conference regularly accepted proposals on topics unrelated to women (Birds in Poetry, for example, stands out in the mind from my own years of attending)—was a rallying call for the creation of a whole new organization dedicated exclusively to women’s writing. As a result, Marvin, along with Erin Belieu and Ann Townsend, soon founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and in 2010 the organization began, among other vital literary projects, their annual VIDA Count to draw attention to gender disparities in publishing. With the Count, VIDA was not just critiquing inequities in literary culture but also holding institutions and gatekeepers accountable to do better in a very clear, measurable way.
But as Christopher Soto writes in his piece “The Limits of Representation” (page 113), equity in numbers, while hugely important, is only one measure of progress. I still longed for an intentional, energetic, creative, and community-building space to fill in even just some of the lack of feminist literary commentary online, to bridge a bit of the gap between these two distinct worlds I inhabited, and to disrupt the white male lit-blog industrial complex with an explicitly feminist Blog of One’s Own. Boosted by the encouragement of a girl gang of feminist poet friends (special shout-out to Becca Klaver for helping me get the blog off the ground), I bought a web domain, went into a temporary and never-to-be-replicated fugue state wherein I designed a website, and asked a roster of the smartest, coolest feminist writers I knew to join me in launching Weird Sister.
~
I wanted Weird Sister to be a space for talking about the feminist poems and books that inspired us, the contemporary literature that was doing interesting work around gender and other aspects of identity, the sexist shit that happened in the literary world but that nobody talked about publicly, how the established canon we all learned in school upheld what bell hooks calls the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the exciting readings and events going on, and the pop culture we consumed alongside it all with glasses of wine or Dr. Pepper—because we were not, after all, monoliths who existed only within the literary world. Like Becca Klaver writes in her piece about Bernadette Mayer’s poetics of “radical inclusiveness” (page 74), it felt feminist and unapologetic to show ourselves as full people who were not just poets and literary critics but also nostalgists and reality TV watchers and record collectors and parents and teachers and people working to survive in the world.
With Weird Sister, I wanted to create an online platform that was filled with serious ideas, but didn’t feel stuffy and exclusionary like poetry criticism so often can. Emulating the chatty, conversational tone of my favorite feminist blogs, Weird Sister aimed to be open and unpretentious. Vernacular language and oft-ridiculed traditionally feminine speech patterns like saying “like” too much were welcomed and encouraged. And, as on the best lit blogs, conventional criticism, creative forms, and personal elements could all, like, blend together. It was a space to celebrate and encourage dialogue between seemingly divergent aspects of culture, both “highbrow” (poetry, film, visual art, politics) and “lowbrow” (pop music, nostalgia, TV, celebrity gossip), and to take to task those supposed cultural distinctions with a glitter-nail-polished middle finger held high.
When it came to the blog’s name, I wanted to invoke the ineffable, the interplanetary; the glittery liminal spaces that art comes from. The “Weird Sisters” are the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, double double-ing and leading the play’s hero to his demise. They’re prophets, goddesses, bearded hags stirring a glowing cauldron. A weird sister is also an outcast, a goth girl, a nerd, a poet. Her existence is a disruption to the status quo. In my own family, I always felt like the weird one—sandwiched between my two sisters, the art-y and sensitive one traced in heavy black eyeliner. Seeing other “weird” girls and women and femmes in pop culture growing up made me feel seen and inspired.
Weird Sister emerged as a space where we and others like us could see ourselves reflected back, and where we could hang out together and talk and write and multiply; a weird sister to both the more journalistic feminist blogs and the less feminist lit blogs that came before us. A platform and community of feminist poets and creative writers, many of whom were trying out writing critically for the first time in a collaborative blog space, all of whom have gone on to do so many incredible things in the literary world.
~
I didn't realize it at the time, but in 2014 we were on the precipice of a cultural sea change. When Beyoncé performed at the VMAs the next year alongside a giant glowing “FEMINIST” sign and a sample from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” it made me wonder if a column debunking stereotypes about feminist poetry was even still necessary. In a turn toward what writer Andi Zeisler calls “marketplace feminism,” everywhere you looked people were suddenly wearing feminist T-shirts bought from indie retailers or from H&M, drinking from feminist mugs, meeting at feminist co-working spaces. There was also a huge influx of mainstream, corporate-funded feminist publications and content popping up online. Broadly, VICE’s women’s imprint, launched in 2015. (I both was miffed by their tagline, “Women’s news you thought would exist by now,” and longed for them to hire me.) Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner teamed up to create Lenny Letter that same year. Bustle, Rookie, and xoJane had all launched a few years earlier, and the media landscape was suddenly flooded with women’s personal stories and lists of “ten feminist novels to read this summer.” Most of these publications folded by 2019—a testament to the tumult of the industry, but also to the fleeting nature of corporate interests in feminism as a cultural fad. Many of the original trailblazing feminist blogs and magazines of the 1990s and early 2000s—like Bitch and Feministing—have also since folded, a testament to the difficulty of sustaining an independent feminist project without sufficient funding.
But of course the cultural and social activism of the mid-2010s was about much more than just corporate co-opting of feminism, something that’s been happening since the dawn of the women’s movement itself. Between 2013 and 2015, in response to non-indictments of the murderers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi became recognized as a protest movement on a global scale. And #MeToo, the campaign started by Tarana Burke in 2006 to draw attention to sexual assault, was popularized as a viral hashtag in 2017. Around this time, my own writing community also began having vital conversations about inclusion, abuse, race, and gender on a scale I had never seen before. In 2015, for example, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Javier Zamora, and Christopher Soto founded the Undocupoets Campaign—and later a fellowship with the same name—to protest the discriminatory rules of many first-book publishing contests in poetry, which prohibited undocumented poets from applying. And after several high-profile conceptual poets were called out for racist performances, an anonymous collective of poets called the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo began sharing online manifestos lambasting what they saw as the white supremacist project of conceptual poetry (or “conpo”). When a number of instances of sexual misconduct came to light in the poetry and Alt Lit worlds, a proto–#MeToo movement, started by feminist poets including myself in cities across the US and beyond, undertook efforts to dismantle a widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment in poetry and Alt Lit. Jennif(f)er Tamayo, whose literary activism was instrumental during this time in organizing “Enough Is Enough” meetings and discussions on sexism and accountability in the New York poetry community, writes about their commitment to “Being Unreasonable” as a locus for resisting entrenched forms of oppression in our particular literary communities (page 129). Weird Sister was created to encourage dialogue at the intersections of literature, culture, and social justice, and during this transformative moment it served as a space to document some of these conversations as they were happening in literary communities.
A feminist lit blog was never enough, would never be enough, to eradicate the world’s injustices, but being one small piece of the puzzle trying to change things for the better was all we could ever really hope to be. Writing this in 2023, I can’t say that I feel particularly hopeful about the state of the world. But I think about an interview with Jia Tolentino in 2022 where she says that she can accept hopelessness as a feeling, but never as a political standpoint, and I feel inspired by the continued work of all the writers gathered in this book and at work beyond it—all those “humorless” and hilarious and smart and radical and messy and groundbreaking literary activists that paved the way for us and continue to do so.
When I first launched Weird Sister, I loved the feeling of running a vibrant space where vital conversations about feminism, poetry, and pop culture could flourish. I stayed up late each night working on it between days at my copywriting job—high on the blend of excitement and anxiety—but naturally it was impossible for me and for all of the Weird Sister team to keep doing this work, at this rate, sustainably. And without a model for funding or time to make one, the blog slowly went from a rush to a trickle of occasional content. As Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former executive editor of Feministing, wrote for Barnard College’s 2012 #FemFuture conference on the future of online feminism, “Blogging has become the third shift. You do your activist work, you have a job to make money and then you blog on top of that. It’s completely unsupported.” The feminist blogosphere that Mukhopadhyay refers to is widely considered the hallmark of a whole “wave” of feminism, but—like so much activist work throughout history— it’s had virtually no financial support. Still, in spite of the challenges that came with Weird Sister, it’s amazing to look back on the vast and mind-blowing array of writing that came out of planting this weird little seed on the internet. I hear there’s a movie about baseball where they say, “If you build it, they will come.” I built Weird Sister, and out came all the feminist weirdos with their brilliant minds, and this incredible collaboration and community was born.
~
The Weird Sister Collection brings together some of the most popular, insightful, LOL-funny, moving, and unforgettable posts from the blog between 2014 and 2022, along with some new work highlighting essential perspectives, figures, moments, and movements in feminist literary history. The book pulls out natural themes that emerged from the blog’s eclectic archive: from bringing a contemporary feminist lens to historical literature and paying homage to the iconic writers that came before us, to shining light on current books, events, organizations, and conversations. And, of course, it includes writing about pop culture, both nostalgic and present-day. While never exhaustive, this book hopes to offer a snapshot of some of the vital conversations and commentary surrounding feminism, literature, and pop culture from the last decade, and those that led up to it.
Weird Sister was born out of a love for feminist books, from my longing for feminist books to exist, to line the walls; to read them all, to write them. So it makes sense that it is now a feminist book too. I want feminist literary writing to take up more and more space, both on the internet and in the physical world, on bookshelves where a teenager at a feminist bookstore café might stumble upon them, goddess willing, after bringing her tray up to the counter. And I hope that putting Weird Sister’s contents in a book will allow future generations to learn about the early twenty-first-century feminist blogosphere in a format that gives it the same legitimacy as the white male literary canon; the same weight as the copy of On the Road that my high school English teacher handed me because she thought I might like weird, emotional, experimental prose, and assumed, correctly, that I would ignore how it treated women. The impulse that propelled feminist bloggers in the first place was an interest in creating our own media, holding it up, declaring it real and legitimate and important amid a patriarchal culture that devalued it and gatekept it away. So this book is a reminder that Weird Sister happened, and of the powerful, cool shit you can do together as a creative community. It’s proof that all these feminist writers read books by all these other feminist writers and wrote about them—and about music and movies and TV and art—and then became the feminist writers that others will write about someday. And actually, people are writing about them right now—go read it. Go write it. It’s a never-ending cycle of influence, admiration, and creation. I hope that you find it weird and inspiring.
An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.
The first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States was told it would be temporary.
Just 19 years old (or 14, or 16—reports vary), Afong Moy was brought to America not as an immigrant, but as a curiosity, sold off by her father to a ship captain who promised he would return her on his next voyage back to Canton in two years. Moy's father wouldn't be the only one to capitalize off of her: Arriving in New York in 1834, Moy's main purpose would be to help two American merchants, the Carne brothers, sell "exotic" goods—essentially acting as a living mannequin, singing traditional songs, demonstrating how to use chopsticks, and, on occasion, walking for short distances on her bound feet as a way to solicit interest in the brothers' imported Chinese wares.
She would never return home.
Moy would go on to become incredibly famous—so famous she eventually met then-President Andrew Jackson while touring around the country. She would also die in obscurity, no record of her existence after 1850. Very little is known about her today, and even less about how she might have felt about her new life and exploitation. But a new short film seeks to capture a glimpse at both: Astonishing Little Feet, written and directed by Maegan Houang, reimagines what Moy's first experience "performing" for potential investors might have looked like—and the result is harrowing, an uncomfortable exploration of complicity, curiosity, and the history of Asians in America.
Below, we spoke with the writer-director about her film—the title pulled from surviving advertisements that bill Moy as the "Chinese Lady" with "astonishing little feet"—and the importance of not looking away from an ugly past.
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The Conversationalist: How did you first decide you wanted to do a film about Afong Moy?
Maegan Houang: I was reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, and there’s one line in it that mentions her. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It really struck a chord with me—I felt so connected to the idea that the first Asian woman most people in the United States saw was there to help someone else sell goods, just because she seemed particularly exotic and strange. I immediately thought there was a movie there.
From what I’ve read, it seems like Afong Moy was treated as a “good” herself, as a commodity. I only knew the bare minimum about her before watching your film, and then I went down my own wormhole. What struck me is how young she was. Some reports say she was as young as 14—so to even call her the first documented Chinese “woman” is a misnomer.
She was between 14 and 18—max.
What resonated most with you about her story?
It was what you just said, that she was a commodity. That she was commodified to help other people make money, because she was such an interesting, exotic object. To me, there’s no way there’s not an element of hypersexualization there, which was really resonate to how I felt growing up. For context, I’m half Asian, and I grew up in Michigan, where there were mostly white people at my school. I grew up being perceived as Asian; I also grew up understanding that I was being seen as different—but no one was explaining to me why. To me, that’s a deficit in our education as Asian Americans. I think it’s easy to blame the system, but I think it’s our own parents, who are immigrants, who really don’t—understandably—know the history of the country they moved to, and the history of how Asian Americans have been treated, and therefore have no reason to tell us. So we’re thrown into a system where we don’t really understand all this context and all this history.
In high school, when I was being really hypersexualized and sexually harassed, as many young women are, there always seemed to be a layer of cruelty, of dehumanization. I didn’t understand it, and I felt like it was my fault. As anyone who’s a woman of a minority, we all understand that there’s no one reason for everything. I can't sit here and say it's a hundred percent that I'm Asian. I don't know. But I think what I wanted in this film was—if other people know her story, maybe they'll better understand their own context as young women in our country. Because there’s no way that kind of introduction to Asian women—which continued throughout the 1800s with P.T. Barnum, with different circus acts [including Moy]—doesn’t impact our present day understanding of what and who an Asian American woman is.
Obviously, my life is not nearly as horrific as Moy's. I’m not trying to create a false parallel of trauma, because I actually really despise that. But at the same time, I think it's really important to know that there might be things about our existence and the way we're treated that really have nothing to do with us, so we don't internalize them. And that's why I wanted to make the movie, and why I wanted it to be hard to watch. Because the other thing is, I don't think there's anyone watching the film, including myself, who kind of doesn't want to look at her foot.
I was going to ask—you made the decision to show Moy's bound foot. Why give in to the curiosity of the viewer?
I think we're all ultimately quite complicit in the systems of exploitation and capitalism of even our own bodies and people. As a filmmaker, it was instinctual to some degree. But also, people feel bad at the end of the movie, because they did participate in it. I think that's fine. It's okay to feel bad. It's okay to have to question your own role in the way that we live our lives. I'm not trying to create a false equivalency. Objectively, things are better than they were then. You and I are not people who were trafficked from Asia to make people money.
It's not that our experiences are equivalent, but it is shining a light on the historical origins to certain narratives and how they're baked into Western and American culture on some level. Even though it's not nearly as bad, or as surface level.
Yeah, totally. I do believe in historical consciousness. It was only forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. That's not very long ago.
Talk me through what was important to you in portraying the other characters in the film, especially Captain Obear and the Carne brothers.
Sometimes, I think we over-intellectualize, or—it's not a real word, but—evil-ize people, trying to prescribe more evil intention to certain things that I fundamentally don't think is there. All of them just want to rise in class. And it has an abhorrent result. But none of them think they're a bad person. None of them think they're doing something wrong. They're just operating within the rules of our society and our system. I was happy when I would screen it and people would laugh at certain things because that shows a discomfort with the absurdity of the past; we can't imagine being that way. But I think people were. So I wanted them to be realistic, but hopefully inspire people to think about the parallels that we might still have—which is also why I wanted to show the foot from their point of view, because sometimes, when you finally get what you wanted, it's really horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that you wanted it. And that's an uncomfortable space.
So much of what you're talking about is complicity and capitalism; that if you're conditioned to believe that this is the only way to succeed in life, then you become blinded by what you're sacrificing morally or otherwise in the process to achieve it.
Yes.
Which, going back to the choice to show the foot—I do want to discuss the very intense and visceral scene of the unwrapping in a second, but first, I was really struck by your choice to switch back and forth between perspectives in the film, almost as if we're both being perceived and also the perceiver.
In early screenings, I actually got notes from people that it should be more in her perspective. And I was so bummed out by that note—because that's the easy way out. Because if you're aligned with her, you are like, "I'm aligned with the victim, I'm aligned with the person being oppressed." And I think that's trauma porn, a little bit. If it's fully from her perspective, we get to feel okay, and I think that's dishonest.
It was interesting the extent to which this note would mostly come from men. I'm like, why do you need me to spell this out for you? Why is that something you need?
That's interesting, given the scene where her foot is being unwrapped—there are very obviously a lot of parallels to assault, to rape. It feels like a rape, I think, to the viewer. And that felt very intentional. I wanted to just talk a little bit more with you about your decision to approach it that way, and her translator Atung's place in all of it as the one who actually unwraps her foot while the other men watch.
All he does is unwrap her foot, and it feels like assault. I would imagine that's what it feels like to her.
Yes.
It's horrible, but it's also obviously what the men want to see, and then they're also a little bit stunned by it. With the translator, he is trapped. He just has to do what they say—this is how he eats, this is how he lives. Now, it's not enslavement, but it's imprisonment through capitalism, it's imprisonment through just needing to survive. So he doesn't want to do it, but it's what he has to do. Those are just the terms that you accept sometimes when you immigrate to a new country where you're a minority, and they're unpleasant, but they're also just reality. Unfortunately, people don't really stand up to power—but he tries. She tries. Meanwhile, [the merchants] aren't doing their own dirty work. They're observing it.
The voyeurism of it was really striking to me.
Not to be lame, but I'm a student of Hitchcock. And his whole thing was that everyone has a dirty little mind. I was trying to play with that idea, which, again, doesn't work if you're only in her perspective. You have to feel like, oh, I am sort of drawn in to this act, but I know I shouldn't be.
I really loved that the film was in Cantonese, and how that added another layer to her isolation within it.
My family is from Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.
Mine, too.
It's really painful because Cantonese is the oldest spoken Chinese language, and when going back thousands of years to characters that we don't know how to read anymore, it's Cantonese that helps guide you, not Mandarin. It's also accurate—they would've spoken Cantonese.
It's also another way of feeling othered, being disconnected from the language around you. She couldn't speak English, which meansshe couldn't understand what was being said if it wasn't translated for her.
A lot of people say, well, women didn't have agency [back then], and that's something I just don't agree with. Women had agency within the confines of their circumstance, and they did employ their agency however they could. It's a myth that we have about women in the past, that they're just sitting there while things happened around them. Moy is deploying whatever agency she has. It just may not work, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have it and that she doesn't try to use it and that she doesn't feel proud of where she's from in her culture. I imagine her dad was like, you're going to go show people what China's really like; that she was told she was going to help educate Americans. That he told her some kind of fable, because that's what people do to survive. And ultimately, she met Andrew Jackson—which, there's no way when that was happening, she wasn't like, "I'm a badass." That's just the reality of power. It's better to be an oppressed person with status than to be an oppressed person without it.
What do you think Afong Moy dreamed of?
I think she dreamed about home. There are moments even I dream about this, and I am obviously born in America, but I still dream of going back home. It's not to live there, but it's to touch and feel the culture that I don't have as easy access to. It's why I would want to go get dim sum, or why I would want to get Hong Kong breakfast, or—my family's also Vietnamese—why I sometimes just really want a bowl of pho. And I imagine in that time period, all those kind of home comforts, particularly food, would be so out of reach and so inaccessible that I would probably, if I were her, really yearn for some of those things.
On the flip side, I also think if I were her, I would dream of other types of fame, of success within the system that she's trapped within. Or freedom, which in that situation, might have been someone marrying her. I don't know.
Of course, we can't know. I was just curious what you imagined when trying to get in her headspace.
No, no, I love that question. It's so interesting. I mean, you just try to think how it would feel to be so far from home, and so poor—and disabled, which is a whole other thing. Women with bound feet were trapped in their houses basically, because they couldn't really walk. It was a status thing, and people were proud of it, but it's still really fucked up. We've tolerated a lot from the way men have tried to disempower us, and she really embodies a lot of those longstanding trends.
It feels fair to say Moy wasn't just commodified for her ethnicity, she was also commodified for her disability. Although there's overlap between the two.
Yeah. Well, it's clearly stemmed from a fetish in Chinese culture that it was more attractive to have a really small, tiny foot, to the point where everyone was maiming themselves—or each other, with the help of older women—to achieve this strange fetish. You could argue foot binding in China was also a commodification of women, because you're making women into an object that's appealing to men. I think it's a pretty abhorrent custom, in that it limited women's ability and mobility to do so many things. Now the tricky thing is not exceptionalizing or exotifying that custom as morally better or worse than other customs that other people have done to women in other cultures all around the world. It's disgusting, but I also would argue that there's a lot of disgusting things we do to ourselves to make us interesting to men that we'll all look back on in different ways, to different degrees, that become more or less acceptable depending on what's in fashion. You could argue weight loss and disordered eating is a different version of self harm and mutilation for men. Or attempting to stay young. And some people hurt themselves to do that.
I was going to say, binding feet in an attempt to keep them as small as when you were a child—could also be a means of sexualizing youth, in an extreme way.
Yeah, totally. I just view it as another norm that was really brutal, but that still has parallels to norms that we live in at the moment.
What else do you hope people take away from the film?
I just hope people think about Asian Americans in history, and how that pertains today. And also their complicity within a capitalist system of exploitation, and not in a self-flagellating way. There's a bit too much of that in our current society, and I don't think acting out of shame for the past or the present is going to resolve how our system works. We have to shine a light on things that are horrible, but also have empathy for ourselves, and for people in the past—that they're doing the best they can because of systemic factors instead of trying to look at everything so individually. That's not going to be how any of our current crises get solved. Climate change, for example, won't be solved by one person. It's going to require and necessitate collective action to fight back against the system that we live in, and it's going to require sacrifice from a lot of people that don't want to sacrifice, and questioning why do we place some lives above other lives?
I don't know. Those are just the things I thought about while making it, but I'm also fine with people taking away whatever they want, because I do think as artists, we aren't able to really control how our work is interpreted, and we have to let that go. White men love the movie, actually—I get the most compliments from white men, weirdly.
But I mean, I made it for us. People are like, "Who did you make it for?" Other Asian American women.
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When my grandad died, I didn't know how to process it. Then I met others who felt the same.
There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I think about often, still as gut-wrenching today as it was when it first aired. “The Body” follows the immediate aftermath of the death of Buffy’s mother, Joyce: her cold face, her stiff limbs; the crack of her ribs when her daughter attempts CPR. It also follows each character’s individual response to grief, a reminder that there is no right way to process death. I cry every time I watch “The Body”, moved by everyone’s outpouring and quiet devastation. But I perhaps relate most to Anya, an ex-demon who is new to human mortality and feeling, and unable to process what has happened. She seems to be clinical, cold even, when asking if the group will see the body. Buffy’s best friend Willow gets upset by this, believing that Anya isn’t in pain like the rest of them.
Anya loses it in response—her first outburst ever. “I don’t understand how this all happens; how we go through this,” she says. “I mean, I knew her, and then she’s—there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid!” It’s the illogical nature of death that has shaken her; that death is constant and permanent, as is the pain and need to go on no matter what. The very fact of being human is unpalatable and beyond comprehension to her—and when my grandad died, I felt exactly the same.
I do not handle grief well. Autistic people, much like ex-demons, are often assumed to have no feelings at all—but the reality is the opposite: We often feel things very deeply, on a cellular level that impacts every aspect of our functioning. Because of this, it can take us a while longer to process things, or even just to express them outwardly. Death and grief are no exception.
When my grandad was dying, just weeks before he was due to walk me down the aisle, I thought I had a handle on it. I dropped everything, avoiding work and most people, so that I could take the time I needed to try and process it. It was futile. Death is illogical, and unfair, and stupidly mortal. I know a person is not their body, but when their body dies, they are no longer here, no longer able to get back into it. My grandad was here, and then he was sick, and then I could no longer call him to talk about the birds in his garden. I couldn’t accept it.
After speaking with a few other autistic people, it seems many have faced a similar struggle when processing the death of loved ones, sometimes grieving long before the death itself, in hopes of better preparing for it. “With my grandad I grieved years before he was even ill, when [it was] just a hypothetical,” Reb, 23, told me. “When I was a kid I imagined what it would be like when he died. I knew it was inevitable and something I couldn't control, so I tried to prepare for it.” With my grandad, I’d done the same: His death was my greatest fear, and I wrote about it constantly, in hopes it would help lessen the sting when it inevitably happened.
These attempts at preparation for future heartbreak, often at the expense of present joy, make sense to me. I read once that autistic people experience all time simultaneously: the past, future, and present, all wrapped up in the current moment. I can’t let myself enjoy the fact that the people I love are here, because I know one day they won’t be. It’s like an unconscious self-preservation. Sitting at dinner with my grandad before he died, I would hurtle through time, the inevitable pain becoming stronger the closer we got to its reality. I knew, even then, it would destroy me.
Autistic people experience everything in our bodies to an extreme extent—every sound, every smell, every touch. We often get sensory overload, which can lead to meltdowns and burnout. There are ways to mitigate this. My biggest trigger in public is sound, so I often wear earplugs. I can’t tolerate most fabrics, so I wear cotton. But over the months after my grandad died, a sensitivity stronger than anything I’d felt before crept up on me and made it impossible to do anything. I couldn’t go to restaurants, the gym, or even supermarkets without teetering on a full-blown meltdown. I spent most evenings curled up in a ball playing Zelda, but every day, it got worse, until inevitably, I was in my first burnout in years. I’d completely shut down.
I wanted so badly to grieve well, to process healthily, but my body disagreed. “My autism is getting worse,” is how I put it to my husband, but how I would never want anyone to put it to me. I felt angry, and weird, and mean. I didn’t feel like myself, but I did—I felt like the kind of person I fear I am. At some point, I realized that what I was experiencing was grief, that I wasn’t just angry or “wrong” or struggling for no reason, but that my loss had sunk into my bones.
It was only with time, and some recovery, that I realized this. Tess, 26, told me that she experienced a similar shut down while grieving. “Stressful situations like bereavement can disable our usual coping mechanisms,” she says. “I’m upset about losing this person, so now the floodgates have opened because I’m too fragile to block out sounds and feelings from other things. It makes you want to withdraw, and it’s very isolating.”
For many autistic people, these feelings can develop into more extreme difficulties to function. Anwen, 31, shared that when she lost multiple members of her family in 2019, she became a “sensory mess.” “My short term memory was shot. I have issues with that on the best of days, but I started having to make lists of everything, printing out itineraries, texting myself reminders,” she says. She was used to hiding her sensory difficulties, so she was able to seem fine to those around her, but for months, she was so distraught she couldn’t even eat. “All of my texture issues ramped up tenfold and I just ate chips for a year because anything else made me feel sick,” she says.
Grief affects every single person differently, and sometimes even for allistic (non-autistic) people, that might mean a similar, complete cognitive shutdown. But autistic people, particularly women, already spend a lot of time “masking”: concealing any difficulties they may have with existing in a world not built for them. When we experience grief, this urge only compounds. The subconscious need to display grief in a “good,” appropriate way means that we might not express it at all, and if we aren’t dealing with it privately, it’ll sneak up on us through our ability to function, obliterating any and all of our coping mechanisms.
For much of this year, my first without my grandad, I felt very angry. Seeing litter on the ground was enough to send me into a spiral, my preexisting grief coalescing with climate grief and a general distrust of humanity. Someone FaceTiming in a restaurant? Always enraging, but with my increased sensitivity, enough to ruin my entire night, leaving me curled up at home with the screech of the offending iPhone speaker still rattling around in my ears. I couldn’t look at anyone I loved without thinking about death, without thinking, What is the point? They’re going to die. They could die now. Why build these bonds, spend this time together?
As an autistic person, I am prone to forming incredibly deep connections. I know how to love and how to nurture relationships. But to love someone at all is to anticipate grief, and I don’t have the tools to manage the inevitable loss. I’m not confident that I ever will. But speaking to other autistic people for this piece, I finally feel, if not normal, at least not wrong for how I’ve processed my grief. As Tess put it to me, “Autistic people have the most special bond [with each other], because it’s like you spend your whole life thinking you’re so bad at being a goose, and then you find out you’re a duck.” We are all victims of the same mortal rules, but it is a relief to have found other ducks, and to not be alone in how I experience death in life.
[post_title] => How Grief Affects Autistic People Differently
[post_excerpt] => When my grandad died, I didn't know how to process it. Then I met others who felt the same.
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How botanical tattoos help me immortalize what is impermanent.
In both Spanish and Portuguese, one word for “season” is “temporada.” When I started learning both languages at once, I noticed their similarities and differences, the way they seemed to weave together and diverge, never on truly parallel tracks. It makes it difficult, sometimes, to pick the right word in the right language at the right time—but anyway, not here. Temporada; temporary. Lasting for only a short period of time. This is what a season is: The winters, however crushing, will end; the summers, however beautiful, will, too.
It’s a truth I think I can outrun every year.
So, I create permanence in other ways. I got my first tattoo at 24, the word “crybaby” as a direct response to the grief I felt after the rapper Lil Peep died. I had met him, written about him, and was so devastated that such a bright, sweet light had been snuffed out. It felt like a way to memorialize him, a permanent reminder of his own ill-thought-out face tattoo. After that, I got more tattoos: first, my sister’s name in a loveheart on my upper arm and my now-husband’s first initial behind my ear after a few months of dating. Then, I refined the process, getting small, botanical tattoos based on flowers and plants I’d seen in my life as a way to preserve them. The habit has become ritual.
Despite my aversion to impernance, I’ve always loved plants. As a child, I helped my grandad cultivate his garden. As a teenager, I spent a week doing work experience at a flower shop, leaving with a short-lived desire to become a florist myself. As an adult, I’ve combined the two: filling my home with fresh flowers and caring for an ever-growing army of plants. When I go out, I see flowers and plants everywhere, noticing the way they change day to day. My camera roll is filled with hundreds of photos of them that look identical to an outside eye.
But flowers, like seasons and people, are temporary. Losing them, the sight of abundant leaves on my street, is a grief that comes with each painful autumn, a reminder of the temporada. Which is why I found a way to immortalize them, to avoid that loss, with tiny needles and pots of color. My body becomes a map of the places I’ve been, and a memorial to the things I have lost.
Now, I hunt for the ones that feel right to make permanent, collecting them like mental notes—recently, a peony-flowering tulip that I bought at the side of the road in the Netherlands, a jacaranda in a Lisbon spring, a sprig of desert lavender in Joshua Tree. I won’t get them yet, because I live seasonally, per the temporada, and they would get in the way of the life I enjoy living. I am a summer child, a water baby most alive in the sun and sea. In the summer, I swim and I sit outside and I get dirty—all things you can’t do with a fresh tattoo. But in the winter, when I can’t do the things I like, when the flowers have long died, I immortalize the summer past on my skin.
CALIFORNIA
When I was 25, I lived in Los Angeles for three months with my now-husband and small dog. I love being in California—least of all because the seasonsnever change—because I have friends, a life, things I love to do there. When I visit, I try to spend as much time as I can exploring the mountains, the desert, the ocean. When my three months were up, I knew I wouldn’t be back for a while. That home was temporary, never truly mine. I got my first botanical tattoo on this trip, at the studio of June Jung, a legendary Korean artist, to remember the plants I had seen in this place I couldn’t permanently call home. I commissioned a guest artist to dedicate a small strip of my forearm to LA: palm leaves, a succulent, a rose, a California poppy. It started my journey of botanicals, but it wasn’t quite permanent enough—a run of taking NSAIDs without realizing they thinned my blood meant I had to return again to have it topped up by June herself in November.
It felt like an excuse, really, to do things over again, if only for a few days.
WEDDING BOUQUET
For my wedding, I’d always wanted dried flowers. We could keep them forever, I reasoned, and wouldn’t have to throw them out after watching them slowly die in our living room. We asked a local flower artist to do everything in pink and white preserved roses, gypsum, and snapdragons: buttonholes, centerpieces, my sister's bouquet. But I asked her to add some fresh flowers to mine, to make it a little different: seven pink roses. The florist put them in tiny vials of water so they would last, even though I knew they would die—they always do. On the day of our wedding, they looked so beautiful, so fresh and alive that they were worth the loss after we left for the honeymoon. I took tens of photos, already knowing I would show them to my tattoo artist when I got home. Before leaving, I removed the roses from the rest of the bouquet so they couldn’t rot onto the dried gypsum. In February of 2022, almost six months after the roses had died, I got the full bouquet tattooed on my upper arm. The rest of it, the gypsum and snapdragons and dried fan palms, sits on a shelf, forever preserved.
CHERRY BLOSSOM
In early 2020, I had a trip booked to Japan, in part to finally see the sakura trees. I first fell for them after seeing them in the anime Cardcaptor Sakura as a child, and they have always been the most painful representation of impermanence. You can’t really plan to see the blossoms—but you can spend thousands of dollars trying. The trees might only bloom for a couple of weeks, and when those weeks are is dependent on so many factors, changeable year to year.
The trip to Japan was canceled. I do, however, have a few apple and cherry blossom trees on my street, and I keep an eye on them every year, knowing that when I see tiny buds start to form, the frost of winter is ending. Better days are coming, days when I might walk without a jacket or swim in the sea that sits cold and close to my home. I always knew I wanted those trees on my body forever, I just wasn’t sure where—and then, it was chosen for me. In March of 2021, I got a pretty serious injury when my dog fell in the gap between our train and the platform as we were disembarking. Without thinking, I threw myself on the ground, dove into the gap, and pulled her up. I felt fine in the moment, but I soon saw blood blossoming on the knees of my blue jeans. As the adrenaline wore off, my collarbone started to hurt so badly that I couldn’t move without crying out. Later that week, a physiotherapist told me that I had torn my rotator cuff. A short while later, I asked the same artist who’d later tattoo my wedding bouquet on me if she would give me a cherry blossom branch on my collarbone, near the site of the injury. I wanted the branch dotted with buds and blooms, little chances to grow before the petals started to fall. Not long after the tattoo was done, my street was littered with pink, and my sakura healed into my skin.
OLIVE BRANCH
As the myth of Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, goes, Hades, the God of Death, was so taken by her beauty that he tricked her into marrying him, dragging her to the Underworld to make her his queen. Her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of the Harvest, was so distraught by the kidnapping that she allowed everything on Earth to die. When Persephone’s father Zeus found Persephone and tried to take her home, Hades tricked her into eating six seeds of a pomegranate, tying her to the Underworld so that she had to stay with him for three (or, in some versions, six) months of the year. To me, the story is the ancient Greeks’ way of understanding winter, of coping with the fact that we have to live for so long in darkness: a symbol of Demeter’s grief at losing her daughter, year after year.
On our honeymoon, my new husband and I visited Demeter’s Temple on the island of Naxos and learned more about the ways her followers paid homage to her, in part through vegan sacrifices where they let the juices of fruit and vegetables run. Along the path to the temple are olive trees, some of the brightest, greenest, healthiest I have ever seen. I took photos and brought one home—the olive is shriveled now. But my husband and I brought the photos to the artist who’d given us our first matching tattoos four years earlier, and now Demeter’s olives sit on my forearm and his collarbone, never to die, no matter what tricks Hades pulls.
MY GRANDAD’S FLOWERS
From whom did I inherit this fear of flowers dying, of the changing seasons? My grandad always told me that he loved flowers, but that they were “pointless,” that they always “just died.” It made him sad to watch them wither, so instead, he cultivated more practical things: tomatoes, onions, a compulsively well-trimmed hedge. Things that “made sense,” that “did something,” that could nourish us.His partner, on the other hand, preferred to plant flowers that she could look at and enjoy, that could nourish her in other ways. He was tasked with caring for those flowers after she died, and he did so, proudly, while memorializing her with a fake orchid in his home. When he was in the hospital dying, I went to spend some time in his house, a home that I had come to know as my own over the years I’d been visiting it. Down the side of his front garden, impossibly, there were roses and snapdragons blooming in his absence. His neighbors had taken over the work, and the flowers had kept living despite the ever-changing conditions of their care. I took photos, surprised to see two of my favorite flowers together. I used to joke with him that there was one way of keeping flowers alive—–the tattoos that were starting to cover my arms. A few months after he died, I sent the photo of the snapdragon and rose to my artist and asked her to drill them into my ankle, a permanent reminder of the flowers my grandad had kept alive despite believing he couldn’t. The tattoo is just one way that I keep him with me, too.
[post_title] => My Body is a Bouquet
[post_excerpt] => How botanical tattoos help me immortalize what is impermanent.
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Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind.
“I can’t get up!”
It was 5 a.m. when the dawn chorus was interrupted by a cry for help. An elderly woman had fallen while sneaking into a field with 25 other nanas, and the group rushed to her aid. “Are you alright?” one asked. They helped her stand up, brushing off her clothes and smoothing her hair. After ensuring she was fine to walk, the group pushed forward.
No nana could be left behind: These women were setting up an occupation.
It was a balmy August morning in Lancashire, a county in North West England known for its sweeping landscapes and greenery. But back in 2014, their idyllic community was facing an outside threat: Cuadrilla, an oil and gas giant and the only company in the United Kingdom with a license to frack, was about to commence shale gas exploration. If the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, went ahead, then the site beneath the nanas’ feet would soon become an industrial wasteland—and the county’s residents would be forced to live with the consequences, unless someone was able to stop it.
(Rory Payne)
The nanas clambered over fences, quickly putting up signs and wrangling tent poles. By 6 a.m., the first tent was up. The women sat on the ground, drinking tea and watching the sun rise above the field that would be their home for the next three weeks. Technically, they weren’t all grandmothers, but before long, this group of anti-fracking activists from Lancashire would be known as the Nanas, both at home and abroad. They’d regularly stage demonstrations, roadside tea parties, and eventually, even a protest outside Buckingham Palace.
And they wouldn’t be alone: In other communities being torn apart by fracking, older people around the world have also been taking the fight into their own hands, spending their golden years in protest. But what makes someone dedicate their later life to activism? To give up the dream of pottering around the garden, pushing grandchildren on swings and enjoying long vacations and their long-awaited retirement?
As it turns out, many of them felt they didn’t have a choice.
Becoming an Activist
In the weeks leading up to their field occupation, the UK Nanas meticulously planned their invasion. What would they wear? How would they get there? Who would bring tea and cake? On the big day, at 3 a.m., they secretly gathered in a hotel basement nearby. Those in charge of wardrobe revealed what would become the Nana uniform: yellow tabards with a graphic of the red rose of Lancaster, proclaiming “Frack Free Lancashire,” alongside matching yellow headscarves. Tina Rothery, now 61, looked on with pride. She was a recent convert to activism, and her role was public relations. Just before leaving the hotel, she hit send on the press release announcing the Nanas’ 21-day field occupation to the world—having no idea that their fight against injustice was about to hit headlines and dominate her life.
As the women adapted to living in a field and spending their nights under canvas, the local milkman began making morning deliveries. Neighbors arrived at the site to indulge their curiosity, bringing ice to help the Nanas keep their food from spoiling or, in some cases, Tina says, to vent their anger.
“Why would you do this? It’s private land,” some of them would ask. But Tina was ready.
“Here’s the thing: You get us, 26 women with a bunch of tents and tent pegs—that’s bad, yeh?” she'd reply. “Or, you get at least a decade of drill rigs, and man camps, and all that goes on, and the noise, and the pollution, the threat to your water and all of that. These are your choices.”
“We’re here to let you know you do have a choice,” she’d continue. “You can stand up, and you can object.”
The UK Nanas. (Rory Payne)
Besides a few naysayers, though, Tina says the protest was relatively peaceful. She recalls the police weren’t too bothered by the presence of 26 older women, and largely left them alone. She says the police were, however, very concerned about the dozens of activists who soon descended on the field next door in support of them. These new protestors were from a group called Reclaim the Power, and they were organized. They brought solar panels, wind turbines, and compost toilets. On the final day of the Nanas’ occupation, they also led a pier-to-pier march, decked out in classic Nana-yellow with placards held high.
That same day, after three weeks of sleeping under canvas, soaking up activism knowledge from Reclaim the Power, and sharing their fears with a growing anti-fracking community, the Nanas took down their tents and searched the field to make sure they’d left nothing behind. They stuck a note on the farmer’s house, whose property they’d been occupying, and notified the police that they’d left. Despite nearly a month sleeping on the scratchy ground in makeshift beds, they felt stronger than ever.
The next day, they were sued by Cuadrilla. The legal papers said they were being fined thousands of pounds for the "eviction,” despite the fact they’d left of their own accord and had informed the landowner, press, and police. One of the Nanas would need to put their name forward and take on the cost. Though she couldn’t afford the fine, Tina stepped forward.
“You can’t get blood from a stone,” she says.
Still, they tried. Cuadrilla embroiled Tina in a legal battle for two years, first serving her the court papers at the Buckingham Palace protest. They wanted more than £55,000 (over $78,000) in legal fees and threatened her with a stint in prison if she didn’t pay up. After Tina finally provided evidence that she couldn’t pay the fees, the case was eventually dropped.
Tina Rothery. (Rory Payne)
Before getting involved with the Nanas, Tina had little experience in activism. She’d recently spent a year and a half caring for her sick mother, staying by her bedside and reminiscing about when they’d globe-trotted from London to Australia to Hong Kong together. This powerful woman, once a leading business executive, was dying, and there was nothing Tina could do. The feeling of helplessness consumed her. She couldn’t help her mother, and she couldn’t change the state of the world beyond her, which at the time, felt like it was spiraling towards further and further injustice. Both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street dominated the news. She watched as uprisings against ruling parties unfolded, and looking to regain some semblance of control, Tina finally decided to join Occupy London in 2011, ending up as a de facto spokesperson.
By the time she received a leaflet on Cuadrilla’s fracking plans from a local residents' action group, Tina had zeroed in on how best to fight the whole system: You had to start closer to home. Until now she’d been trying to get to what she calls the “belly of the beast,” but this new awareness of fracking on her doorstep shifted her mindset—this single issue told the whole story of a broken system. The way she saw it, fracking was one very specific example of how the government was taking risks with people’s lives and affecting individual communities. The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore. Instead of returning to London to join more protests aimed at the government and the wider system, Tina remained in Lancashire to fight Cuadrilla.
She was right about fracking’s impact on her community. In 2019, researchers Anna Szolucha from the University of Bergen, Norway and Damien Short from the University of London carried out a study published by research journal Geoforum to examine how people’s lives were affected during the fracking planning and approval process in Lancashire—and the results were harrowing. They called what they found a collective trauma: a slow-burn shock that ripped apart social lives and damaged the feeling of community.
"You can stand up, and you can object."
“Some residents experienced severe stress and anxiety. Many reported that they lost trust in the police and democracy,” Szolucha says. Residents felt a sense of loss, fear, betrayal, guilt, and anger as the fracking consultation went through its various stages. Notably, Fylde, the area of Lancashire where Cuadrilla planned to drill, has a high population of older people. Residents feared their once quiet country lives would change overnight, punctuated by trucks, drills, and an influx of workmen. The people of Lancashire objected strongly to this, and the County Council voted against moving forward with the fracking. But the Secretary of State overrode their decision, sweeping aside resident wishes, and approved the work. Residents felt betrayed and powerless.
They mounted a legal fight, but even as the case made its way through the courts, Cuadrilla continued preparing the worksite. The locals couldn’t stay silent. They did everything they could to delay the drilling, from slowing down the trucks to showing up to the site every day. Although it wasn’t a specific part of their research, Szolucha says she noticed older campaigners seemed more traumatized than their younger counterparts.
“Older campaigners, many of whom used to be Conservative voters or simply had a pretty Conservative outlook, were often enraged or in tears when they spoke to me about how disappointed they were with their political representatives and the police, who, in their eyes, allowed fracking to happen,” she says.
(Rory Payne.)
A Big Fight in a Small Town
The residents in Fylde aren't the only ones to have experienced this collective trauma, although not every town has been so unanimously against it. In Gloucester, Australia, when energy companies AGL and Halliburton began “consulting” with the locals about fracking for coal seam gas in 2009, it splintered the community—and made enemies out of neighbors.
“Don’t come near my place,” one woman in her eighties yelled at Dominique Jacobs and her foster children during a protest. “I’m going to fucking shoot ya!”
Dominique is a 59-year-old resident of Gloucester, and for nearly a decade, she’s dedicated herself to the fight against fracking—something not everyone agrees with. Sometimes, this means being on the receiving end of her neighbors’ threats during a peaceful demonstration through the town center. She brushes off these encounters with a laugh often bubbling under her voice. But in a town where so few people speak out against fracking, she feels like a pariah. It’s a small town, a farming community of around 3,000 residents. Everyone knows everyone’s business—and many don’t like hers. Even now, there are people her husband has worked with for 15 years who won’t speak to her because of her anti-fracking activism. There are shops she doesn’t go into. People were banking on the jobs fracking had been promising, and as they saw it, people like Dominique were standing in the way. But Dominique says the fracking companies don’t actually care about the community, and that part of why she became such a vocal activist against them was to prove it.
Dominique Jacobs. (Derek Henderson)
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them,” she says.
Where Tina discovered activism in her later years, Dominique’s inner activist had been bubbling under the surface for most of her life. In her 20s, she was desperate to join the Franklin River blockade against a proposed dam, but couldn’t afford the travel expenses to get there. Instead, she and her husband spent the following years taking part in environmental campaigns and learning about climate change, but as soon as they became parents, their activism took a back seat. Three decades disappeared. Then, the protests appeared on her doorstep, and Dominique couldn’t sit back and watch any longer.
At first, Dominique didn’t know much about fracking. When it first arrived in Gloucester, she had been working in a preschool, and she recalls one of the parents who worked for the energy company trying to sell her on the benefits of allowing fracking in their town. There would be more job opportunities, for starters, they said. At the time, Dominique didn’t know any better, so she believed what they’d told her.
But soon, the big machinery arrived, care of Australian energy company AGL, drilling four wells in their once quiet town after initially proposing 110. In 2011, a group of local residents blockaded the corner of a dairy farm to prevent four more. Dominique started joining the protestors for a few hours at a time. The work slowed down, and as everyone awaited the results of a court challenge, the frackers eventually disappeared. By 2014, though, they’d returned.
“By then, we were really up to speed. We knew exactly what it was all about by then,” Dominique says. The local activists were no longer naive. They had a body of knowledge about what would happen to the landscape, the environment, and the people if the fracking were allowed to continue.
In October 2014, people gathered on the main road of Gloucester in a peaceful protest, populating the area with signs raising awareness about the negative impacts of fracking, like the contamination of land and water. As the small group of anti-fracking locals got into the swing of their protest, Dominique’s eye caught two yellow-clad women sitting on folding chairs, knitting needles clicking away. Fascinated, she walked over. The women were the Knitting Nannas Against Gas—a separate group from the UK Nanas, with similar motivations, tactics, and uniforms (but a slightly different spelling to their name). They were using what they called “gentle activism” to peacefully protest fracking.
If she wanted to join them, they told her, she should put on some yellow and get to knitting. So she did.
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
Dominique started spending three days a week manning a peaceful vigil in a little rotunda with a few other members of the community, but soon, knitting didn’t feel like enough: They wanted volunteers for arrestable actions. Dominique was fearful. She was a foster parent, and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that and lose her children. She chose to stick to the peaceful vigil, while others in the group went down to the gates of the fracking site and locked themselves onto it—a tried and true way to kick up a fuss. Dominique watched on as police arrested around 30 people.
Then, something happened that transformed Dominique from gentle activist to risk-taker; an experience that opened her eyes to the environmental devastation fracking could soon cause in her community. In January 2015, she and her family took a trip to Tara, Queensland, where fracking was much more developed than in Gloucester—and she was horrified.
“There was really no life anywhere,” she says of the ravaged areas she drove through. She describes two or three kilometers of road lined by huge ponds holding fracking wastewater. Forests were blocked off by metal fences. “Private property. No trespassing,” signs were plastered on the gates. Trailers, rigs, and grey infrastructure dotted the landscape. She was surprised by how industrialized it had become. Less than a decade earlier, it had been a farming community. Now, it was a wasteland.
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them."
Driving through Tara, Dominique thought of the image the fracking company had sold the people of Gloucester. A little well, some cows grazing out on a green field, perhaps, and everyone enjoying a peaceful life, with no discernible difference to their community.
“When you go up there to Queensland, you go, ‘Oh my god. We've got no idea,’” Dominique says.
What she saw in Queensland was bleak, and a stark contrast to the traditional portrayal of Australia, one of sprawling landscapes teeming with biodiversity. But what happened in Queensland was far from unusual. Travel to Oklahoma, where fracking first began, and you’ll find a similar picture. Drills, industrialization, and wastewater ponds abound. Phillips 66, which used to be a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips but split in 2012, fracks the land there, and has become one of the largest energy exploration companies in the world. They produce millions of barrels of oil a day and are estimated to be worth around $50 billion—and some of its residents are furious about it.
Fracking and the Ponca Tribe
Environmental ambassador Casey Camp-Horinek has lived in Ponca City her whole life. She’s an Elder and Hereditary Drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, and has recently turned 74.
When hundreds of people were arrested at Standing Rock in 2016, Casey was there. The Ponca people once lived further along the Missouri River, in a different region, and on that particular day, Casey was at a Tribal Historic Preservation Office meeting around 20 miles away. Mid-prayer, they got news that militarized police were heading to Standing Rock. They were going to forcefully evacuate the people at Treaty Camp who were standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
Casey and the other Elders from the meeting arrived as observers, and found hundreds of people peacefully praying. Over the hill and across the road, militarized police lined up shoulder to shoulder, advancing. As they came closer, Casey stood in prayer with the other Elders. Her son was in a nearby prayer circle of around 50 people. Others were singing, drumming, or in ceremony. The peace was soon shattered. Armored trucks and tasers invaded the scene; peaceful protestors were blinded with pepper spray as they prayed. A security helicopter thundered overhead. Sound cannons erupted.
“It was a scene from a horror movie,” Casey says. She speaks slowly and deliberately, frequently pausing to think. “It was like what happened to us all throughout history, going through it again.”
The police reached the Elders. Casey was pulled down and her hands zip tied behind her back. Her son called out, asking them to at least leave the Elders alone. That day, 142 people were arrested by armed police in riot gear, numbers written on the detainees’ arms. Casey was Standing Rock 138. She had to watch as her son was beaten and dragged away, unsure of when she would see him again.
In the cells, tear gas hung on their clothes. Dozens of women were bundled into what Casey describes as dog cages.
“We sang prayer songs and victory songs, and we celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery,” Casey says.
In many ways, it was nothing new. Casey’s stand against fracking and the extractive industries is inseparable from the disastrous consequences of colonialism that the Ponca Nation has suffered: the forced removal to Oklahoma from northeastern Nebraska, the children harmed at the boarding schools they were made to attend. There’s no short answer, she says, to explain how she got to where she is today.
“I guess one has to begin with the fact that I'm a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter, and a survivor of a holocaust of when the Europeans came to these shores,” she says, speaking in her calm, grandmotherly tone. While Tina was new to environmentalism, and Dominique had spent decades as an activist in waiting, the struggle forced on Casey encompassed not only her whole life, but generations before her.
"We celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery."
Casey uses strong words to describe what has been done to the Ponca Nation. She calls it a genocide. Nearly a third of the Ponca Tribe died due to their forced removal in the late 1800s. This history has been passed down through generations using oral traditions, which is how she continues to pass them on today. Many of the abuses she details have been well documented, ranging from colonizers gifting Indigenous people blankets laced with smallpox, to countless treaties made and broken, and the Ponca Nation’s 1.5 million acres being reduced to just a small township in Nebraska.
When the Ponca people were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, Casey’s grandparents were only around five or six years old. Their tribe was made to walk hundreds of miles, and many lives were lost along the way.
“At that time, Oklahoma was called Indian Territory. And it was to be the dumping grounds, the killing grounds, of all Native Americans,” Casey says. The Ponca people reached Oklahoma without their seeds and hunting instruments and were newly vulnerable to foreign diseases. Many of those who survived the journey did not survive the new territory.
And then, in 1911, the extractive industries arrived on Ponca land, looking for oil. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency designed to manage relationships between the government and Indigenous communities, made decisions about their land without their consent. She says the extractive industries created “killing fields.”
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
As it was for Dominique’s community in Gloucester, fracking was presented to Indigenous communities with a positive spin. Today, energy giant Phillips 66 describes itself as “engaging with our communities in an environmentally just way.” A sustainability web page says that they are committed to “providing energy today with an eye on tomorrow,” and that they have the highest levels of responsibility and ethics. Their 2023 sustainability report makes bold claims of supporting biodiversity and restoring park land, and even has a section on connecting with Indigenous peoples “to build meaningful relationships, honoring them and their connection to the land in the regions where we do business.” The front cover of the report shows a sprawling refinery against a blue sky, with a solitary bird soaring overhead, assessing its industrial habitat.
But once the companies arrived, a different reality emerged.
Casey had heard many sustainable claims like these before learning the truth about how water is used in the fracking process. To start, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water are injected into the earth, per well. The pressurized water, along with chemicals and sand, break open cracks below the surface and release gas. The unusable wastewater is then held in tanks, laced with fracking chemicals like hydrochloric acid, methanol, and petroleum distillates. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report shows this toxic cocktail can leak into drinking supplies from unlined pits or spills, or even be injected directly into groundwater resources. Across a six year period ending in 2012, there were 151 spills in 11 states, according to the EPA’s analysis. They don’t have enough data to definitively say how much this is happening on a national level.
In the US, an average of over 3 million gallons of water were used per well between 2005 and 2015 and at least 239 billion gallons have been used across the US since 2005. This is according to a report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, an organization which researches and educates about environmental issues. At this scale, the potential harm is monumental: A report published in Nature Communications shows that fracking can increase radiation levels by as much as 40% over the background level, putting those living within about 12 miles of fracking sites at increased health risk. Casey says she has seen countless cancer cases in Ponca families, and that many children have developed breathing difficulties since fracking began in Oklahoma. Similar symptoms have been seen elsewhere, as well, with researchers at the Yale School of Public Health finding carcinogens from fracking could be contaminating air and water, increasing the risk of childhood leukemia. The Center for Environmental Health has also warned of how pollutants from fracking might impact children’s respiratory health.
“They don't tell you that it's creating radiation that they're going to dump into your yard,” Casey says.
“We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide,” Casey says.
But however hopeless it might seem, Casey refuses to give up on fighting for this planet and its inhabitants. She is a part of nature, too, and that’s why she keeps pushing back.
"We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide."
She’s not the only one fighting back in North America. Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of Keepers of the Water, a group of Indigenous communities and environmental groups working together to protect nature, works with Elders responding to extractive industries across the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin.
“The thing with the Elders is they remember a life where you can drink water without it having to be treated; they remember drinking straight from the streams; they have lived that life,” she says. They have seen the increase in sickness, mental health issues, and loss of culture, both since colonization and during this current period of extraction. Many Indigenous communities across North America are surrounded by lakes, streams, and creeks, but they are buying bottled water: We’re living in a time now, she adds, where our children don’t know that you can drink pure water.
“The Elders are amazing because having seen all this and lived through all this, they're still the voice of reason, and they're telling people what needs to be done,” Cardinal, who is from the Kikino Métis Settlement in Canada, says. She explains how they attend the rallies, go to meetings, and participate in workshops. “They know right from wrong,” she continues. “They also know that their time is going to end soon, and they don't want to leave this behind for future generations. They're so desperately trying to make change where they can before they leave this place.”
This sentiment seems to be a universal one for fracking’s elder protestors, whether in North America or elsewhere: They’ve lived the past, and many feel they have no choice but to protect the future. The only difference is in how they choose to do it.
With a key role in the UK Nanas, Tina tries to be the voice of reason and to speak up about what needs to happen to stop fracking. She leads demonstrations and raises her voice until she can’t be ignored—but does so in a way that welcomes others to join: She uses gentle protest.
The Craft of Gentle Activism
During the demonstrations in Fylde, Lancashire, the UK Nanas would meet at the community hub every Wednesday around 9:30 a.m., all dressed in white. Together, they would walk up the hill, arrive at the gates of the fracking site, and form a long line. They would then stand in silence for fifteen minutes in what they termed the “Call for Calm.” It was a moment of peace between the police and activists: The women tied ribbons to the gate, singing groups joined, and then they broke into a choreographed dance. People brought stews, quiches, vegan chocolate fudge cake. Once, actor Emma Thompson even made an appearance.
(Rory Payne)
To help bolster their efforts during this period, Tina heavily utilized social media, where she regularly live streamed the daily lives of the Nanas and their demonstrations. Across roughly 1,000 days between 2014 and 2019, Tina shared livestream after livestream on her Facebook page, where she cracked jokes, argued with police, captured people dancing and venting, and fumbled with the technicalities of filming in a beautifully human way. Most importantly to Tina, anyone could easily watch these videos and write comments in real time—wherever and whoever they were.
“I want anyone watching to think, ‘I could do that.’ So if you're eighty, and you're sat at home, I want you to feel it's accessible,” Tina says.
While the UK Nanas relied heavily on social media, in Australia, the Knitting Nannas have so far utilized a more unusual approach to their gentle activism: They play on people’s assumptions about sweet old ladies and use it to their advantage. They turn up to work sites, politicians’ offices, and anywhere else where a demonstration is needed, and they knit. While police officers might assume the Nannas are harmless, it can be a split second before they’re caught off guard and an elderly woman has chained herself to a fence.
In Oklahoma, Casey has a different approach to spearheading change: She is using legal frameworks to her advantage. Although the Ponca Nation passed a moratorium on any future fracking on their land, Casey says this was ignored, and fracking continues to this day. She grew frustrated. Then, she learned about the Rights of Nature.
At first, Casey was skeptical. She was at a meeting of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, where around 100 women from across the world spoke and presented solutions to various environmental issues. It was the co-founder of Movement Rights, Shannon Biggs, who introduced her to the Rights of Nature: a legal framework that recognizes that ecosystems have the right to exist, in the same way that humans do. Within this law, nature is no longer treated as property, and communities could stand up in court and fight for the rights of ecosystems.
"We're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself."
Casey was reminded of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. At the time of its introduction, her brother had scoffed and said, “If religion were truly free, why would they need to put a law around it?” She felt the same way about the Rights of Nature. But over time, as Casey talked to Shannon more, she began to see its potential. With the Ponca’s ability to create their own laws within their tribal jurisdiction, it could be a form of protection.
At the time, Casey was on the tribal council. She created a resolution, the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature, and it became law in their court—the first time ever that an Indigenous community had recognized the Rights of Nature in tribal law. But Casey describes it as an old concept that’s just new on paper.
“This land is here forever. This water is here forever. These winds that blow are forever. You cannot eat, drink, or breathe that paper money or that plastic money. So the only way to go forward is for all of us, all human beings, to get on board and become those water protectors and land defenders. Because again, we're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself,” she says.
This approach to activism is a different path from the ones Tina and Dominique have chosen. While their activism is about creating impactful moments and disrupting the system, Casey’s is about finding and implementing solutions—and loopholes. But for all of them, it’s ultimately about protection. When fracking threatens the natural world, these women have felt they have no choice but to be its protector.
The Switch
In a research paper on what they term “Nannagogy,” Larraine Larri and Hilary Whitehouse set out to discover what motivates older women to step out of their comfort zone to fight for the planet they will soon leave behind.
“What we found were women who had been marginalized due to age and gender, who were determined to be productive and creative social change agents taking action for a low-carbon future. Our data show many of these women had never done anything like this before,” they wrote.
When it comes to the specifics of that activism, Larri and Whitehouse refer to the Knitting Nannas’ activities as “Craftivism,” a term originally coined in 2003 by crafter and activist Betsy Greer, the “godmother of Craftivism.” In another paper, Larri writes, “In the case of the Nannas, Craftivism emboldens and empowers older women to challenge gender and age-related stereotypes to become vibrant and central actors in the broader social movement.”
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
But are gentle actions enough? Tina says the UK Nanas all had moments where they “switched,” where they decided that they were going to become more defiant. A lot of these women, she says, grew up in an era where they had to be obedient to their husbands, and during their activism, they had this moment of realization: Enough is enough.
Tina’s moment came in 2018, when she decided to take part in her first arrestable action. Up until that point, in all of their demonstrations, Tina had never technically done anything illegal. But as anti-fracking efforts started ramping up, eventually, she was asked to take part in a lock-on, where she would physically attach herself to a static object and block the gates to the fracking site in Lancashire. This would put more pressure on Cuadrilla. It would also break the law: Jail time would be imminent for anyone blocking the fracking site.
“I had always said no because I still want to set the example that you don't have to break the law to win,” she says.
Still, she thought, what if it made all the difference? If Tina was going to do a lock-on, it was now or never. With an upcoming injunction that would prevent trespassing on the exploration site, she was running out of time. So, she and her niece both said yes. The demonstration was called the Caravan of Love, and took months of planning. A group known as The Cooks invented devices for the protestors to lock onto, using hard to cut materials like cement and elevator cable. Lock-ons often end with police cutting through similar contraptions, power tools whirring close to activists’ arms. They were hoping that wouldn’t happen by creating something too dangerous for the attempt—not that this had stopped police before.
Tina remembers hiding up at the camp near the fracking site gates on the day of the demonstration, trying to keep away from the glare of security.
The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore.
“We knew that at just after 2 a.m., someone was going to dump a whopping great caravan in the middle of the entranceway,” she says. The caravan concealed six men who were each locked onto a large household appliance, and once in place, would drop a huge cement foot from inside. The trailer was going nowhere. Its arrival was their cue. Two women ran up and thrust their arms into the vehicle, clipping themselves onto the men inside. Another pair locked themselves onto one side of the trailer together, and then, on the other side, Tina and her niece reached their arms through either end of a torpedo-shaped lock-on device with “love to my mum” written on it. They each clipped themselves onto a hook inside.
Tina stayed like that for 21 hours wearing incontinence pads and battling the discomfort of the outdoors. Eventually, she felt she couldn’t breathe, and the activists hatched a plan to help her escape. First, they’d distract the police, who were watching close by. Next, they’d make the switch.
“When you’re ready,” one of the other activists said.
“Quick, quick, I need some help with my pad,” Tina called out, doing her best to pretend that she really did need help, while the Nana who was attending to their personal care rushed to her “aid.”
This made the policeman standing nearby so uncomfortable, she says, that he walked off. Two other activists ducked under the tarpaulin covering Tina and her niece’s connected arms, taking their place as the two women snuck out. Tina stood up and tried to casually walk away from the scene. She was, of course, immediately arrested.
While Tina had been reluctant to do anything illegal in her anti-fracking efforts, however, after what she’d witnessed in Queensland, Dominique had been ready. Only a couple of years after becoming a Knitting Nanna, she traveled to the town of Pilliga in New South Wales, roughly 250 miles away from her home, to join their local fight against fracking—and jumped at the chance to escalate her actions.
“You kind of get to the point where you've done everything you possibly can do,” Dominique says. “What is there left to do except that? You've written so many letters, you've signed petitions, you've talked to your politicians, and they just leave you with no options. It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something.”
(Derek Henderson)
Early in the morning one January day in 2016, with yellow parasols in hand to defend against the sweltering heat, Dominique and two other Nannas snuck up to the wire gates outside the fracking site, unfolded their chairs, and looped bike chains around their necks, attaching the opposite ends to the gate. Dominique settled into the lock-on and got out her knitting. Each Nanna had a buddy to support her, and eventually other Nannas arrived, throwing out tablecloths and setting up a high tea.
The police eventually ordered the buddies to leave, and tried to persuade the Nannas to do the same, Dominique recalls, telling them they’d made their point.
The Nannas didn’t budge. They knew they were likely to get arrested, but they weren’t going to give in.
The police got out the bolt cutters. They gave the Nannas one more chance to leave, and when they refused, each Nanna was arrested. They walked themselves to the police van. At the station, they weren’t put into cells but sat in the main office while their papers were processed, still wearing the straw hats that had protected them from the sun. When they finally left, it was to the sound of cheers as all the other Nannas lined the path in a guard of honor.
Dominique makes light of the situation now, but makes it clear that it was a desperate measure. They were out of options. Fracking was still happening, and gentle protest wasn’t making a big enough impact. Like Tina, she felt the same mounting pressure to force someone to listen.
"It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something."
But for both women, that risk had been a choice—while for others, like Casey, even quiet protest was enough to be considered an offense. When she was arrested at Standing Rock, it wasn’t for something she'd chosen; it wasn’t for a moment of defiance. She was arrested while praying, arrested in spite of her peaceful presence, arrested in spite of the fact she was participating in the exact same vein of quiet protest that Tina and Dominique and countless other nanas around the world had participated in without punishment.
“I applaud the bravery of anyone who chooses to do nonviolent, direct actions. If that involves chaining themselves to equipment, I applaud that,” Casey says, making a particular point that she’s behind those other nanas in their actions. “I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary.”
In her younger years, Casey took part in similar actions that she describes as “pushing the envelope.” But now, as an Elder, her activism looks different. As an Indigenous woman, putting herself in the way of police would come at a higher price for Casey than it would for white activists.
“It always has,” she says. “I don’t see that as a changing trend.” Indigenous people have the second highest incarceration rate of any racial group in the United States. Casey says that if she drives her car to town with tribal tags on it, she knows she’s more likely to get stopped than if she had an Oklahoma tag.
“Yes, racism is alive. And Indigenous men and women on the front line are flagged by racist laws that are being put in place in places like Oklahoma, South Dakota, and many other places where there's large Indigenous populations,” she says. Specifically, Casey is, in part, referring to a law where anyone protesting against fossil fuels can face $100,000 fines or 10 years in prison. In stark contrast, both Tina and Dominique’s cases were eventually dropped, both still have clean criminal records, and both were treated with respect, even while getting arrested. Casey was not.
Something else happened for both Tina and Dominique and their local communities, too: Eventually, the fracking stopped. The same cannot be said for Casey and the Ponca Nation.
Gloucester. (Derek Henderson)
A Fight That’s Never Won
In summer 2019, people in Lancashire felt their homes shaken by tremors measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale. They were the UK’s largest fracking-related earthquakes to date. That November, the government halted procedures following a damning safety report that concluded there was no way to predict the probability or magnitude of future earthquakes. It finally felt like the fight was over—but Tina isn’t convinced.
“It's only a moratorium, and all we did was keep them at bay until we had enough seismic events and time to diminish their resources for it to impact them,” she says. Today, Tina stays vigilant because she still feels a responsibility to make the most of her time. “I feel like I got here really late, and so I've got a lot to do before I go,” she adds.
There are certainly still people in government who aren’t on the Nanas’ side: In the fall of 2022, during her short stint as UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss promised to lift the UK’s ban on fracking. While just a few weeks later, the new Prime Minster Rishi Sunak reversed the decision, it was definitive proof the fight is far from finished in the UK.
Meanwhile, in Australia, less than a month after Dominique’s lock-on in Pilliga, she was at home when the phone rang: The fracking in Gloucester was over. The energy company AGL was withdrawing, citing disappointing production volumes. It was so sudden and unexpected that she could barely believe it. She remembers feeling euphoric. The activists all hurried into town, gathered in the street, and popped bottles of champagne.
“No one could wipe the smiles off their faces. It was so beautiful,” she says. It was a small group of people from a small town who had fought something bigger. She says a lot of people called it the mouse that roared. But not every battle has been won.
"I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary."
In Oklahoma, fracking continues.
“We have so many societal ills caused by these colonists that it is just shameful. And that's not on us. I will not allow my people to ever feel guilt,” Casey says.
She continues to speak about solutions to environmental destruction and the Rights of Nature. She fights fracking because she has not been given any other choice. As of 2020, Oklahoma was the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the US. There are 43,232 wells in the state, according to US Energy Information Administration data from 2019. The number of rigs is falling, but slowly; and earlier in 2021, a natural gas pipeline exploded in northwestern Oklahoma. But Casey is not giving up the fight.
None of them are. For Tina, Dominique, and Casey, their work will never truly be over, even if the battles in their hometowns have been won—or will be. For all three women and the hundreds of others fighting fracking, there will always be another energy company arriving, another community being ignored, another generation facing a threat. They persist because they feel they must, because they want to leave a better world behind. They fight because they feel you must do everything you can to stop injustice, even if you might not see the change in your own lifetime.
Which is why Tina has stayed so vigilant, even four years after the last work truck left Lancashire. It’s why Casey still leads prayer walks, taking her strong and peaceful demeanor directly to Phillips 66 refineries across Oklahoma. And it’s why every couple of weeks, you’ll find Dominique stationed outside the Federal Politician’s Office in New South Wales, Australia. Fracking in Gloucester might be over, but the drills are still in the ground in much of the country, and for as long as they are, she will be there—dressed in her yellow clothes, forcing the government to listen, and knitting.
(Rory Payne)
Photography by Rory Payne, Derek Henderson, and Ryan Red Corn. Additional editing by Mariana Heredia. Fact checking by Tadhg Stevens.
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How people respond to disillusionment shapes history. Without hope, we're doomed to repeat it.
Few things feel worse than building your hopes up about something that later turns out to be bullshit. It's the profound disillusionment of being burned by someone you trusted, by a belief you held, by a foundational narrative you built your life and identity around that's no longer possible to maintain. Whether consciously or not, most of us will do just about anything to avoid these destabilizing feelings—to shut out the pain of grief and helplessness. When confronted with ugly realities that don't match our grand narratives, we can mourn the loss and adjust, or dig our heels in deeper. Many choose the latter, because the rupture is too painful.
I was already writing this essay on the dangers of nihilism in the face of atrocities and authoritarianism when the latest war between Israel and Hamas broke out. Russia-Ukraine, GOP Christian nationalism, and the climate crisis provided plenty of despairing material. I was feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, and wanted to make sense of growing instability and extremism. Then came October 7.
There's a Russian saying: Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, someone knocks from below. For the past few weeks, as I've watched the war in Gaza unfurl, the atrocities pile up, and ethnic cleansing further normalized, I've tried, and failed, not to catastrophize. It doesn't seem like the world order is going to survive this, as failing democracies disgrace themselves, and warlords clap their hands. Still, I choose to remain hopeful that something better is possible, because giving up makes things infinitely worse.
By now, most people are familiar with how the latest round of violence erupted. Early in the morning of October 7, Hamas militants surprise attacked southern Israel, brutally massacring over 1400 people, killing infants, burning families alive in their homes, and shooting ravers celebrating Sukkot at a music festival in the desert near Gaza, in addition to kidnapping around 240 hostages—children and the elderly among them. The next morning, I woke up to a text from a friend who has spent years covering wars: "The world is hopeless." I was horrified. I felt grief for the dead, and the survivors, and for Gazans, who I knew would soon suffer in retaliation for Hamas' war crimes. I felt terrified for the hostages, and for Jewish people, my people, everywhere: October 7, 2023 is now understood as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel responded to this by once again bombing the shit out of Gaza, and Gazan civilians—again, children and the elderly among them. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, as Palestinians desperately dug through the rubble to find survivors and what remained of those who’d been killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also immediately imposed a blockade, and cut off Gaza's electricity, fuel, water, and food supply—a job made easy by decades of occupation. All of it, of course, was signed off by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. By now, whatever reserves were left have long run out, and minimal aid has come in through Egypt. The humanitarian crisis is as dire as it gets. Many hospitals have run out of fuel for their generators, meaning anyone on a machine will likely die. People are starving, drinking sea water, being operated on without anesthesia. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered the siege, justified collective punishment—a war crime—by saying, "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly." Hearing those words, again, I was horrified. I felt sorrow for Palestinians, who've been dehumanized, ghettoized, and unable to escape collective retribution. I felt complicit in their suffering. Once again Gazans were dying en masse while the world watched. I felt despair at the lack of leadership, and helpless to stop the cycle of violence.
Even through all the noise, it is clear many people have felt the same. Moments of crisis like the one we're in now demand a lot from us emotionally, asking scared people in pain to hold the weight of many conflicting truths in our hearts at once. Zero-sum thinking is tempting, providing a false sense of certainty, a justified rejection of compassion. It’s also dangerous—all manner of atrocities follow when people believe they have no choice; that, in their circumstances, the ends justify the means.
It's a cliche, but it's true: Hurt people hurt people. As political scientist Seva Gunitsky tweeted last month, "You know intergenerational trauma is real because the two nationalities most victimized by fascism are currently waging two proudly genocidal military campaigns."
As both a scholar of genocide and Soviet history, and as the American daughter of a Ukrainian Jew who survived Hitler and Stalin, fled Soviet repression as a refugee for Israel, and ended up in the US, only to fall for Fox News—wow, did I feel that. My people's trauma is on full display in multiple wars, and I hate it. Despite living a remarkably secure life compared to my ancestors, disillusionment has still knocked on my door many times. It's come for all of us of late. Which makes it all the more important that we do not let it win.
As I write this, Israel's ground invasion of Gaza is underway, with all the horrors for Gazans that it brings. The day it began, the IDF blocked all communications, cutting off power and internet in Gaza so we couldn't hear or see the extent of the atrocities. Nothing in this alleged strategy to eliminate Hamas suggests the lives of the hostages or of Palestinian civilians have been given a second thought. With over 9000 Gazans dead, and Hamas leaders in Qatar and their tunnels still relatively untouched, it's hard to accept that this invasion serves a purpose beyond bloody, indiscriminate revenge—or, in the worst case, a second Nakba. I feel sick watching Bibi and Hamas drag the world into the abyss, with the US courting global catastrophe by lighting billions on fire to prolong an unwinnable armed conflict.
For Palestinians, the existential threat is immediate and ongoing, as people in Gaza cannot escape the bombs and now, the tanks. In the West Bank, there are horrifying reports of prisoners being tortured, and fundamentalist settlers armed by the state continuing to expel Palestinians from their land, and pogrom their villages; in East Jerusalem, the state continues demolishing Palestinian homes. Every day there are stories of entire families killed in Gaza while trying to flee south following the IDF's forced evacuation order, many of them with nowhere to go. Meanwhile, air strikes have only escalated. The IDF has already confirmed it has hit 11,000 targets, many of which were civilian buildings. Most recently, and horrifically, they bombed Gaza's largest refugee camp, two days in a row, killing over 100 people. There are so many dead, hospitals and morgues have run out of space, and Gazans are stuck burying bodies in mass graves.
What do these atrocities solve? Who does this free or make safe? Certainly not Israelis, who overwhelmingly blame Netanyahu's policies for leaving them vulnerable to attack, as whatever tenuous sense of security they had was pulled out from underneath them, and all the gains they'd made regionally evaporated overnight. And certainly not Palestinians, who have suffered decades of occupation and statelessness with no end in sight, only to experience the disruption of a status quo that was already killing them: Over 200 Palestinians were killed by the IDF and militant settlers in 2023 even before the war began. The threats and conditions facing each are not the same, but at base, they share an existential fear that their people won't survive to see the aftermath of this conflict. And even if they do, how much of their humanity will remain?
It's especially disturbing watching Israeli officials declare holy wars, and talk of wiping Gazans out, flattening them, or forcibly expelling them. Jews have been on the receiving end of all the above many times over, and it's sickening knowing it's being inflicted on Palestinians in my name. They heard Hamas leaders boast about cleansing the land of Jews and are itching to outdo them: Over 2 million people, half of them minors, remain stuck without food, water, fuel, or shelter in a high-density death trap as bombs rain down, including along the very evacuation routes that were allegedly to take Palestinians to safety.
As Hamas' atrocities beget Israeli atrocities, the absolute worst people are benefitting from the suffering and chaos. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are taking advantage of the chaos and using Palestinian pain for their own political ends. Iran's proxies in Yemen and Lebanon keep threatening to expand the war. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party is using Israel as vindication of their own Islamophobic ethnonationalism. It's easier for corrupt authoritarians to entrench power, hollow out institutions, and silence people in times of crisis. It also doesn’t help that Netanyahu knows people want his head when this war is over—naturally, he just announced the second phase of the war would be a long one. It's an open secret that Netanyahu and Hamas have fed off one another for years, neither wanting a two-state solution to succeed. We're seeing the results of their efforts now, and why it's disastrous to empower authoritarians who promise the illusion of security with a dose of repression. With the illusion gone, repression has skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, Arab leaders, most of whom had previously normalized relations with Israel, are facing populist rage and discontent at home. This seems by design: Israel was about to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia for the first time when Hamas attacked, and now weeks later, Jordan has recalled its ambassador. Diplomacy deteriorated early on when Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled a summit with US President Joe Biden over horrifying—but to this day, disputed—reports, first blaming Israel, then Islamic Jihad, for the October 17 bombing of Al Ahli hospital, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. It was a pressure cooker moment in a pressure cooker conflict, an outpouring waiting for a vessel. Unverified headlines about the incident led to angry protests outside Israeli embassies; Hezbollah calling for a global day of jihad; the burning of synagogues in Berlin, Tunis, and Spain; and continued violence in the West Bank.
Palestinian scholar Iyar el-Baghdadi tweeted about the hospital blast, and the furor it inspired, “This is no longer about a specific hospital and what happened there. The news [was] a watershed moment for a lot of pent up anger about a million things, bottled up for a long time, to explode. Confirming or debunking won't help. This is no longer about facts but about psychology.” The readiness of so many to believe the worst about each other, to blame entire peoples for the cynical actions of criminal, extremist leadership, to oversimplify a complex conflict, parrot violent propaganda and disinformation, and harass anyone calling for us to find our shared humanity is jarring. If anything, we've become disillusioned with each other.
The war has triggered a global backlash as dissent is quashed, and antisemitic and Islamaphobic hate crimes rise dramatically. Anti-war protestors have been arrested around the world, including in Israel, the US, UK, Germany, France, Egypt, and Bahrain. In Chicago, a Palestinian American boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was killed by his landlord. In Dagestan, a mob stormed the airport looking for Jewish passengers. Synagogues around the globe have been defaced, Jewish and Muslim university students harassed. Palestinian Israelis have been arrested for liking social media posts, and families of hostages have been harassed for demanding a ceasefire and prisoner swap. Calls ranging from pauses to peace talks and an immediate ceasefire, no matter who they’re from, have largely been ignored by the people who most need to hear them.
Also on the chopping block: international humanitarian law. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Putin's impunity for war crimes in Syria was a turning point for the international system, a pure display of might makes right. Now, Russia, China, and Iran are watching as the West actively funds and arms war crimes in Gaza. Drawing tons of criticism, the US has not laid down any red lines for Israel, like conditioning funding or weapons deliveries upon them not being used against Palestinian civilians; as well as vetoing multiple UN Security Council resolutions calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire. What good are the Geneva and Genocide Conventions when they can be vetoed into oblivion? Who actually ends up before the International Criminal Court? When the moral authority and legitimacy of legal institutions are gone, rule of law goes with them. This emboldens bad actors to do their worst, just because they can.
As I’ve watched the last couple weeks unfold, I've sought out voices of compassion and reason, for informed people who, even as they grieve, still speak with moral clarity and a sense of our shared humanity. They doexist—they're primarily Arab and Jewish—but they're outnumbered by masses of uninformed people publicly stumbling through this, and far too many racist posts, statements, and signs justifying the ethnic cleansing of one side or the other. Even outside of reporting on Al Ahli, Western media coverage has been a mess, reminding many of 9/11: Muslim TV anchors sidelined; Palestinian commentators canceled; unverified, sensationalist reports spread; internal dissent silenced. Social media, especially Twitter—once a vital source for verifying breaking news—is rampant with antisemitism, Islamophobia, and disinformation: violent propaganda, bloody videos, memed history, unchecked rage, and nihilistic, binary thinking. In short, we are collectively struggling to cope with a spiraling situation.
In all of this, many have gotten bogged down in ranking people's suffering. It's difficult but necessary to accept that cyclical violence, institutional collapse, and mass atrocities can happen anywhere, and have happened everywhere at some point in history, that no people are solely oppressors or oppressed, or bleed differently than any other. We're all capable of electing dictators, of succumbing to reactionary short-term thinking. We're also all capable of putting even the most egregious grievances aside, of caring more about being at peace than vengeance, and accepting that our safety and freedom depends on the safety and freedom of our neighbors.
Explanations for the current global crises are not an exercise in judgment or morality, especially when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Explanations, at their best, seek to understand the human condition, and how history and life experience affect people's subjective, emotional truth. Making sense of those myths, traumas, beliefs—often impervious to logic or reality—is critical to understanding what shapes and motivates people, and states, to behave the way they do. We're stuck with people as they are, not as we want them to be. You can't understand disillusionment without knowing the illusions that preceded it.
October 7 and all that has followed uprooted several stubborn myths, for better and for worse. As Amjad Iraqi wrote for +972, a psychological barrier broke with Hamas' assault:
“Israel’s mass protest movement…has consciously kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most [Israelis] still clung to the illusion that the current structures of permanent rule could deliver safety for Israelis and remain compatible with their claim to democracy. That bubble has now irreparably burst. But Israelis, who have been shifting politically rightward for years, are far from questioning or recalculating their commitment to iron rule.”
It was obvious to me, especially after a troubling visit to the military courts in the West Bank over a decade ago, that the occupation was rotting Israeli institutions from within, and that rule of law and democracy couldn't exist with parallel, unequal systems. It felt frankly delusional to think the Israeli state could repress Palestinians in the West Bank under one system, keep Gaza isolated with another, and systemically discriminate against Arab Israelis, all without the militarization and repression of Palestinian rights eventually extending to Jewish Israelis, too. But people believe what they believe.
Endless cycles of violence, democratic backsliding, and threats of institutional collapse make for scary times—and I, for one, am terrified of what’s to come. What does it look like when the bubble bursts? What fills the vacuum? The answer is rarely anything good. Idealogues are especially prone to nihilism, and the horseshoe theory, that the far-right and far-left meet at the extremes, has become a truism. The points of a horseshoe don't actually touch, though. What the extremes share is the void: "Death to Arabs" and "Kill the Jews."
Like any supremacist ideology, both are inherently anti-democratic. But people choosing between a meaningless life of suffering, and a life of suffering, but for a cause, will always choose the latter. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich documented the collapse of the USSR through oral histories of everyday people as they experienced it. There are romantics and cynics, intelligentsia and party flacks, peasants and city dwellers, many with mixed feelings about both communism and capitalism, but all having suffered under each.
In her introduction, "Remarks from an Accomplice," Alexievich describes growing up as a believer in communism: "Disillusionment came later." She writes about how people reacted to the archives opening after perestroika, when regular people finally began learning about the vast crimes committed by the Communist Party—that their heroes were mass murderers, and their neighbors and relatives their executioners.
"People read newspapers and magazines and sat in stunned silence,” she writes. “They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well." Why was truth the enemy? As one interviewee put it, "Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why…In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him."
One woman, whose teenage son died by suicide, remembers screaming at her own mother, "What did we hear from you our whole lives? Throw yourself under a tank, go down in an airplane for your Motherland. Heroic death." I see the obvious echos here of Russia's invasion of Ukraine; but I'm also reminded of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans devoted to exposing the violent reality of the occupation. The issue of complicity, especially in atrocity, is at the heart of so much of the hand-wringing we're seeing today in Gaza, and how people have responded to it. Who are the victims, and who are the perpetrators? As with all things, it depends who you ask and how far back you want to go. Two stateless people were pitted against each other by imperial and regional powers playing dispossession dominos, leaving enough valid grievances to last many lifetimes. The unfortunate truth is that Jewish people's right to self-determination ultimately came at Palestinians’ expense, and the establishment of a Palestinian state coexisting alongside Israel is the best shot we have at rectifying this and undermining groups like Hamas and their successors. The conflict wasn't always so lopsided, but insofar as Palestinians today are concerned, nuclear-armed, US-backed Israel has become Goliath.
This has created an enormous rupture in the identity of Jews around the world, for whom the existential threat feels perennial, who are scared of going to synagogue while watching masses of people gather against Israel, most of whom are protesting for a ceasefire and Palestinian human rights, but a significant portion of whom blame all Jews for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, and think Netanyahu speaks for us all. No matter our politics, we’re haunted by the knowledge that as the violence wears on, more and more people out there wish the Nazis had finished the job.
None of this excuses flattening Gaza or ethnically cleansing Palestine of Palestinians. I do still believe that Jewish people need a homeland, one country that won't expel us; I literally wouldn't exist but for Israel providing refuge to stateless Jews. But I also don't believe that right is exclusive, or that it trumps the rights of Palestinians to the same things. I deeply resent the implication that my refusal to support the genocidal policies of a foreign autocrat makes me an antisemite, a supporter of terrorism, or less Jewish. Quite the opposite: I believe and have watched the current government's vengeful, reckless, overreaching policies make Jews everywhere more of a target.
So what do we do about all this? As people process the loss of their old beliefs, they're faced with the option of hardening into something more extreme, or freeing themselves from old constraints and reimagining a better future. It's a choice between hope or revenge. But reimagining requires a shared reality, a rejection of bigotry, and people who seek complexity, not propaganda. It requires empathy, and an ability to see each other's humanity, especially when we're afraid. It requires choosing leaders who don't want to see the world burn.
There are people all over the world already doing the work to end cycles of violence, who know that as bad as things get, they could always be worse. In Israel, Standing Together is a grassroots peace movement led by Jewish and Palestinian Israelis standing courageously against the tide of war. I recently attended a Storytelling Summit hosted by Futures Without Violence at the Courage Museum in San Francisco. The museum, which opens in 2025, is built on the belief, backed by science, that when we hear each others' stories, and see each other as people, we empathize. That as social creatures, we're built to connect and be in community. That this is how we heal ourselves.
The good news is that this healing is possible. But it can only begin from a place of safety, something too many have not been guaranteed. It's up to us to demand human rights, rule of law, and freedom and democracy for all, and to push for policies that strengthen them. Because as disillusioned as I am with the institutions meant to deliver these aspirations, I still believe in people. I understand that violence comes from a place of despair, and that hope is a precursor to peace. Even knowing what I know, I choose to be hopeful, to use my voice and what power I have to push for people everywhere to live boring lives, free from violence. It’s the only way forward for all of us.
[post_title] => We Must Not Give In To Nihilism
[post_excerpt] => How people respond to disillusionment shapes history. Without hope, we're doomed to repeat it.
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I have a confession to make: Over the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to understand why queer people raised in Christianity would want to remain practicing Christians as adults. This opinion is largely born of my own experience, and informed by the experience of countless others who have also had to overcome the self-hatred inflicted on them by anti-LGBTQ theology. I mean, why would I want to be part of a “big tent” religious affiliation in which a majority of my erstwhile coreligionists believe my very existence is sinful, including some—surely a larger proportion than most respectable Christians would like to admit—who think I deserve to be put to death simply for existing? As I see it, were I to continue to claim Christianity today, I would be submitting to the perpetual framing of my queer existence as a theological problem to be solved. And even if I were convinced that adopting “affirming” theology would solve that problem in my favor, the effort feels unnecessarily exhausting in the face of another option: simply refusing to defend my life in theological terms at all. No theology, no problem.
The mainstream punditocracy (both conservative and liberal) doesn’t see it that way, of course—and lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how profoundly Christian privilege shapes our national discourse on the intersections of queerness, religion, and secularism. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how legacy media outlets take it for granted that religion, and especially Christianity, is a good thing, full stop, for both individuals and for society, a position that condescendingly implies that the nonreligious just don’t know what’s good for us. I’ve also wondered how this conversation might change, and how we all might benefit, if we could open it up to the many queer people directly affected by but largely excluded from taking part in it.
Despite my own stance on religion, I know many LGBTQ Christians feel empowered by reclaiming their faith from bigots, making it into something loving and inclusive and fabulous. Some of them still believe in miracles and a literal resurrection, and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that humans really choose whether or not we believe in the things that are at the core of our identities. As someone committed to embracing pluralism as essential to democracy, I respect queer Christians and believe we can hold space for each other. We are as we are: Each of us is individually complicated, and those of us who have left high-control Christian backgrounds are not all going to land in the same place.
The premise that religion is unequivocally good for all of us, however, is one I’ve long been skeptical of. It also, frankly, offends me—because it suggests that secular Americans, including the many queer people who have consciously disaffiliated from religion for very good reasons, are to blame for any suffering or unhappiness in our lives, when this distress is in fact largely caused by stigma, unequal treatment, and, often, rejection by our religious families when we choose to live as our authentic selves.
The doyens of the punditocracy insist that people have “metaphysical needs”; that dangerous political extremism will inevitably fill the void for those without religion (which makes American polarization at least partly the fault of us secularists); and that religion is necessary for community, social support, and good mental health—all of which, by their logic, secular people must lack. We’re expected to sit back and take it when The Atlantic and The New York Times tell us, if not exactly in so many words, that they know better than we do what we need to thrive. That the actual people who embody America’s rapid secularizing trend don’t deserve a say in how the story of American secularization is told, because we’re basically petulant children refusing to eat our vegetables.
But is any of this conventional wisdom based in truth? (Spoiler alert: It’s not.) And if we could sweep aside the dogma and the taboos in order to have a more nuanced discussion of American religion and secularism, what might both queer Christianity and queer secularism have to teach us all?
As for queer Christianity, it’s currently having a moment. A few weeks ago, Christian singer-songwriter and drag queen Flamy Grant topped the iTunes Christian music chart, staying at number one for nine days—the first time a drag queen had ever achieved the feat. Although her star was already rising, Flamy Grant’s meteoric leap to the number one spot was fueled in part by a hateful, viral tweet from charismatic evangelical Sean Feucht, best known for the massive anti-mask in-person worship concerts he held in various American cities during the COVID-19 pandemic—often without obtaining the necessary permits. His hateful rhetoric wasn’t surprising. Two years ago here in Portland, Oregon, Feucht used street brawlers, including Proud Boys, as his security detail—the kinds of gun-fetishizing Christian nationalist thugs who in recent years have taken to using intimidation and harassment in all-too-often successful attempts to shut down LGBTQ events and silence queer folks and our allies.
For anyone looking for evidence that Christianity and LGBTQ people are at odds with one another, Feucht provides a data point. But Grant’s spectacular popularity in turn offers a counterpoint: Clearly, unabashedly queer Christian art resonates profoundly with millions of Americans. The phenomenon reminds me of the time I observed a Jesus cosplayer at Orlando’s 2017 Pride festival giving out hugs to attendees, at least one of whom was moved to tears. Seeing that, you couldn’t help but feel something positive and powerful, whether you yourself believe in the ostensibly resurrected Jesus or not.
Even so, it has long been clear that American agnostics, atheists, and humanists trend disproportionately queer for what seem to me like obvious reasons—quite a few of us come from Christian backgrounds, and Christianity has typically not been kind to us. Although it did not use a nationally representative sample, American Atheists’ 2019 Secular Survey found that a striking 23% of its 33,897 respondents, drawn primarily from members of secular advocacy organizations, identified as LGBTQ. According to Gallup, less than a third as many Americans (7.2%) identify as LGBTQ overall.
But what about religious LGBTQ people? Earlier this year, the researchers Kelsy Burke, Andrew Flores, Suzanna Krivulskaya, and Tyler Lefevor attempted to answer this question, crafting a survey that asked members of the LGBTQ community (though also not a nationally representative sample) about their religious affiliation, reporting on their findings and conclusions for Religion News Service (RNS). According to the researchers, 36% of respondents reported a religious affiliation, a finding they framed—oddly, to my mind—as indicating that queer Americans are more religious than we might expect, given an ostensibly prevailing media narrative, fueled by Supreme Court decisions in favor of “religious freedom,” that queerness and faith are inherently at odds.
But this perception of American media outlets is in itself biased—and demonstrably false, as I’ve attempted to illustrate above. Our legacy media constantly sings the praises of religion, and the Flamy Grant phenomenon has only further proven that religion journalists are more than ready to celebrate queer Christianity, too. Indeed, in their rhetorical attempt to “save” queer religiosity by emphasizing how “high” 36% is, it seems to me that Burke, et al. were participating in what I consider the quintessential religion of America’s public sphere: faith in faith itself.
A hint of this pro-faith bias shows through in the way that the researchers summarized the findings of a separate study, in the same story, about religious affiliation and mental health outcomes among sexual minorities. “Although faith and participation in religion have been clearly linked to better health in heterosexual people,” they tell us, “these effects are less strong for LGBTQ+ people.” However, what the study they link to, a meta-analysis, actually says is this: “The relationship between R/S and health disappears or becomes negative when participants are sampled from sexual minority venues (e.g., bars/clubs; r = .01).” That’s social scientist speak for, “Religion and spirituality has either no impact or a negative impact on queer folks’ mental health when a study’s sample is drawn from queer community spaces.” This is clearly not the same as a “less strong” positive effect on mental health outcomes—in fact, this finding suggests that what really matters is community and social support, and that in at least some cases queer people are actually better off finding that outside of church than inside it.
With that in mind, I turned to Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and a fellow exvangelical whose expertise includes the relationship of religion to mental health, for an assessment of the state of the field. “Broadly speaking, religion provides two major positives for wellbeing: purpose/meaning-making and community,” Grubbs told me. But religion doesn’t provide that for all of us. If a person’s “religious affiliation is causing feelings of purposelessness, lack of meaning, or lack of community/belonging,” Grubbs explained, “it’s likely that the religious affiliation is causing harm to mental health.” He added, “In premise, if people are actively involved in community outside of religion and if they are able to find purpose/meaning in other things, they are quite likely to do just as well without religion as they would with it.” Unfortunately, as Grubbs noted in our email exchange, this is often difficult (but not impossible) to do in the United States.
To me, one way we can begin to address the media bias is obvious: Both religious and nonreligious queer folks should have and deserve representation in our national discussion of religion, secularization, and American society. They also both deserve to have their choices to be religious or secular respected. As for the RNS report, despite its shortcomings, I applaud the authors for undertaking original research on the relationship of LGBTQ Americans to religion. More of that should be done. But while data is important, so are our actual voices: Crucially, the report contains no qualitative data or quotations from members of the LGBTQ community, represented only as statistics.
Like the American religiously unaffiliated generally, the queer unaffiliated are particularly underrepresented in a public sphere being gatekept by the priests of the Great American Faith in Faith. The fact is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making meaning as a human. We do not all have “metaphysical needs.” We have human needs, needs to belong and be supported, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to find meaning in our lives—and while religion provides that for some of us, for others it is downright toxic. What might a more robust, nuanced, inclusive conversation about religion, secularism, queerness, and society look like? I think it would benefit us all to find out by bringing more secular Americans, and more queer Americans, whether secular or religious, into the elite public sphere to challenge the punditocracy’s demonstrably false idea of religion being a universal path to wellbeing and happiness.
[post_title] => Are Religious or Secular LGBTQ+ People Inherently Happier?
[post_excerpt] => Spoiler alert: It's not that straightforward.
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People who lead lives in “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them. Finding commonality is how we fight back.
At age six, “Ashley X” was subjected to a series of invasive, irreversible medical procedures. Without her consent or understanding, her breast buds were removed, along with her uterus, and she was placed on hormone therapy to limit her growth. These procedures were performed at the behest of her parents, who insisted they were for her own good.
Today, Ashley’s story conjures up the nightmare of the “trans agenda” that is being advanced in conservative circles: a vulnerable young person unable to make decisions for herself, forced into procedures that will profoundly shape the trajectory of her physical, sexual, and social development. It’s easy to imagine it as the subject of mass outrage, the center of a think piece in a conservative gossip rag running on Substack or in the Daily Mail. But it wasn’t, because of one important detail: Ashley was subjected to these procedures not because she was trans, but because she was disabled.
Ashley’s case rose to public attention in 2007, when her parents wrote a detailed explanation, justification, and treatise on their “pillow angel” in a viral blog post, claiming they wanted to keep her smaller and easier to care for. Their disregard for her humanity was perhaps most apparent in the argument that the removal of her uterus would prevent potential pregnancy, “which to our astonishment does occur to disabled women who are abused,” a very odd way to address the shockingly high rate of sexual assault in developmentally disabled women—estimated to be 80 percent. Still, many agreed with them. Doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital received ethical approval to perform these procedures, which were written up in medical journals and widely praised. Because Ashley had “severe disabilities,” the modification of her body was deemed appropriate and necessary, with one ethicist commenting “a step too far, or not far enough?” Another ethicist, notorious for his negative commentary about the disability community, praised the Ashley treatment for The New York Times.
As the attack on trans rights continues to escalate, I have been thinking of Ashley X, and wondering how she is faring—the last update on her parents’ blog is from 2016, and she would be in her mid-20s by now if she is still alive. Much like the war on the trans community today, her “treatment” drew upon centuries of practices that use the medicalization of marginalized bodies to control them, with the free and open permission and sometimes active approval of society at large. In the process, she joined a long list of disabled people, many of whom are not even named in records, who have endured abuses such as coerced sterilization, brain surgery, and forcible medication, all for the convenience of others around them, and to protect society from their existence. It’s a familiar playbook: This demand for bodily conformity is also (and has been) experienced by the trans community, often in lockstep—laws designed to target one inevitably harm the other—inclusive of practices like “conversion therapy” in a goal to eradicate transness, alongside denials of care or gatekeeping by authorities who control access to social, medical, and surgical transition.
Through this lens, the overlap between both communities might seem obvious. But understanding the deeper connection between the lives of people like Ashley and the trans community is an important step in building solidarity through the shared experience of medicalization as a tool for dehumanization—and is key in working towards dismantling it. Both communities experience a very specific form of somatic oppression rooted in fear and hatred of their bodies. Sometimes, this is used to pit them against each other, causing a tension between these two communities and trapping those who are a part of both in the middle. In some instances, this includes rejection of the similarities between the harm caused to both groups, or refusal to make common cause. But this is by cultural design: Keeping two communities with much in common apart makes it harder for them to team up and push back against oppression.
Harmful attitudes and policies targeting disabled people are not issues of a faint and distant past, and many in fact have laid the grounds for restricting the freedoms of trans people today: Most states have some version of a law that allows for the forcible treatment and often medication of mentally ill people, especially of note in a world where transness is treated as mental illness or a social contagion. (It wasn’t until 2019 that being trans was delisted from the World Health Organization’s ICD-11.) Deaf people are increasingly pressured to get cochlear implants, especially in the case of children, whom, some people rationalize, can learn to “speak normally” if they receive an implant early in life, an echo of the oralism of the 19th century, when educators attempted to force d/Deaf people to learn to speak and read lips rather than use sign language. (Both offer limited, if any, benefit and in fact have caused harm, fracturing Deaf culture and communities for the convenience of hearing people.) Meanwhile, other young disabled people may be encouraged—or “encouraged,” without consent—to get IUDs, again for “convenience” and avoidance of menstruation while also making it impossible to get pregnant; if Britney Spears was not exempt, how is an ordinary person supposed to fight back?
These practices aren’t new, hearkening back to policies such as 19th and 20th century “ugly laws,” which targeted “unsightly” people with fines if caught “begging,” and contemporary sit/lie laws, which effectively criminalize being unhoused on the sidewalk, again pushing unwanted bodies out of view. Rather than progress, newer policies have only widened the net: Contemporary drag bans, for example, echo historic laws designed to erase queer people to ease social discomfort. Policies that prevent trans people from accessing necessary medical care do the same, an extension of historic trends including policing that specifically targeted Black and Latinx trans people during the Stonewall Inn and Compton’s Cafeteria raids of the ‘60s.
Because of this overlap, it is important to understand the shared legacies that span both communities, because they are ultimately one fight, and collaboration makes it easier to share both strength and tenderness when needed, to be vulnerable and ferocious, to work toward a shared right to autonomy. Disabled people have been fighting for centuries against coerced treatment that targets bodies and minds deemed monstrous, wild, and unacceptable, in contexts that are often heavily racialized as well, such as Black disabled women deemed “promiscuous” and in need of sterilization. Trans people have been fighting forced detransition and denial of access to care they need to lead full, active lives for centuries, as well. As the contemporary fight extends to trans adults, with a growing number of states including Missouri and Florida moving to undermine or ban gender-affirming care for people of all ages, the stakes are even higher.
The maliciousness and cruelty of this legislation is designed to put trans people in their place, under the guise of “protecting” people from harm; precisely the same kinds of arguments used to justify the mutilation of people like Ashley, and the irreparable harm done to intersex infants and children—who are often subjected to similar forced surgeries and hormone therapies—in a “for their own good” paradigm. The goal is eliminationism. The same people who conjure up myths of trans kids being coerced into irrevocable procedures by overeager parents and doctors are very comfortable supporting those same abuses when they involve disabled people and measures to wipe out trans people altogether, betraying where their true concerns lie. Notably, legislation targeting gender-affirming care for trans youth often has specific carveouts for intersex children, a reminder that this legislation pursues normative and desirable bodies, not evidence-informed care. The purpose is not safety. It is compliance.
People who lead lives in othered, “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them, and with the cultural pressures that lead people to challenge their right to exist as they are. In a culture where trans and disabled people are medical problems to be solved, thereby erasing them from society, working in solidarity with each other is extremely important, and is the best way forward in a hostile climate that uses medicalization as a tool of power and control. Issues of pressing concern to both communities can and should be common sources of organizing power. If the trans community sees applications for the ADA, for example, it also recognizes the power of legal protections against healthcare discrimination on the basis of sex and gender. The disability community is familiar with coerced care or denial of treatment, and can support the trans and intersex communities in the pursuit of their legal rights. This is a mutual struggle of survival that becomes more pressing by the day under the growing weight of the state, and its abandonment of responsibility to care for those most at risk of abuse and exploitation.
Solidarity includes thinking about the myriad ways in which medicalization is used to oppress vulnerable communities, and how to push back on these practices beyond the obvious. Mental illness is a major factor in police shootings, for example, while Black and Brown kids disproportionately experience school pushout, often on the grounds of the criminalization of behaviors that may be associated with disability, or because they are LGBTQ. Similarly, treating transness as a mental illness is used as a tool for social and institutional discrimination targeting trans people, while ignoring the mental health impacts of untreated gender dysphoria.
Many are already doing this work. Works such as Health Communism (Verso, 2022) push at the boundaries of understanding how medicalization has become such a sinister tool for suppressing marginalized groups. Similarly, abolitionists such as TL Lewis and the creators of Captive Bodies (AK Press, 2011) highlight the profound connections between disablism and larger social structures—including transphobia — while We Want It All (Nightboat, 2020) invites engagement with radical trans culture through anthologized poetry.
In a just world, humanity would not be calibrated against a medicalized status, and people’s personal health needs would not be used against them to deny full access to society. Until we live in that world, however, it’s vital to collaborate as co-conspirators in a hostile world, unpicking the threads of the tapestry someone else has knit.
[post_title] => When Medicalization Becomes a Tool for Dehumanization
[post_excerpt] => People who lead lives in “deviant” bodies are familiar with the state’s attempt to control them. Finding commonality is how we fight back.
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After my daughter was born, I struggled to produce milk. Why did I feel like I had to keep trying?
When I was sixteen, I went to see my mother in a community theater production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Though Mom performed a chilling death scene as Grandma Joad, it was the character at the center of the play, a young woman named Rose of Sharon, who ended up haunting me. In the third act, Rose has just given birth to a still born baby—a particularly cruel fate given what the Joad family had already endured on their journey West. But then, grieving and broken, the family encounters a young boy and his father, who is dying of starvation, in an abandoned barn. Rose of Sharon, with her milk having just come in, unbuttons her blouse and nurses the dying man back to health.
Even as a teenager, I sensed some great superpower, a gift that I couldn’t wait until it was my turn to receive.
~
A few years later at a coffee shop, I watched a young mother, dressed in a blue tube top with light brown hair hanging down to her waist, wrestle with her hungry baby. I stared transfixed as she casually pulled down her top and popped out a small, perfect breast. Her baby immediately latched on. The woman was sitting in the window, warm afternoon light flooding behind her, and for a moment, she seemed to occupy a holy air: her long hair curtaining them off as the baby nursed with a practiced ease, a profound sense of calm flowing outward from them.
~
In December 2021, a few days before Christmas, I gave birth for the first time. Immediately after cutting the umbilical cord, my daughter was put to my breast; I felt a little pull and suddenly she was working away. I gasped. We stayed like that for about an hour, completely still except for her suckling. Her cheeks and my breasts were both so large at that point it was hard to know where she ended and I began. It would be the last time that breastfeeding was easy for us.
Two days later, I was told by a nurse that my daughter's weight had dropped and that she probably wasn’t latching correctly. A lactation consultant kindly showed me a better angle to hold the baby while nursing. I adjusted. My daughter latched on. “Everyone thinks the cradle way is easiest,” she said. “But that’s because of what we see in the movies.” And in literature, and plays, and paintings, and in coffee shops, I thought.
I believed everything was going fine until around 3 AM the following morning, when I was awoken by another lactation consultant, this one much harsher than the last. Standing over my bed, she sported a neon fanny pack and a buzz cut on one half of her head, her vibe much closer to Nurse Ratched than Mother Theresa. I honestly can’t remember most of what she said, except for one phrase that she repeated over and over: “This is an emergency.” She told me that my milk hadn’t come in yet because I’d had a c-section and my body was prioritizing healing. Strike one against mama, the c-section. Strike two, bad nipples.
My husband and I were directed to feed the baby tiny bottles of formula while I was put on a pumping schedule of every two hours for fifteen minutes at a time. By the time I left the hospital, my nipples were cracked and bleeding, looking like a pair of skinned knees. According to Ratched, the clock began when I started the pump, not when I finished, which, after the obligatory clean up and sterilization of the pump’s various parts, meant that I was sleeping in bursts of an hour to an hour and a half. I started to lose my grip on reality from the sleep deprivation. All the while, nothing was coming out.
Once we got home, I became obsessed with solving the riddle of my broken breasts. I saw a total of six lactation consultants. According to these experts, I had already done so much wrong: taking Dayquil when I came home from the hospital with a cold, sleeping through a couple of my pumping alarms, not being hydrated enough, not eating enough calories, being too stressed for the oxytocin to release and help the milk flow. So I ate all the lactation cookies, drank all the teas they recommended, and even went to an acupuncturist. I created Excel spreadsheets to track my progress, which I made my husband and mother fill out in detail every time they fed the baby. I continued the relentless pumping schedule that had been prescribed to me.
To make matters worse, I was spending less and less time with my baby. I was still trying to nurse her, still trying to recreate every beautiful feeding scene I’d witnessed, but the reality was that until I started to produce milk, she still needed to eat, and the bottle kept her from being interested in the breast. I’d always heard that newborns were like breathing, dreaming appendages, attached so firmly for the first few months that they don’t feel like separate beings. But whenever I looked down, instead of seeing my baby, there was only a mess of wires, and a buzzing pump always alerting me that I was more machine than mother. Over the constant noise, I’d strain to hear her cooing and crying from the other room, where my husband and my own mother held her, and changed her, and fed her.
~
One morning, I woke up with a breast infection so painful it made me forget the intense abdominal surgery I’d just undergone to remove my daughter from my womb.
I’d known about mastitis and blocked ducts, but this felt like broken glass inside my nipples, now shiny and hot as though they each had their own intense fever. One nurse told me she thought it could be thrush, a type of fungal infection, but another was suspicious since my baby didn’t have it in her mouth. A third said I just needed to “toughen my nipples up” and suggested dipping them in black tea. But the more I pumped and tried to nurse, the worse the pain became. I had stopped taking the powerful painkillers prescribed for my c-section recovery, but started taking them again to deal with this new agony. (Later, after I moved to formula feeding exclusively, the pain lessened but still took months to go away altogether.) It seemed to me that my body was saying something important, something it had long been trying to tell me but that I wouldn’t let myself hear. I walked around in a cloud of such sadness that I felt like my soul had the flu.
My pregnancy had been difficult. Almost immediately, I’d developed hyperemesis, which is like morning sickness on steroids. It had landed me in the emergency room twice with dehydration, and once at the dentist when a molar, weakened by copious amounts of stomach acid, disintegrated and fell out of my mouth. I had imagined myself as a pregnant glowing earth mama, all supple curves, completely in tune with nature and myself, but there were times the vomiting was so extreme that I just wanted to die. Then, I had a c-section, further cementing the idea that my body wasn’t meant to do this at all. That my breasts could not “correctly” produce milk was the final nail in the coffin.
The internet, unfortunately, agreed with me.
At the same time that I was struggling to produce milk, America experienced a terrifying formula shortage after a contaminated batch at an Abbott plant led to a widespread recall, revealing the fragility of the formula supply that so many families depend on. But for every woman who was vocal about how the shortage should be considered a national emergency, there was someone, usually a man, asking why women couldn’t “just breastfeed.”
Suddenly total strangers from around the world were chiming in to validate my inadequacy. But in the midst of this turmoil, my breasts still vibrating with mysterious pain, rather than feel rage or frustration, I felt a perverse relief. The world seemed to agree with that little nagging voice in the back of my head. I simply wasn’t meant to be a mother.
~
How much of the breastfeeding debate is really about the health of the child, and how much is about the control of women's bodies and, moreover, about the performance of successful womanhood?
I found myself thinking about this question a lot in my baby’s first months of life. The internet’s unsympathetic reaction to the formula shortage further demonstrated that many believe the difficulty of breastfeeding to be a modern predicament; that as women have gotten more agency, and more rights, they’ve abdicated more of their motherly duties. But breastfeeding has been complicated since the beginning of time. Women have always experienced issues like mastitis, which before the advent of penicillin was an often fatal infection. And babies have always experienced tongue ties, premature births, and trouble latching. Add to that centuries of malnutrition, as well as external traumas like giving birth in famines, war zones, or while enslaved, and the body’s ability to produce milk becomes less and less likely. We’ve always needed alternatives.
Before formula, parents searched far and wide for methods to replace breast milk. Author Carla Cevasco notes in The Atlantic that early options ranged from cow’s milk to bone broth and nut milk—some of which provided hydration but not necessarily nutrition, and could be deadly due to contamination and poor food preservation capabilities. Historically, the surest way to keep a baby fed was a wet nurse, another woman who had also recently given birth and could breastfeed. Wet nurses were commonly poor or enslaved women who were forced, either by poverty or slaveholders, to feed other’s babies as their own starved at home.
These women’s experiences should remind us that the history of formula feeding is not a stain against a woman’s ability to mother, but in fact quite the opposite: a testament to the incredible act of keeping one’s baby alive.
I knew all this, so why couldn’t I let myself believe it? I thought of every poster hanging in every doctor’s office, waiting room, and maternity ward that depicted mother and child in complete harmony with the tagline “breast is best”—a mantra made popular in the 1950s by a group of Catholic women who called themselves La Leche League and believed breastfeeding was “God’s plan.” And I couldn’t stop seeing that young mother in the coffee shop from my twenties, how she had no problem nursing her infant, the two of them a recreation of every painting I’d ever seen of Madonna and child come to life.
Even before getting pregnant, I had already internalized the cultural messages surrounding breastfeeding so deeply, it had become something much bigger than a simple act. It had bloomed into a dangerous omen.
~
During my maternity leave, my husband and I spent the late nights re-watching the entire seven seasons of Mad Men. In one episode, a pregnant Betty Draper, played by January Jones, gets asked by a nurse whether she intends to breastfeed. Betty answers with a bored “no” and the nurse nods in agreement. My husband was shocked. Here we were, struggling so intensely, and there was Betty, not even intending to try. What’s more, no one seemed to have a problem with it.
Where my husband saw a kind of permission for formula feeding, I saw something different: an inverse reflection of the very expectations I had failed to live up to, and that are placed on so many birthing parents, regardless of gender. In the 1960s, formula feeding became the norm, with, as historian Amy Bently writes, only 20-25 percent of babies starting their lives being fed breast milk. The primary reason for this shift was the urging of pediatricians who were intent on lowering the infant mortality rate, and saw formula feeding as a more consistent and regimented way to keep babies fed and alive. More women were also working outside the home and needed to be able to leave their infant with a caregiver as they went into the office.
Little of this was relevant to Betty, a wealthy housewife who didn’t work—and so her reasons for bottle feeding were probably similar to the reasons I wanted to breastfeed: It was a cultural marker of being a “good woman.”
~
After six excruciating weeks, the end of my breastfeeding journey was sudden, unexpected. Eventually, when calling the nurse for the umpteenth time to describe a new pain in my breast—a swelling lump that hurt to touch—I received the kindest advice I’d been given thus far. “Honey, just give up,” she said. “You don’t need to do this.” Her tone was frank but measured; her South Boston accent rough but comforting. I didn’t know how much I’d needed her permission to stop.
I was free—almost. For a couple more weeks, I still tried to nurse, but then during a blizzard that lasted the weekend, I gave up cold turkey. I made my husband run out into the storm to collect little baggies of snow that I would then sneak into my bra sandwiched between cabbage leaves, an old wives’ remedy for weaning. Lying on the couch, icing my swollen breasts, I thought about how on New Year’s Eve, just a few days after we’d returned from the hospital, my husband and I had waited for the clock to strike midnight, my baby in my arms. While giving her a bottle, I started to cry. “Why can’t I feed my child?” I asked him. “Look at you right now,” he replied. “You are literally feeding your child.”
I glanced down at my daughter, her eyes wide, slowly blinking, and saw her taking in all of me. The Christmas tree lights glimmered behind us, lighting us both up with a starry glow. How long had she been staring at me like that? I wondered. Her tiny hand wrapped around my finger, her skin pressed against my skin. I felt like I was seeing my baby for the first time, and noticed that I was, in fact, feeding her.
[post_title] => A Personal History of Breastfeeding
[post_excerpt] => After my daughter was born, I struggled to produce milk. Why did I feel like I had to keep trying?
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