The College Hill Independent—Vol 47 Issue 3

From the Editors

Without looking she can see the shape of the storm. She is thinking about orchards. The building is dead outside the window. Big rain shaking the limbs. Her son under the tree. Image of her son. It’s funny when he reads. He reminds her of her sister. Both of them got the proud little nose. Round cheeks—hers never went away. He’s telling her about a girl in his class who came in wearing a cape and wouldn’t take it off, even for gym. “How is it so different from when you brought in your bear?” The objects in his life are interchangeable. A cape and a bear become identical, become each other. He is learning about the water cycle. Big cycles all around, in the air and in the sky, huge invisible cycles turning through them. No. When superimposed the interstices proliferate. The more identical they become, the more unresolvable their differences. She knows what it is to wish for form alone. -AQ

Masthead*

MANAGING EDITORS

Charlie Medeiros

Angela Qian

Lily Seltz

WEEK IN REVIEW

Christina Peng

Jean Wanlass

ARTS

Cecilia Barron

Nora Mathews

Kolya Shields

EPHEMERA

Quinn Erickson

Lucas Galarza

FEATURES

Madeline Canfield

Lola Simon

Ella Spungen

LITERARY

Evan Donnachie

Tierra Sherlock

Everest Maya Tudor

METRO

Kian Braulik

Cameron Leo

Nicholas Miller

SCIENCE + TECH

Mariana Fajnzylber

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

WORLD

Tanvi Anand

Arman Deendar

Angela Lian

X

Claire Chasse

Joshua Koolik

DEAR INDY

Solveig Asplund

LIST

Chachi Banks

Saraphina Forman

BULLETIN BOARD

Qiaoying Chen

Angelina Rios-Galindo

STAFF WRITERS

Aboud Ashhab

Maya Avelino

Benjamin Balint-Kurti

Beto Beveridge

Dri de Faria

Keelin Gaughan

Jonathan Green

Emilie Guan

Yunan/Olivia He

Dana Herrnstadt

Jenny Hu

Anushka Kataruka

Corinne Leong

Priyanka Mahat

Sarah McGrath

Kayla Morrison

Abani Neferkara

Luca Suarez

Julia Vaz

Siqi/Kathy Wang

Zihan Zhang

Daniel Zheng

COPY CHIEF

Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Rafael Ash

Elaina Bayard

Victoria Dickstein

Maria Diniz

Benjamin Flaumenhaft

Anji Friedbaur

Dylan Griffiths

Sam Ho

Becca Martin-Welp

Nadia Mazonson

Adelaide Ng

Taleen Sample

DEVELOPMENT

COORDINATORS

Corinne Leong

Angela Lian

Ella Spungen

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Jolie Barnard

Kian Braulik

Angela Lian

Kolya Shields

Yuna Shprecter

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

COVER COORDINATOR

Mina Troise

DESIGN EDITORS

Gina Kang

Ash Ma

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Jolin Chen

Riley Cruzcosa

Sejal Gupta

Kira Held

Xinyu/Sara Hu

Avery Li

Anahis Luna

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Eiffel Sunga

Simon Yang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Julia Cheng

Izzy Roth-Dishy

Livia Weiner

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Aidan Xin-he Choi

Avanee Dalmia

Michelle Ding

Anna Fischler

Lilly Fisher

Haimeng Ge

Seungwoo Hong

Ned Kennedy

Avery Li

Mingjia Li

Ren Long

Jessica Ruan

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Isa Sharfstein

Luca Suarez

WEB EDITORS

Kian Braulik

Hadley Dalton

Matisse Doucet

Michael Ma

MVP Ash

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Week in Fake families and shopping around

wherever you go. Little Brother 2 dusts off yellow onions while I buy cherry tomatoes with the stems still intact, and they grow mold before I remember to eat them. -MC

Eastside Marketplace

Trader Joe’s

All summer I shove my phone in the faces of friends and family and say, “Can you believe it? Isn’t that so funny? That Trader Joe’s has all these names of different ‘Traders’ to go along with their theme of trading posts in different locations, like Trader José for Mexican food, Trader Giotto for Italian food. You know, like a variation of the name ‘Joe’ but in the other language? And so the name for the Japanese Trader Joe, it’s so funny, you’re just not gonna believe it, it’s Trader Joe-San. Like—like isn’t that funny?”

My mother says it’s not funny. Everyone else says it is. When I arrive at the freshly opened store for gentrifiers a few days after I touch down in my beloved, Providence, I’m struck with the driftwood sense approximate to hopelessness that always comes with the territory of needing groceries and not having them. What do I want? What can I use? And when my depression works the graveyard shift which foods will take the longest to go bad?

I have been thinking about the situation of cohabitation. It is a situation, presently, not a state of being. It’s a problem that needs to be solved. My new roommates and I, twenty-somethings, self-searching, keep passing each other like ships in the night. What I mean is our understanding is not mutual, our locations are not tenable, some of us separate our compost and some of us do not. But I want to bridge that gap in the next 10 months at least. Where better to coagulate than at the crossroads of unfamiliar traders?

Flanked by habitational partners who are not family, we conjoin shopping carts in frozen aisles of the cheapest nutritional haul known to (American) man. I’m asking them, what do you want to eat? What do you like? Will we build our household upon non-perishable goods or cruciferous vegetables?

The response is vague: a bell pepper and a bag of sour gummies.

I am in the bread aisle and a partner is in the sauces aisle while the divisional shelves loom, unknowably—a trite, uneven description of all that stands between us. This roommate thing involves shopping together maybe as much as school involves studying your very hardest. As much as being Japanese involves tacking a -san onto the end of your name. Or as much as being a good writer involves working with the Indy. I call into the void, but it’s easier this way, and the next time I visit Trader Joe’s it’s alone. -JW

Farmer’s Market

Attendance at the Hope Street Saturday Farmers Market is an ordeal in planning ahead. I have to forfeit the restorative sleeping-in that the week end promises after a nocturnal Friday night, waking early enough to arrive at Lippitt Park before all the patrons of Providence usurp the picnicking space with lines for breakfast sandwiches and kombucha. And I have to commit to trekking the hour-long path from Fox Point on foot, as an obstinate loyalist to walking whenever remotely conceivable. But by this morning, the last Saturday before classes, my roommates—or as I like to think of them, the college imitation of my biological little brothers—have moved in, and Little Brother 2 insists that walking is ludicrous when, if split between us, an $8 Uber costs less than an afternoon at COFX. I had forgotten that Uber was a phenomenon justifiable for anything besides shuttling to T.F. Green.

Less than half an hour after abandoning my covers, we’re standing in a park and everything is awash in brightness—smiles and chit-chat abound, the sundresses are a cornucopia of pastel, little kids are weaving between adult legs, I’m wearing massive sunglasses, Little Brother 2 and I are fighting over a pastry, the man at one of the umpteen produce stalls is bequeathing the singular jalapeño I dislodged from its bundle unto me for free! Amidst the abundance, my companions and I accrue the ingredients for a galette—for which we will flit around our kitchen, raising plumes of flour in a chaotically picturesque display of fake family. As I take in the many couple friends reunioning by coffee stands and parents wiping strawberry stains from grubby mouths, my baking fantasy is engulfed in young adulthood. Here are countless ‘real’ families: for them, I imagine that Saturday shopping is not a deliberate attempt at using food to stitch together the patchworked lives of twenty-one-year-old roommates, but the expression of a single-unit household that instinctively eats the same meals. These wedded partners, these filial pairings—their lives trundle along on interlinked trajectories, exhibiting none of the volatility inherent to college friends veering off from one another at a moment’s notice.

I muse aloud that there is something so publicly domestic about petite Providence, which I can only really understand at vendor spectacles like this. The sunlight is coruscant atop the pop-up tents. Providence looks to me like a tethering but I am still adrift. What must it be to buy fresh foods with routine permanence, to return each weekend as a patron of the same stall, knowing you will consume all your groceries before they perish because ‘you’ are inexorably a ‘we,’ because every meal is a convergent effort, consistently shared between people who are going nowhere else but

Sans the company of our housepeople, a company that only exits the grocery store bereft, we find other ways to congregate as we shop for what is missing. Where our recipes and households diverge, our paths in the aisles still may cross. When MC and I come together at last, we are seeking ingredients for the meals that we will each make alone—golden potatoes and ground cardamom that sells for $22.99 a bottle, which is worth it because it will last “years.” I walk helpless past shelves, discovering anew how little I know about feeding myself, as we tread the waters of domesticity. We take turns pushing the cart. We discuss our house mates—mainly I talk and MC listens—while we pick out snow peas and ginger, respectively. We’re two little women come to our designated spot on the river where we wash and beat our clothes in the sudsy spray and commune about our husbands, the many.

First Husband told me today that she saw a spider in the shower. I asked her if she killed it and she said no. But she wanted to. She just didn’t.

Little Brother 1 is in the weeds again. He pulled out the 1000-piece puzzle.

Should I buy meat? I don’t like to cook meat here. I’m a vegetarian except for when I buy Blue Room sandwiches.

What if we bought a fish? A whole fish? And steamed it and organized a family dinner? Or we could wait and look for seafood at the farmers market?

There are flies in the house. They’re blooming out of nowhere. Everywhere. Should I bake us something fun for movie night?

Two domesticities are converging. Imagine I push this cart alone and buy nothing? Imagine I come back home empty-handed, the laundry unwashed? Imagine, MC and I imagine, a sleepover of the minds and not the bodies, imagine I paint the nails of her prefrontal cortex and her hippocampus braids my hair? We do the puzzle, we kill the spider, we steam the fish.

I’ll be back here next week, presumably alone, to pick up ingredients for the dessert, which will be either a chai spice cake or super chewy brown butter pumpkin snickerdoodles. I’ll let her choose. -JW

Whole Foods

Now, after regaling each other with domestic preoccupations and exchanging modicums of advice for living in liminal families, we are fulfilling the function of Whole Foods as the culinary ancillary, the final, extravagant waystation where we collect the obscure items on our personal recipe lists for the coming week. I purchase eggplant at the open-air market, JW amasses the seasonings at the faux-trading post, together we flash our IDs for the student discount at the northeast chain, and here, we indulge in a dose of delicacy. In each place we accumulate a distinct flavor: solitude bred by nostalgia for home life, platonic bickering in the shadow of saccharine families, femininity actuated through a melancholia that we sweeten, like reflex, with home-made sugar and conversation. We are searching for the perfect nourishment, a dish breaded together from a seemingly un-integrable mixture of backgrounds, tastes, homes. She is like me: never content with just one store, still childishly desiring excessive acquisition. We conjure fanciful meals that require perpetual grocery searching, and we want to be stimulated by an ever-expanding array of store aisles. We have to shop around to get everything we need. My former roommate is convalescing from a run-in with COVID, jilting exuberant plans to visit her cousin for an upcoming holiday. Worrying about her sequestered in a bedroom off Thayer, I will whisk up a conciliatory concoction, gluten and dairy free, so as not to offend her sensitive organs. While JW deliberates over her preferred pint of Jeni’s, I sleuth for unfamiliar items, chickpea flour and Cream of Wheat. I will unearth my battered mixing spoon and create two versions of honey cake: one a simple loaf in two pans, a favorite of the sick friend’s, and the other rolled dough stacked in layers, a new recipe reminiscent of my mother. In her absence I will innovate my way toward childhood memories, nurturing remnants of an old familial collective that maybe I will recreate in my future, and as I text an assemblage of people to whom I may pawn off pieces of cake, I miss the vastness of a family that would leave no crumbs behind. I know that JW is baking something of her own for when I see her next—we will be watching Harry Potter to educate First Husband, like parents exposing their children to their first dose of wizardry. But I hope it’s alright if I bring the leftover slices, casting a spell on a small piece of my home and levitating it into her. It will be pretend and ephemeral, a fixture of our youth imagining a world that cannot really exist: it will be, to us, just like magic. -MC

( TEXT MADELINE CANFIELD, JANE WANG DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA ILLUSTRATION MERI SANDERS )

JANE WANG B’24 and MADELINE CANFIELD B’24 ended up eating pumpkin olive oil cake instead.

UNDERSTANDING THE AGREEMENT

Opposition to Providence’s new PILOT deal, explained

→ On September 5, Providence officials and the city’s four nonprofit higher education institutions announced that they had reached a deal. The long-awaited agreement secures hundreds of millions of dollars in voluntary payments from Johnson & Wales University, Rhode Island College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University, with Brown contributing close to 80 percent of the sum.

These payments, often called PILOTs (short for payments-in-lieu-oftaxes) are used in town-and-gown relationships throughout the Northeast. Due to nonprofits’ tax exempt status, Providence loses property tax revenue each time the schools buy land—a trend that city officials say is straining Providence’s finances, as the College Hill Independent has previously reported. The voluntary payments are meant to remedy this issue.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley is the third mayor to negotiate a PILOT agreement with the four schools. The final hurdle is approval from the City Council. Smiley has celebrated the deal, saying at the September 5 press conference that it sets up Providence for “long-term success.” Supporters point out that the ostensible $223 million sum would be a 138 percent increase over the last agreement.

So why are so many Rhode Island progressives calling on the council to reject the agreement? Opponents point to contract language that would allow Brown to substantially reduce its contributions and provisions that could strip power from the council for decades.

“They called it a doubling, but that’s assuming we get all the payments, which seems extremely unrealistic,” State Senator Sam Bell told the Indy, referring to clauses that allow the university to reduce its payments by investing in development projects.

And others say that even the full sum just isn’t enough, compared with what Brown—whose endowment recently reached $6.5 billion—could pay. “I’m used to hearing claims that Brown doesn’t have the money their public financial statements would suggest,” said Michael Ziegler, political director for the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO).

Perhaps most critically, opponents of the deal simply don’t trust Brown to keep its side of the bargain. “Brown is an institution whose word cannot be trusted,” said Sherena Razek, GLO’s president.

WHAT DO THE CONTRACTS SAY?

The new deal, like its predecessor, has two prongs. The first is a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) between the schools and the city, through which the four institutions will pay over $177 million over the course of the next 20 years. The second is a “memorandum of agreement” (MOA) between only Brown and Providence. Under that contract, Brown will shell out another $46 million to the city over the next ten years. Together, it’s $223 million.

The MOA would also reward Brown for its contributions. Brown will acquire four blocks in the Jewelry District and one block in College Hill, in addition to extending its possession over parking spots for university employees.

CAUTION TOWARD CREDITS

The biggest change from the last MOA with Brown, which expired in 2022, is the introduction of “credits against payments.” Essentially, the Ivy League university would be able to shave money off its annual disbursals by investing in development projects, like constructions or renovations.

“Where Brown substantially participates in the development of a building, and new commercial tax is added to the city’s tax roll, Brown gets 50 cents on every dollar,” Courtney Hawkins explained at a September 12 City Council finance committee meeting. Brown can get the full dollar back, as opposed to just 50 cents, when the development team includes a “public or private sector partner… designated by the City.” The credits would be determined by a “third-party accounting firm selected and paid for by Brown,” according to the agreement.

If you ask President Paxson or Smiley’s office, this clause encourages Brown to bolster the Providence economy in ways other than just voluntary payments. Development projects, according to this logic, benefit both parties: Brown gets more space, while Providence gets a building and new property tax revenue.

“Ultimately we’re getting a dollar fifty instead of a dollar,” Hawkins said at the committee meeting.

But some local politicians, like State Senator Bell, argue that the provision would allow Brown to “wipe out” entire years of voluntary payments down the line.

“Brown has the ability to pay nothing [in the MOA], if it wants,” he told the Indy

Bell is also concerned that the MOA’s language would allow Brown to profit from the credits. He described a hypothetical $65 million development, in which Brown makes a $10 million investment. If the city draws $2.3 million in property taxes from the project—standard for something of that size—then Brown could get a yearly credit for $1.15 million (50 percent of the tax income) taken out of its voluntary payments.

Over the course of several years, that annual $1.15 million credit could surpass Brown’s original $10 million investment in the project—while

Brown also reaps the benefits of the investment itself.

“It’s subtle, but Brown is not required to contribute the whole of the investment [to get the credit],” Bell explained.

Overall, Bell worries that the agreement’s headline number will shrink dramatically as Brown reduces its obligations. “Inflation, economic growth, population growth, and real estate inflation will make it a fairly substantial cut in real terms,” Bell said.

The debate over tax credits for development is, fundamentally, a debate over fiscal policy writ large: Do development projects really offer the same value to the city as unrestricted voluntary payments? What does Providence gain by outsourcing its financial decisions to an institution like Brown?

MARGINALIZATION OF CITY COUNCIL

Another area of concern for some city councilors is how little say they had in the process. “Especially new councilors, we were kind of discouraged to not be more involved,” Councilman Miguel Sanchez told the Indy. City negotiators presented a summary of the agreement to the council in early August, but did not provide physical copies, Sanchez said. Councilors didn’t get the whole agreement until the Friday before the press conference.

At the finance committee meeting, Councilman James Taylor noted that the first PILOT agreement, negotiated by Mayor Cicilline’s administration in 2003, had no involvement from the council at all. “I guess if that’s how it’s done, I definitely have different opinions,” Sanchez told the Indy. “Then we should take our time in vetting this.”

Sanchez did laud the university coalition for accepting one change after that meeting, requested by Council President Rachel Miller. In an earlier draft, the MOU payments increased by a flat 2 percent each year; Miller requested that the annual rate of increase instead start at 2 percent and escalate to 3 percent. The change netted $7 million more than before. Emails obtained by the Indy via a public records request confirm that as of August 2, the draft agreement’s headline number was $216 million, not the eventual $223 million.

“It’s definitely not a minor change,” Sanchez said. “I do give the universities credit for that.”

Some city councilors are concerned that certain MOU provisions will diminish the council’s power. In an ‘advocacy guide’ created by Sanchez, Councilwoman Shelley Peterson, and Councilman Justin Roias, the representatives lambast a clause that prevents city officials from advocating for more money during the life of the agreement, as well as a provision that relinquishes some zoning authorities to Brown.

State Senator Bell also sees diminished council authority in the tax credits provision. “A mayor who’s looking to do something quickly before leaving office could easily use it to fund some pet project, in agreement with Brown, and go around the city council,” he said.

The length of the agreements, in particular the 20-year MOU, also gave councilors and activists pause. Fiscal experts and city negotiators portray the timeline as beneficial to the city, allowing for a stable revenue stream, while deal opponents say it would hamstring future city councils.

Sanchez’s sense from recent meetings was that the city and the schools were looking for a stamp of approval, rather than substantive feedback. “I’m not clear on whether the institutions are willing to make any significant changes,” he said.

COMPENSATION OR TRANSACTION?

Much of the disagreement can be chalked up to a key difference in framing: Is the deal with Brown compensation for lost property taxes, or is it a business transaction? If you believe the former, Brown’s proposed $8.4 million yearly contribution is woefully inadequate compared with the $53 million in property taxes it would owe annually without a tax exemption.

But as Councilwoman Sue AnderBois said at the finance committee meeting, the MOA with Brown “reads more like a purchase and sale agreement.” In the upper echelons of Providence politics, the conversation moved on from Brown’s property taxes long ago. Now, as the MOA reads, Brown is “amenable to working with the City to advance the growth of Brown while simultaneously assisting the City.” In fact, Brown’s own announcement of the deal doesn’t refer to “payments-in-lieu-of-taxes” at all.

Whether progressives will succeed in amending the agreement remains to be seen. The deal itself, though, sends a powerful message about Brown’s influence over city governance. In the end, the contract’s complex financial maneuvers matter little to Providence residents who see their city in distress.

“Please consider doing something so they pay their fair share,” Tom Johnston, president of the Providence Police and Firefighter Retirement Association, pleaded with council members at the public hearing. “That 20 year deal is ridiculous.”

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 hopes he doesn’t get trapped in a City Hall elevator.

Rights, Unguarded

USENTRA Workers vs. the Brown School of Public Health

→ When Jonathan Hart worked as a Whole Foods security guard for private security company USENTRA in 2021, he was paid just $13 an hour. “I was basically not making it. There was no way I could stay there,” he said. He added that his hours also “changed on a whim” and when he caught COVID-19, the company’s response was, at best, indifferent: “they told me to wear two masks and go to work.” USENTRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about that allegation.

The company, which maintains clients in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, currently has security guards placed at the Brown School of Public Health (Brown SPH), The Providence Journal’s offices, Providence Community Health Centers, and the Rhode Island Blood Center. According to labor organizers and former employees, USENTRA workers are subject to constant schedule changes, low pay, unreliable part-time work, and, despite their little training, potentially dangerous situations on the job.

For the past two years, USENTRA Security employees have been rallying for better pay, increased benefits, and fair scheduling with the help of fellow worker’s collective Service Employees International union, Local 32BJ (SEIU 32BJ), the largest building service worker’s union in the country. Workers have also been pushing for unionization with Local 32BJ, which currently represents 170,000 service workers.

In their efforts, organizers have begun to turn their attention to USENTRA’s influential customers—none more powerful than Brown University. On Wednesday, workers, 32BJ representatives, and local politicians protested outside of the Brown SPH’s tenth anniversary celebration, demanding that the university sever its ties with USENTRA if the company doesn’t improve conditions for workers.

At the rally, New England District Leader of 32BJ Dan Nicolai claimed that USENTRA does not respect its workers’ schedules, provide regular raises, or offer workers the agency to discuss their problems. “Does that sound like a company that cares a lot about public health to you? Do those sound like good practices to you? Does that sound like a company Brown University should be employing?” he asked the crowd.

“No!” they responded.

“Tonight was a contrast and a tale of two cities. On one end, you have people in highend suits with a lot of political influence who entered Brown’s School of Public Health’s 10th year anniversary,” said progressive Representative David Morales in an interview with the College Hill Independent after the rally. He continued, “On the other hand, you have over a dozen working-class people coming together standing in solidarity with frontline security officers that provide essential services to the Brown School of Public Health.”

USENTRA’s security guards have continued to organize despite the company’s union-busting. In an interview with the Indy before the rally on Wednesday, Nicolai noted that employees have been “questioned and threatened” on the subject of unionization in conversations over the phone with multiple workers. 32BJ has filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that is currently being investigated, alleging that the USENTRA violated its workers’ rights by instructing them not to discuss their work outside of the company.

Contrary to workers’ claims, USENTRA wrote in a statement to the Indy: “We recognize that some of our employees are expressing an

interest in unionizing. Certainly they have the right to unionize and we have not interfered.”

As it stands, Nicolai said that workers have not yet reached a need to strike, but the possibility stands should the company continue to refuse the workers’ demands. Employees are arranging visits to USENTRA’s headquarters in Warwick to petition and, as Nicolai put it calmly, “talk.”

Only one guard at the Brown SPH is presently contracted by USENTRA. Nicolai told the Indy that all others at the Brown SPH have quit due to the working conditions. Speakers at the rally agreed that Brown has the responsibility to push USENTRA to provide better working conditions. “Part of [the School of Public Health’s] mission is to advance the health of all populations, including and especially underserved or vulnerable communities,” Hart said. “Security officers are mostly people of color or immigrants.”

Supporting the workers’ goals, Morales

DRI DE FARIA, CAMERON LEO, NICHOLAS MILLER DESIGN JOLIN CHEN ILLUSTRATION AVANEE DALMIA )

USENTRA is just one part of the private security industry that exploded in the U.S. over the past two decades. According to a Time Magazine series on the proliferation of private security companies, there are twice as many security guards in the U.S. as there were 20 years ago. This trend began in the aftermath of September 11 and saw a spike after 2020, when protests against police violence made it difficult for law enforcement agencies, including the Providence Police Department, to hire and retain officers. An increase in private securitization is significantly informed by economic inequality. As the well-off become more concerned with protecting their property, demand for security guards in public spaces tends to increase. That same TIME series lists a range of upper-middle-class neighborhoods—everywhere from Lincoln Park in Chicago to the San Francisco Marina District—where residents have “chipped in extra money to hire private security.”

As a result of the increasing demand for guards in affluent neighborhoods, private security has emerged as a lucrative industry. In fact, the third largest private employer in the U.S. (behind Walmart and Amazon) is Allied Universal, a security guard firm that reaps $20 billion in annual revenue. Workers claim that Allied underpays its employees while placing them in dangerous circumstances. These problems are not only consistent with those of USENTRA workers but security guards in New York and Massachusetts that SEIU 32BJ has also helped organize.

commented: “As the employer that is contracting with this agency, [Brown] holds a lot of capital when having these discussions. It goes a very long way when they reach out to this agency and ask that they make these changes.”

Brown University did not respond to a request for comment.

+++

Speakers pointed to the fact that wages for security guards vary greatly depending on their assignment, another unfair policy of USENTRA’s. Hart received $13 per hour from his position at Whole Foods in 2021, while some guards at the School of Public Health have received $16.50 per hour. According to Nicolai, most of the USENTRA employees are part-time workers, but even working full-time at a $16.50 hourly wage would only come to $34,320 a year.

USENTRA pushed back against this narrative, arguing that “in the past three years, all of [our] employees have seen their earnings go up in increments far greater than in previous years.”

But Hart confirmed his pay was far from enough, especially as someone with dependents. “I help out my mother. She’s retired, so with the pay that they were giving me, it wasn’t enough. I would have to pay money out of my credit cards, and get loans, just to cover basic necessities,” he said in an interview with the Indy Workers also claim they receive inadequate benefits. Olaide Sabola, a security guard at Brown SPH, said in an August statement to The Rhode Island Current that even when working 70 hours per week, she couldn’t afford the employer-based health insurance that USENTRA offers. Additionally, USENTRA did not disclose to her upon hire that she could take 40 hours of paid time off annually. Instead of the allotted 40, she did not take any paid leave last year.

Industry workers and organizers also claim that security firms often fail to properly train their workers, putting both the public and the guards themselves at risk. Insufficient training reflects a larger issue with private security corporations: they have little to no regulation. According to the National Association of Security Companies, Rhode Island is one of 21 states that requires zero training for unarmed guards. Any security guard with a pistol permit is allowed to carry a handgun, whether open or concealed.

In the past decade, 309 security officers nationally have been arrested for manslaughter or murder while on duty. Recently, there’s been a sharp rise in assaults on security workers, who, often poorly prepared to handle such situations, pose a significant risk of escalation. Hart told the Indy that he received just three hours of training and an informational video the day prior to starting as a security officer. “You don’t feel like you have enough training if something were to happen,” he confessed.

These life-or-death problems, endemic to the security industry, force us to reckon not only with the unjust working conditions faced by USENTRA workers, but also with the potentially dangerous consequences of Brown-sanctioned security on the greater Providence community. As employees and union representatives continue their organizing efforts, they implore Brown to recognize their complicity in USENTRA’s behavior. “I would love for Brown University to take notice of how they’re treating their employees,” Hart said. “It reflects on them as well.”

DRI DE FARIA B’26, CAMERON LEO B’25, and NICHOLAS MILLER B’24 are union strong.

( TEXT

Sabrina Zhang R’26 Shallow ink on paper

1. Don’t think of yourself as one.

2. Find yourself an English name. Choose casually, because you can always change it. But be careful: after a certain period of time people will know you by that name and it will start to define you.

3. Prepare for the question: “What’s your name?”

4. Say goodbye to your parents at the airport. But don’t look them in the eyes. Hug them in a quick way, say goodbye, debate whether you should say “I will miss you,” and realize that the hug is already over.

5. Feel their breath and smell and touch. Tell them to not worry about you. Know that they still will.

6. 23kg 50lbs/bag is the limit. If your luggage is overweight, abandon some of your clothes but not the gifts your parents made you bring to the family friend whom you’ve never met before.

7. Tell the customs officer that you are here for school. No, not studying any sensitive subjects. No, not over $1000 worth of cash carried. Yes, your address here is SCHOOL ADDRESS. Tell them (only if they ask) that’s the only address you have. Don’t speak unless asked to.

8. Orientation 101. Answer in this order: Hi NAME! I use PRONOUNS and study SUBJECT. I’m doing well, how are you? I’m from COUNTRY. When they say “OMG that’s so cool!”, smile.

9. Pretend that every song, movie, show, and book you like is in English. Suppress the urge to say things from back home so that you don’t ruin the flow of those conversation starters.

10. ————— this line is approximately 2 cm long but don’t say that. Say it’s almost 0.8 inches.

11. X degrees Celsius * 9/5 + 32 = Y degrees Fahrenheit. Memorize. Practice.

12. Speak carefully so you don’t accidentally slip into your language.

13. Convince yourself that accent is man-made.

14. Speak your language. Practice it. Teach it even when most won’t remember what you taught.

15. Don’t own anything—your country, culture, language. Remind people that others also do exist in your hometown.

16. When they recite the Pledge of Allegiance at convocation, stand up, but don’t make eye contact with anyone. Focus on the grass so that you don’t hear them and can convince yourself that you should be here. (Remember to sit down when they finish.)

17. Try to be patient when your class starts discussing “serious/systematic/significant problems of our country.”

18. Make friends, but don’t become too attached since after graduation you will all be in different time zones.

19. But remember the undeniable sense of belonging you feel with others when doing something you all love, forgetting how different everyone is.

20. Remember the first time you called that little apartment you rented with new friends in this distant city “home.”

21. Go grocery shopping. Walk through lanes of foreign vegetables while searching up words and images online to find the right ones that can bring you tastes of home.

22. Fill up your fridge. Decorate your room. Go to meetings, parties, dates, make dinner plans, get coffees and go on walks, take sunny-weather-grass-naps and chase sunsets.

23. Remember that sense of selfhood you felt, walking “home” after a long day, listening to songs not in English but feeling that you might belong here, still, with every piece of yourself preserved in shapes unapologetically foreign.

24. Text your parents. But don’t say too much because too many notifications will wake them up or make them believe something is wrong, so they stay up all night thinking about you.

25. Translate. Translate names, classes, schedules. Food, currency, menu. Translate the system here and your role in it. Translate the parts of America you think you are beginning to believe in.

26. But also translate your home. Translate what you are like there. Translate your legal (real) name, your culture, your food, your beliefs. Translate what it means to leave and return and leave again.

27. Translate what it means to be the translator.

28. Check your phone, but switch its language into English so that others don’t get confused when they put their numbers in.

29. Get a U.S. number. Maybe one that starts with 401. Make other international friends so they can be in your family plan that’s $4 cheaper than the regular one.

30. Check your grammar and punctuation, like what Google Docs suggests when I type in “check your.” But yes so true check your grammar and punctuation please do you want to be the one in the crowd who can’t even get a proposition right? (This is an example of bad writing.)

31. Do go to doctors when you feel unwell but no! Don’t call the ambulance and be careful about going to the ER. You don’t want to be ill and broke at the same time.

32. Search up symptoms online in your home language and search engine to find the right medicine. Or go to the nurse for a pill of the omnipotent Advil.

33. Go to career fairs, but only look for employers that will “sponsor” you to draw a H1-B work visa during your Optional Practical Training so that you won’t be forced to leave after one or three years. Apply to internships but not the ones that ask, “Do you have unlimited work authorization in the United States?”

34. No, the answer is always no.

35. Don’t question it when they say “there are endless opportunities ahead of you after graduation.” When they say “you have a bright future here.”

36. File taxes on your own, forms marking you a “non-resident alien.” Remember how you are never considered to be part of everyone legally.

37. Think about home now and then. Think about your parents. But never for too long. Don’t think about the things and people and places you miss or lose.

38. Remember the sudden bursts of happiness expanding inside you without reminding yourself of anything on this list.

Ask KATHY WANG B’25 for the full list.

( TEXT KATHY WANG DESIGN SAM STEWART )

From Novice to Pro: Strategies for International Student Success

Save Yoshida

The Battle Against Japan’s Oldest Dormitory

→ In Kyoto, students govern themselves. At least, at Yoshida Dormitory they do. The dormitory is easy to find: colorful handpainted wooden boards decorate its entrance, located on the street directly next to Kyoto University’s campus. A black and white sign with the characters for Yoshida (吉田寮 ) marks the stone entryway, leading to a courtyard filled with bicycles—some new, some seemingly left behind for decades, their metal frames overgrown. The pathway ends at an old, rickety, wooden building, whose entrance is almost completely hidden by large ginkgo trees, towering at least forty feet high. The front door of the dormitory is always left open. In the lobby, posters and flyers are taped to the walls and put out in piles for visitors to take. Some advertise recent events; others, ones long past. Further inside, futons, clothes, books, old computers, clocks, and empty sake bottles fill the space, piled up in every corner.

On first impression, Yoshida Dormitory looks like it has been abandoned for years. Yet, over a hundred students still live in the dormitory, which for over a century has served as a self-governed, radical space in Kyoto.

+++

Yoshida Dormitory feels like a time portal to another era, and in many ways, it is. Yoshida is the oldest student dormitory in Japan and physically little has changed since it was first constructed. Its main complex of buildings was built in 1913, and its associated dining hall is even older, erected in 1889. Like many dormitories that were established during the late Meiji and prewar period (1868-1939), Yoshida Dormitory operates autonomously and is governed by its members. Although part of Kyoto University, Yoshida selects applicants freely, administers its own facilities, and runs independently from the university administration. The dorm prides itself on being a form of accessible housing, charging members only 2,500 yen monthly, equivalent to around 20 dollars. In comparison, the dormitories directly run by Kyoto University can cost up to 50,000 yen per month, twenty times the amount that Yoshida charges its residents. Keeping dormitory fees low is at the center of Yoshida’s philosophy, particularly as a way to create opportunities for low-income students to attend the university. The dormitory explains its ideology on its website: “We believe that universities should play a role in fighting inequality. However, in recent years, the conditions for students have become so tough that it increasingly appears that only individuals from wealthy families can afford the privilege of higher education. Yoshida Dormitory plays a vital role in combating this growing inequality. Our dorm charges very low rent and therefore acts as a safety net for less affluent students so that they too can be able to attend Kyoto University.”

The dormitory was initially envisioned as a male residence for the top students of Kyoto University, which itself was created as a state-run imperial university to educate Japan’s elite. Hiroji Kinoshita, the first president of Kyoto Imperial University, built the dormitories under the belief that self-governance would bolster students’ character development. The building’s style is a mix of Western and Japanese architecture, with carved interior staircases and tatami flooring. The rooms face into two courtyards, allowing for plenty of sunlight. Originally, the top students would receive the best rooms, with large windows and private balconies.

Over time, the space transformed into a center for youth activism, communal styles of living, and intellectual debate. Its priority became to serve as a space open to all—one in which anyone from any background would be given refuge, community, and access to affordable housing. Now, students share the rooms and the once-manicured courtyards are overgrown, home to a flock of chickens.

+++

Since 2017, Kyoto University has been in conflict with Yoshida to close the dormitory permanently. The university administration demanded that students evacuate the building over claims that Yoshida’s wooden structure is a safety risk, particularly with the common threat of earthquakes in Japan. On December 19, 2017, the university issued the “Basic Policy for Ensuring the Safety of Yoshida Dormitory Students,” under which the university demanded that 1) the dormitory stop accepting new residents after January 2018, 2) current residents move out at the end of September 2018, and 3) undergraduate and graduate students who have not completed the standard term of study accept placement in private apartments as alternative accommodations. The university distributed materials stating that continued residence after the expiration date would be regarded as illegal possession of the dormitory. In response, the Yoshida Dormitory Residents’ Association issued a statement of protest, demanding the withdrawal of the “Basic Policy.”

The ‘Basic Policy’ was announced without any discussion between the university and the Yoshida Students’ Committee. On a number of occasions, Yoshida residents have approached the university with concrete proposals for repairs to the dorm. However, the university has refused to take action. We feel that the university is not truly worried about our safety and is simply using the structural issues with the old building as an excuse to demolish our dormitory. We believe that the university management is threatened by our system of self-governance and wants to construct a new dormitory that they can control more easily.

After a series of protests against this order, on April 26, 2019, the university filed a lawsuit against the students for illegal occupation. The trial has been ongoing since, with final remarks scheduled for October 5th, 2023, and a ruling on the fate of the dormitory to be issued in the months following.

Yoshida, as a student-run dormitory, is an anomaly. Dormitory housing in general has become increasingly less common in Japan, with students primarily living in one-bedroom apartments or at home with their parents. According to a survey carried out by the Japan Student Services Organization in 2020, only 6.2 percent of students at public universities live in dorms. The decline of student dormitories in Japan was a direct result of actions by the Japanese Ministry of Education following the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Zenkyōtō) protests, a revolutionary student movement that occurred in the late 1960s. The protests were associated with New Left student organizations, which sought to resist Japanese and American imperialism. The students hoped to fundamentally disrupt the idea of the “everyday (nichijō),” a term used to define the institutions and practices that the New Left linked to war, capitalism, and inequality.

In June 1971, following the decline of the movement, the Ministry of Education’s Central Council for Education issued a report declaring school dormitories, particularly student-governed dormitories, to be “the root cause of conflicts,” and claimed that they had no educational function within

universities. Based on this report, many universities began to charge fees for utilities and took control of dormitory access. At the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Osaka University, Okayama University, and others, dormitory students protested these regulations. In response, the universities, with the help of riot police, forced the dormitories to close. In 2002, the government demolished Tokyo University’s Komaba Dormitory, another dormitory deeply connected with 1960s protests. This closure was a final victory for the Ministry in its goal to eliminate campus radicalism. With the closure of Komaba, Yoshida was left as the oldest student dormitory in Japan.

+++

In the 1960s, debates emerged at Kyoto University surrounding the relationship between university administration and student dormitories, primarily related to a campaign for non-payment of additional fees by Yoshida to the university. In January 1969, inspired by student protests originating in Tokyo in 1968, New Left-affiliated Yoshida residents launched a struggle against the university, blockading and occupying the Student Affairs building. Following the actions by the dormitory residents, the College of Liberal Arts, the Faculty of Letters, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Faculty of Engineering went on indefinite strike. The movement became widespread within the university, and various factions emerged reflecting different revolutionary theories and aims for the struggle.

Despite its strong connection to the student movement, Yoshida avoided becoming a target of the Ministry of Education in the years following the 1968-69 protests. The dormitory’s survival was directly connected to a unique approach by Kyoto University: the university would not follow the official policy of the Ministry of Education, but would instead seek its own solution within the scope of university autonomy. This allowed the university to directly negotiate with students’ demands. As the Ministry of Education cracked down on the student movement across Japan, particularly targeting dormitories, protests at Kyoto University continued into the 1970s. In November 1972, control of the student government at Kyoto University shifted almost entirely to students associated with the New Left, and the mobilization of rallies of up to 1,000 people continued throughout the decade. The university continued to listen to the students’ demands in order to avoid clashes, which included maintaining the previous agreement with Yoshida.

At the end of the 1970s, a new Dean of Students, Professor Toshio Sawada, came into power. After taking office, Sawada declared that there would be no collective bargaining with Yoshida Dormitory and that he would follow the Ministry of Education’s policy of taking away student governance. However, after attempts to negotiate with the Yoshida Dormitory Council failed, Sawada decided to announce a “Basic Policy” for the abolition of Yoshida Dormitory. According to the policy, the expiration date of residence in Yoshida would be March 31, 1986.

When the date approached, Yoshida students refused to vacate the dormitory. In response, the university removed staff from the dormitory dining hall. In 1989, Yoshida successfully fought to save the dormitory, and the university agreed to pay for structural repairs. Negotiations between the dormitory association and the university continued for decades. In 2012, the university finally recognized the architectural significance of the building and promised to preserve the dormitory. However, in 2015, the university went back on its word and suspended negotiations with the dormitory association. This led to a stalemate that ended with the announcement of the 2017 “Basic Policy.” Since the announcement, the administration has refused to provide aid for routine maintenance. Additionally, Yoshida Dormitory is considered a university building and no drastic repair work can be done without Kyoto University’s consent. Because of this, in the years since, the wooden structure has fallen into increasing disrepair.

+++

In addition to publishing objections to the university’s plan, the Yoshida Dormitory Council posted an online petition (which now has almost five thousand signatures) making the following demands:

1. Withdraw the ‘Basic Policy to Ensure the Safety of Yoshida-Ryo Resident Students,’ which was announced on 19 December 2017.

2. Continue the promise to the Yoshida Students Committee (a written agreement maintained by successive vice-presidents, which prescribes the university to have a dialogue with residents before it makes a decision on the dormitory) and consent to an open meeting with students.

3. Make a decision in regards to repairs to the old Yoshida dormitory building in consultation with the Yoshida Students’ Committee.

Yoshida is urging the university to commit to renovating the current structure instead of evicting the residents and demolishing the building. The students believe the demolition will lead to the loss of Yoshida as an institution, along with its values of self-governance.

+++

For generations of students, living in Yoshida Dormitory has served as a formative experience of their youth—a place that prioritized accessibility, self-expression, and community in a university system that has increasingly become competitive, isolating, and unaffordable. The closure of Yoshida would mean the end of one of the only remaining student-governed dormitories in Japan, whose role, as defined by one of the dormitory’s residents, “is to allow people to experience the freedom to live enjoyably according to the rules they have set for themselves.” Yoshida has served as an alternative choice for young people who wish to go against what is expected of them, and who do not view university as a stepping stone to entering into Japan’s (notoriously) grueling working culture. As the photographer Kanta Nomura explains: “People who don’t choose that path, who don’t feel like they belong, have been saved by the Yoshida dorm.” Through the self-governing system of the dormitory, the students who live there ensure that anyone, no matter their background, is welcome.

Yoshida has also played a role as a space for the local community in Kyoto. The dormitory serves as a site for events such as talks, movie screenings, and festivals, helping to combat the recent decline of community spaces in Japan. A Yoshida resident reflected on the success of this past spring’s festival, Haru Matsuri: “Stalls were set up from all over the country and many people came to visit, [which] made me feel that the formation and revitalization of the local community had been accomplished to a great extent. One of the advantages of having a local community is the ability to collectively help each other in daily life. Yoshida Dormitory is one of the bases of this kind of thing… in Kyoto.” Yoshida has served as a place where those in need can stay overnight, whether that be students who have been studying late at the library or people who may not have a safe space to return home to. One student recounts how she was able to stay at Yoshida after a fight with her parents: “I don’t really have a good relationship with my parents. One day, they came to my house and we had an argument. I didn’t have any place to go but I had friends in this dorm that told me I could come to sleep there. I feel very safe to have this kind of place in Kyoto.” Losing Yoshida would be a tremendous loss for everyone in Kyoto, not just for the students who live there.

+++

It is hard to deny that Yoshida’s building is in poor condition, and the students themselves agree that repairs need to be made. However, the university’s attacks on the dormitory are part of a much larger battle—one that has been ongoing for decades—against student autonomy. Kyoto University is disinterested in maintaining a campus space that supports students who disrupt societal norms. A degree from Kyoto University essentially guarantees employment at an elite company, but residents of Yoshida are far more likely to pursue less conventional careers: queer theorizing, community organizing, peacock-raising. Some students pursue masters or PhDs at Kyoto University just so they can stay in the dormitory, or will take additional time to graduate so that they can continue to have a low-cost and communal place to live.

With October 5th—the final date of the trial—fast approaching, it is hard to know the future of Yoshida. The Yoshida residents are not just fighting to save their building, but are fighting to save the community they have built over the past century, one that is grounded in student freedom and expression. As another Yoshida resident voices: “This trial has a lack of human compassion. People who have no knowledge of Yoshida are trying to destroy this place—a space for self-expression without prejudice and a home to which one should be able to return.”

LOLA SIMON B’24 は吉田寮自治会を応援しています！

Thank you to Yoshida resident Gaku Okuma for your help across a thirteen-hour time difference.

Sign the online petition to stop Kyoto University’s trial against Yoshida Dormitory. The petition makes the following demands:

1. Resume discussions, including collective bargaining, with the dormitory community association and other parties concerned about the future of Yoshida Dormitory, including measures to deal with the aging of the current building.

2. Resume the commitments made by the Yoshida Dormitory Residents’ Association and successive Kyoto University administrators.

3. Withdraw the lawsuit against the dorm residents and former dorm residents demanding that they vacate the building.

A SHUCKING REVELATION

On corn and the commodification of evolution

→ An illuminating exercise for the reader: next time you are at your neighborhood grocery, convenience, or corner store, take a close look at the ingredients list of your favorite snacks and beverages. Pick up those Sour Skittles, a bottle of Coke, that box of nebulously delicious java chip Oreos. You might come to find in these unsuspecting confections a common ingredient: corn.

In its multitude of processed forms (starch, syrup, oil, and, more inconspicuously, fructose, bio-polyethylene, and dextrose), this plant has come to be commonplace not only in snack food, candy, and soda, but in numerous other industries. It is fed to meat and dairy cows, made into plastic cups and jars (Coca-Cola is currently transitioning to bottles made from corn-derived bioethylene glycol), and is fermented into ethanol, a component of both the gasoline that powers cars and the drinks that power fun nights.

Corn’s multi-purpose nature has catalyzed massive production over the past few decades: it is the most grown crop in the United States, harvested at a clip of about 14 billion bushels annually (3.5 times more than the second place crop, soybeans), and representing an $86 billion share of the U.S. economy. Present in economic spheres from automotive to culinary to plastics, corn has become one of the most important plants in human history.

The species did not always look like it does now, however, with its thick ears and sweet, bursting kernels. Corn is not only one of humanity’s greatest partners—it is also one of our most wonderful inventions.

About 9,000 years ago, humans on the land that we now call Mexico began to gather the seeds of a grass known as teosinte and drop its small, tough seed pods into the soil. Teosinte had smaller ears than modern-day corn and triangular, hard-shelled kernels. These grains were not useful in their ancient form, though people enjoyed the sweet juices derived from the stalk. Communities engaged in a lengthy process of selective breeding—large-eared plants were manually bred with large-eared plants, large kernels with large kernels. Over time, and with much attention and care from the communities that harvested it, teosinte seeds lost their tough outer husk, revealing the soft kernels underneath.

Research suggests that corn in its modern iteration spread through the Americas around 2500 BCE and rapidly became a dietary staple for many Native American communities. As its abundance spread, it grew to be inseparable from the cultural traditions of these communities as well. Corn was deified, as in the case of the corn god Centeōtl in Aztec mythology, and was often present in creation stories, including that of the Maya. The Popol Vuh, a text of Mayan mythology written by the K’iche people native to the land of modern day Guatemala, states:

Then our Makers Tepew and Q’uk’umatz began discussing the creation of our first mother and father. Their flesh was made of white and yellow corn. The arms and legs of the four men were made of corn meal.

Thus corn began its tumultuous existence in the realm of the divine. It at once sustained humans, composed humans, and was greater than humans could ever be.

Corn spread widely across the globe in the following millenia, the timing of which is unclear. Historians widely accept that the crop was introduced to Europe by Christopher Columbus, following his expeditions to the Americas, and thereafter was brought to African and Asian communities in the 1500s (although there is evidence of corn’s presence

in those lands in pre-Columbian times). It was spread throughout the continents by military force, traders of enslaved people, and missionaries, though was embraced by local communities due to its straightforward agricultural process, fast growth rate, and high seed yield. As human populations increased so too did corn production, until the crop became a widespread economic and dietary staple.

This is but a snapshot in the story of corn’s rise to global omnipresence. How did this plant, once a small, marginally useful grass, come to be found in our fruit candy, wheat crackers, and sports cars? What does it say about the abilities, and priorities, of our own species? And ultimately, who does all of this benefit? Who is this all for?

There is no end goal to evolution. You’ll learn that on the first day of any self-respecting evolutionary bio class. Every species that has ever existed has come into being due to the natural propensity of things to continue. The organisms best suited to their environment live, and thus reproduce. The rest, outcompeted, cannot.

Evolutionary perfection cannot exist, as each species develops according to selective pressures imposed by their biotic and abiotic surroundings, which are constantly changing. These pressures and the life strategies that are required to resist them are a species’ evolutionary and ecological ‘niches,’ respectively. The species that survive through the ages—the horseshoe crabs, the frilled sharks, the ginkgo trees—are those that have found a niche and claimed it. Or they are those who—via fast generation time, genetic instability, or merely intuition—can jump from one niche to another.

About 12,000 years ago, a novel evolutionary niche opened in Mesopotamia. In perhaps the single defining moment in the origin of human society, communities in the Near East began saving seeds from plants they had gathered and replanting them. The increased availability of food that agriculture provided led to a massive boom in the human population—communities were able to resist the selective pressures that had previously forced them to remain small and mobile. Thus, a new niche for the human species. Thus, evolution.

Parallel to human population rise came a flourishing of these domesticated plant species. Their reproductive processes were intentionally expedited, their DNA spread far and wide. To a certain extent, agriculture is functionally similar to zoochory—or the carrying of seed by animals—with plant species co-opting the abilities of their more ambulatory kin to spread their offspring. Tapirs, for example, are highly productive seed dispersers, responsible for much of the growth of Queen Palm trees. They eat the fruit of this tree, walk a bit away, and redeposit the seed into the ground. A good deal for all parties involved.

The species most capable of spreading seed and nurturing it to reproductive age has become, through agriculture, humans. And just as the Queen Palm ‘uses’ tapirs, corn is entirely indebted to humans for its own dispersal.

Humans have so distorted the reproductive systems of corn plants in favor of more desirable traits that corn can no longer reproduce in the wild. At first glance, this might seem wildly problematic—throughout history, species with the most fail-safes and protections against environmental change have been the most successful over time. It is generally not advisable to put all eggs into another species’ basket. And yet corn is one of the most common plants on the planet, and the prosperity of the species is all but guaranteed into the far future. Corn has ‘convinced’ humans, through its succulent kernels and speedy reproductive capacity, to spread its seed. Or rather, we have built corn into a boundlessly useful species, worthy of having its seed spread.

This modification-for-utility cannot be considered to be a completely new evolutionary niche. That Queen Palm plant, in ‘seeking’ to attract tapirs to eat its fruits, evolved bright orange sweet fruits. In a sense, these tapirs also carried out a long process of selective breeding; they ate the fruits from the plants that were the most sweet and plump, thus allowing those plants with the sweet-plump genes to reproduce. The fruits, over time, only got sweeter and plumper.

There is a crucial difference, however, between these two evolutionary histories. No animal has devoted more time and resources to the explicit and intentional selection of traits than humans. No other trait engineering process has been able to alter the genetics of a useful plant so specifically, down to the manual alteration of genetic code. And no other species has so aggressively incorporated trait selection into its societies and institutions to the point where ecological destruction and legal retribution in the name of profit have all become common practice. A handful of humans have dramatically changed the evolutionary landscape by co-opting the process to work against the wellbeing of our species as a whole.

+++

In 1973, researchers were able to transplant DNA from one bacterium to another: the invention of genetic engineering. For the first time, humans exerted direct control over the genetic code. This technology flourished in the following decades: in 1982, genetically modified insulin was approved for clinical use, and in 1994, the first GMO produce went on sale after being approved by the FDA. The prevalence of GMOs skyrocketed in the years following. Of the most commonly grown crops in the U.S. today—including corn, soybean, canola, and cotton—upwards of 90 percent of plants are genetically modified.

( TEXT CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION LILLY FISHER )

Modern genetic modification allows for the production of highly specific traits, many not visible to the naked eye. Using what is known as “recombinant DNA technology,” researchers are able to transplant genes from one species to another, creating novel organisms that are more ecologically competitive. These plants can have increased resistance to pest and disease, or to the specific herbicides that farmers use to kill weeds. These traits increase harvest and decrease labor (and volume of chemical) required for pest management. Bt-corn, Roundup Ready Corn, and Liberty Link corn are examples of corn varieties that have been carefully crafted in the past couple of decades.

Genetically modified corn, along with many other crops, has drastically increased potential food output. In many ways, this is a good thing: more food = more fed people. Looking deeper into the modification process and the distribution of seed, however, it is clear that the responsible companies are not simply working for the benefit of humans. Through the protection of genetic intellectual property (IP), corporations such as Bayer and Syngenta assure that their brands of corn are limited in their distribution, and that all profits fall directly to them.

“Seed law,” the term granted to the field of law regarding genetic IP, was born into this world during the Green Revolution, an era of incredible increase in agricultural output stimulated by advances and trade in farming technologies. The Green Revolution, which occurred in the 1960s-80s, is deemed by historians the “Third Agricultural Revolution,” the first being the discovery of agriculture in Mesopotamia, and the second arriving in Britain in the 18th century. The effect that this third agricultural boom had on the capacity of our species cannot be overstated. Incredible population gains in the mid-20th century had given rise to fears of a dire global famine; selective breeding birthed wheat, rice, corn, and sorghum varieties with dramatically increased productivity, and famine was avoided.

For all of its great production, however, the Green Revolution had long-term consequences that impeded widespread access to sustenance. In 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act was passed, allowing plant breeders and genome developers to patent the genetic code that they were able to create, functionally giving them ownership over the code and its production. One patented genome is that of Roundup Ready Corn, a line of corn seed produced by Monsanto (a division of Bayer) that is resistant to the herbicide Roundup (also a product of Monsanto’s), allowing the chemical’s use in corn fields.

While these patents are active, it is illegal to produce seed that contains the patented genetic material, such as those Roundup resistance genes. This serves to prevent competing companies such as Corteva and Syngenta from profiting off of Monsanto’s research. These patents also prevent farmers from using seed that has not been bought directly from the producer. A farmer that gathers corn seed from their farm and replants it next season can be sued on the

grounds of stealing a company’s intellectual property. This is severely burdensome for the farmer, who must purchase new seed from the company each season.

Importantly, the farmer’s intention here is not important. Accidental replanting, extending even to the spread of seed from a plot owned by a separate farmer, is punishable. If corn seed from an industrial farm that uses Monsanto seed finds its way into the garden of a small grower, that faultless grower can be sued for intellectual property theft. Monsanto asks purchasers of its seed to spy on neighboring farms and report any presence of their product.

Between the years 1997 and 2010, Monsanto filed 144 IP-theft lawsuits against farmers. Many of these farmers reported not knowing about illegal seed on their properties.

For Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta, and many other seed producers, context is irrelevant. They, like all other multinational corporations, profit off of restrictions and exclusivity. Their responsibility, after all, is not to humanity but to their shareholders.

The hold of these patents is one of the dramatic inefficiencies of our food system, creating massive amounts of access disparity and waste. Punishing farmers, especially peasant farmers, for improper use of seed creates a world in which the few administrative members of massive corporations can control who does and does not have access to food.

As illustrated above, intentional genetic modification can be understood as an arm of the evolutionary process. Evolution is, quite literally, progressive modification of a species’ genome. These companies, then, have co-opted and bastardized the evolutionary process, marshaling it to the benefit not of our entire species, but of a select few.

+++

As with all issues related to the ultimate well-being of the human species, there is no simple alternative. After all, GMOs can be incredibly useful—those introduced during the Green Revolution saved upwards of one billion lives. Even today, genetic modification allows for the massive production of various plant crops that not only feed humanity, but clothe and house us as well. Corn itself is a wonderful example of the utility of genetic modification. Its mere existence owes itself to engineering, and, in its current highly-modified iteration, it is able to feed billions.

The environmental implications of GMOs, however, must be considered when contemplating their place in our future. Because of their technologically-granted increased fitness, GMOs pose a major risk to native environments should they escape the agricultural realm and find their way into the wild. These plants have gone through the predator adaptation phase of evolution without their predators having any time to catch up. Ecosystem balance could falter, which would have significant environmental implications. (This is likely not a problem for corn, as it cannot reproduce in the wild, but is a pressing concern for many other GMO crops.)

Considering the incredible restrictions

placed on the use of genetically modified seed by their producers, change seems far away. Yet it is useful to imagine a world in which humans once again have universal respect for the land and the crops that they plant in it.

The native communities that both created and venerated corn did so out of respect for the plant, the land, and their own communities. There was no desire for power or singular access, rather power was endowed onto the plant itself. The passage from the Popol Vuh above continues:

Then Grandmother Ixmunake ground the white and yellow ears of corn to make enough gruel to fill nine gourds to provide strength, muscle and power to the four new men.

This care is prompted by, and itself responsible for, a deep and sustained attention to the needs of the land and its people. A healthy relationship with our agricultural processes and the continuation of our species requires respect for that which nourishes us and the land where they come from.

We must also wrench evolutionary powers out of the grasp of commodification. Agricultural companies currently have no financial incentive to release their patents and allow their seeds to spread, or to stop punishing small farmers who replant seed or just happen to find it in their plots. As long as this is so, they cannot be trusted to act in a manner that is conducive to a truly functional agricultural system—one that works not only for some but for all.

Evolution has continuously given rise to intraspecies competition, both in search of mates and resources. But perhaps more important for the flourishing of species is the concept of biological altruism. Communities of animals that support each other at their own individual disadvantage, via warning calls and resource sharing, are often more successful than those who don’t. This makes sense intuitively, but can be surprising if viewed alongside individuals’ natural propensity to protect themselves. Humans, for much of our history, have followed this altruistic path, acting for the good of the many at the expense of the individual. This, clearly, served our species well. It is only in the relatively recent stretch of our existence that individualist and capitalist tendencies took hold.

If we are going to wield the power of evolution in our own hands, it is crucial that we return to a lifestyle of generosity and altruism. This will serve to secure a bright and healthy future for ourselves, our offspring, and the sweet beloved corn that has been alongside us all this way.

CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 is a Capricorn.

A secluded home tucked into a wooded area of rural Vermont. The windows glow with warm yellow light. The faint hum of locusts.

IMOGEN(31), an observant woman whose brow is perpetually set in a furrow, scrubs her hands in the sink. Just barely noticeable, a trace of blood slips down the drain. She stares at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are empty, sunken in the deep hollows of her face. On her skin, the sticky sheen of sweat; she looks like the shell of a person.

IVAN (O.S)

Should I put the apps in the oven?

Imogen stops washing her hands, lets her head hang.

IVAN (O.S)

TABLE MANNERS

Honey!

Sure. Yeah!

IMOGEN

INT. LIVING ROOM - EVENING

IMOGEN sits on a mid-century style couch, taking up as little space as she possibly can. IVAN(33), a real charmer and a walking encyclopedia, makes himself a Manhattan at the bar cart. He adds a lime to a glass of seltzer and hands it to Imogen.

He checks his leather-strapped watch.

IMOGEN

Did you try calling?

IVAN No answer.

IMOGEN Service is probably just...

Spotty.

IVAN

IMOGEN

Yes. Right. Exactly.

Imogen seems like she might say something. Ivan sits next to her on the couch and places a hand on her stomach. They smile at one another, Ivan lovingly, Imogen tight-lipped.

INT. WILLA AND WALLACE’S CAR - EVENING

WILLA(30) drives. WALLACE(32) inspects a big paper map. The car winds along a small Vermont road. The sun is fading.

WILLA

Well?

WALLACE I think you missed the left?

WILLA What left? You never said

( TEXT

LYDIA

RIESS DESIGN TANYA QU, ASH MA ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING )

anything about a left.

WALLACE I did say.

WILLA

Well, where do I go now?

Willa’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

Hello?

WILLA

WALLACE

What do you think I’m doing? I’m working on it—

WILLA

You’ve always been so awful with maps—

WALLACE

What road was that? What road did we just pass?

WILLA

I don’t know! I’m driving!

CUT TO:

INT./EXT. - IMOGEN AND IVAN’S ENTRYWAY - EVENING

IMOGEN and IVAN swing open the door to their house. WILLA and WALLACE stand next to their matching luggage. They all exchange big hugs and pleasantries.

WILLA

We’re really happy to be here.

IVAN

The pleasure is all ours.

INT. THE DINING ROOM - NIGHT

IVAN, IMOGEN, WILLA, and WALLACE sit around a table eating little shared plates of food. Mini cheese and spinach tarts. Slices of dry salami. Marcona almonds. Cherry tomatoes and green olives popped into mouths. Candlelight flickers off of dark wood-paneled walls. White linens drape over the table. A few open wine bottles. The space is well-lived in, but just a bit too formal to feel entirely comfortable; if you swung a limb too wildly, you might knock a trinket off a shelf or send an oil painting askew.

WILLA We were walking through this city. It was tropical.

IVAN

It was a tropical city?

WILLA

Yes! There are tropical cities. And then we were on the beach!

And then what?

IVAN

WILLA

Well, that was it!

Willa fusses with an olive pit, removing it from her mouth.

Oh.

IVAN

WILLA

I didn’t say it was a thrilling dream. It was just - we were all together again. And it was nice.

IVAN (Sarcastic) Scintillating.

WILLA (In jest)

Oh Ivan, can’t things just be nice?

Willa turns to Imogen.

WILLA

How do you put up with him? She pops a cherry tomato into her mouth.

INT. THE DINING ROOM - LATER

Wine glasses are emptied and refilled. The hors d’oeuvres of the previous scene are mostly depleted. Now, plates are full of frilly lettuces and a sweet potato mash.

WALLACE 10 acres? Wow. The kids would just love that.

Ivan grabs hold of IMOGEN’s hand under the table.

WILLA

Oh, the kids have the parks! And culture in spades.

WALLACE

But to own a home. To be a “homeowner.”

WILLA (Through a tense smile)

You must miss the hustle and bustle every once and a while, though? They must miss the hustle and bustle.

IVAN

Oh, you age out of that sort of thing.

Imogen smooths out her sweet potato mash with the back of her spoon.

IMOGEN

We miss it sometimes, I think. Sometimes I think we miss it.

EXT. IMOGEN AND IVAN’S HOUSE - EARLY EVENING

INT. ENSUITE BATHROOMEARLY EVENING

IVAN (Flippant)

Sure, but you start to see thehmm the hustle and bustle of - of nature, I suppose.

WALLACE (Gesturing with a fork full of lettuce) We wouldn’t know! That’s the truth of the situation. We would not know.

WILLA

Well, we get away! Metro North trips up to Beacon. The Hudson Valley is just stunning in the fall.

WALLACE (An attempt at charming) She’s real original, isn’t she?

INT. KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

IMOGEN puts the plates on the counter, dirtied with smears of sweet potato.

IVAN (O.S)

So the thing with hamsters is that they eat their young. It’s very sad.

WALLACE (O.S) Is that right?

Imogen pours herself a large glass of red wine. She drinks it all, then carefully wipes the remnants from the corners of her mouth. Stares into the sink. She opens the oven to check on a massive roast chicken.

INT. THE DINING ROOM - LATER

IMOGEN runs her finger through the flame of a candle on the table.

WALLACE Working for yourself, though. Starting your own company. Taking orders from no man. That’s the real deal, huh? Must feel justyeah. I mean, how does that feel?

Willa shifts in her seat, fed up with the Ivan praise.

WILLA (To Imogen) I used to do that.

Everyone goes quiet.

WILLA Imogen.

IMOGEN Huh?

WILLA

That. I used to do that. Running my finger through a flame. At my grandmother’s house.

Imogen gestures to a nearby candle, offering it to Willa.

IMOGEN (Absently)

Be my guest. It’s very therapeutic.

WILLA

Oh, I think I’ve outgrown it. Willa gives a tight, Close-mouthed smile, looks around at the men.

INT. THE DINING ROOM - LATER

The group digs into the chicken and a side of greens. Empty wine bottles litter the table and as a result, the guests are significantly more drunk.

WILLA

WILLA Yeah, c’mon, you sick fuck.

IVAN

3.85. 3.85 people die every second.

WILLA

Well I was way off!

WALLACE

Oh yeah? What happens to the .25 of a person that stays alive every second?

WILLA (Matter of fact) .15, sweetie.

WALLACE

Oh jeez! We all must think I’m an idiot, right?

WILLA

No, no one thinks you’re an idiot. Everyone misspeaks from time to time.

WALLACE No, I really - I really thought that for a second. I really thought .85 and .25 added up to 1. Only for a second! But I did think it!

per second? You must know.

WILLA

We don’t know if he knows. He might not know.

IVAN

I don’t. I actually don’t know.

WILLA

See? I think I read somewhere that it’s about eight. Seven or eight.

IVAN

Oh, look at you.

WILLA slams her fist down on the table as she says the word “eight.”

WILLA

Eight. Eight. Eight. Eight.

Willa looks around the table excitedly.

WILLA (Crazed)

That’s an amazing way to look at things. Important things just happening all the time! Without us! Without us at all! HA!

She’s almost choked up at this realization.

WALLACE

How about a miscarriage?

IMOGEN Huh?

WALLACE

Is that a death and a birth? Is it counted twice?

WILLA

Oh, I think that’s just a death.

IVAN

Huh, I’ve never thought—

IMOGEN

Can I pour you all some more wine—

Imogen reaches for the wine bottle on the table and knocks over a glass. It shatters and cuts her hand.

Shit!

IMOGEN

WILLA

Oh dear, are you alright?

WILLA (With edge)

Well, c’est la vie!

WALLACE

Hi! Nice to meet you, I’m Mr. .85 plus .25 equals 1!

IVAN

Oh, you’re a riot. Willa, you snagged a riot.

WILLA

So what were you saying about 3.85?

IVAN

3.85 deaths a second. Isn’t that amazing? Three.

IVAN slams his fist on the table, rattling the glasses. And perhaps more notably, rattling IMOGEN.

IVAN

(Beating on the table each time he chants)Three. Three. Three. Three. Three.

Imogen grabs hold of Ivan’s fist, halting his slamming.

IMOGEN

You’re being a little disrespectful, don’t you think?

One hundred!

IVAN

Nope. Way off. Any other takers?

WALLACE

Oh, just tell us, you bastard!

IVAN

No more disrespectful than just going about our days with no acknowledgment of the constant passing of people in all corners of the earth.

WALLACE

Well, do you know how many births

Imogen looks at her hand in her lap. It bleeds.

IMOGEN

Oh yes, yes. Just a scratch. Please ignore me.

You sure?

WALLACE

IVAN

Sweetie, do you want to wash it?

IMOGEN

It’s really alright. Please let’s just. Why don’t we just move on.

INT. THE DINING ROOM - LATER

They eat slices of chocolate cake. IMOGEN’s hand continues to bleed in her lap, completely soaking her white linen napkin. The MURMUR of conversation drones on.

EXT. IMOGEN AND IVAN’S HOUSE - NIGHT

The glow of the house tucked into the woods. The murmur of conversation continues, mixing with the hum of locusts. An unbearable cacophony of chatter, growing so loud and distorted it nearly hurts.

A sharp cut to black. Finally, just quiet.

END OF FILM

LYDIA RIESS B’24 is busy writing wrongs.

How to Break a Curse Towards a Transsexual Feminism

( TEXT KOYLA SHIELDS DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ )

→ I’m cursed. In the way all women are cursed, but also because most women don’t seem to believe I’m cursed at all. To them, I’m a malevolent changeling, feigning affliction, tricking them into lowering their guard to meddle in their deep feminine magic; the unusually tall Cassandra of Troy in a city composed solely of other Cassandras, who cling to their chromosomes as the Trojans did to Helen.

Part of the pernicious terror of a curse is its boundless indeterminacy, that it might befall you, but you’ll never really know for sure—were King Tut’s looters caught in a centuries-long mystic quagmire, or were they pallid, always already anemic Brits lost in the desert? Rational causality crumbles, every action and outcome in jeopardy of reduction to an accursed symptom. For Giorgio Agamben, curses are the twisted underbelly of the oath: the traditional punishment for oath-breakers who, through ‘lying,’ challenged language’s (divine) correspondence with reality—The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God. In Ancient Rome, the ultimate punishment was sacer esto, literally, to be cursed—total exile, non-status, subtraction from meaning.

Sometimes sacer esto sounds relaxing in comparison to trans esto —when I stare at my flat breasts in the mirror, willing

myself to believe that maybe just maybe they’re a little perkier than a month ago, or flip my palms up against my face, blocking the jut of my jawbone from view, what I really want, at least for a moment, is for my body to stop signifying, stop meaning, to make real the cybernetic fantasy of a pure, ungendered quantification—flesh stripped bare. When your body is experienced as a curse, a tragicomic contingency—mixup at the baby factory!—it seems easier to accept a diminished embodiment than to expect euphoria. Of course, I don’t actually want to be a meat sack. I want to be a woman. So help me God.

+++

Allie Rowbottom is cursed. As was her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. The curse is first foisted upon her mother Mary by a man (who else?), her leering uncle John, who knocks back whiskey while grumbling to a gaggle of children about how the men of the family— heirs of the Jell-O fortune—are felled by tragic accidents stemming from “money and its attendant problems.” Running his hand down her preteen waist, John promises Mary that he will protect her from the curse, and that only men fall victim. Of course, for Mary, this reassurance simply inaugurates a new fear—“that she’d be the first to break the mold,” the first woman cursed.

In her aptly-named memoir Jello-O Girls, Rowbottom traces her genealogy back to its gelatinous genesis, following the family product over three generations of women, from grandmother Midge up to Rowbottom herself. She presents the history of the snack company as a history of patriarchy, a business model dependent upon legions of Jell-O-making housewives. Quickly, her female forebears realize that their curse is no simple karmic punishment for wealth but in fact womanhood itself, the consequence of “a social structure predicated on [male] power.” More than anything, this repression is depicted as a muffling, “the sickness that silence becomes when swallowed.”

Resistance becomes speech, in a distinctly feminine form, that “deep, intuitive power alive in every woman, connecting us across space and time.”

Rowbottom “return[s] to [her] mother’s body, her voice”—redeeming Mary’s unfinished memoir and her

family’s long-unheard trauma through her own (auto)biographical triumph.

This voice doesn’t come easy. Midge longs to explore Lima, where her husband is a hotshot pilot, but is kept inside by her children and her gender. After packing a picnic for the family that is quickly cut short by a tantrum, she looks “down at her wailing baby, down at herself, her painful breasts… into which Mary’s body melded. There was no privacy in this life. No space just for her, her thoughts, her words.” Midge needs a ‘room of one’s own,’ certainly, but it’s clear her feminine plight isn’t solely political-economical—she feels her children leaching into her, her isolated motherhood an uncontrollable bodily and psychic excess crowding out her freedom to write and think.

Mary, two decades later, now living in New York City, also experiences her body as an unruly opponent. After a brutal, dissociative night with her uncle John in a hotel, her hand freezes into a claw, rigid and unusable. She struggles to wash herself clean, unable to “unburden herself of the suffocating fullness she’d embodied since sleeping with John, since courting the curse,” which she now recognizes as the patriarchal stifling of femininity. For years she’d known the power and coherence male approval promised— seeing his gaze upon her, she “recognized something… strong about [her body] when molded to fit a man’s desire,” a legibility and purpose furnished by cishetero objectification. When he tells her she’s beautiful, “the control she suddenly had over her body…pushed through her.” Words and looks, signs and symbols, provide a path to some bodily stability and empowerment, but the way he treats her body in that hotel room—as public goods, an instrument for his desire—is unbearable. Her bodily experience of misogynistic assault is untranslatable into the patriarchal signifying system, and therefore emerges symptomatically, uncontrollably, in her flesh. The curse seems to emerge precisely at this junction of body and language, the confluence of uncontrollable, unsignifiable excess.

+++

The mirror is, in its own way, a curse. Narcissus couldn’t tear himself away from it, Romans believed souls could become trapped in them, and breaking one bestows seven long years of bad luck. When I walked into my new apartment this summer, the first thing I noticed was the ornate mirror hanging in the living room— lowkey, I can’t live with that there, I said. For psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage names the traumatic experience of confronting a supposedly whole, external imago (idealized image) of the body, which so contradicts with the fragmentation and inconsistency of a body as lived.

Lacan lifts the term from psychologist Henri Wallon’s studies of babies and early self-identification, but in psychoanalysis, this isn’t a developmental stage but the structure of identity and body-image as such. Suddenly and forevermore, we identify with, and are haunted by, a fantasy. No fantasy is solely visual, and Lacan is clear that self-image is deeply semiotic. When I come upon a mirror, I don’t simply see an image but the words that the Other (and sometimes, I) pin to my body: white, tranny, Russian, student, and

too often, man. While it may feel fictional, radically disjointed from your material experience, your image and its attendant signifiers define how you move through the world and forever estrange you from unmediated embodiment.

What happens when there are cracks in the mirror; when your imago isn’t a wistful impossibility as much as the very locus of your oppression? I needed that mirror gone because every time I walked past it, the curse bored deeper into me—seeing myself as others do, I feel the weight of endless stares, the sudden insistence that we do a pronouns circle, “OMG! Let me teach you how to do eyeliner!!!”

For Lacanian queer theorist Lee Edelman, social violence is meted out on individuals because they challenge the fixity of identity. He paradoxically argues that “Black, queer, woman, trans… [that which is] collectively delegitimated as other than human,” names archetypal representations of unrepresentability —the impossibility of a perfect, static taxonomy. In short, cis people don’t hate me because I take estrogen and like wearing dresses, as much as they hate me because I represent the instability of sex, the inability to say anyone is—essentially, eternally—a man or a woman. In the end, transness poses sex as a question, not an answer, nor an essential property.

But of course, ‘just’ being a cis woman is no piece of cake either; one could say that patriarchy is less about hating vaginas as it is about hating the possibility of not being a man. One does not have to have a specific set of body parts or organs or chromosomes to experience patriarchy—all they have to do is embody the instability of masculinity. This is why Rowbottom figures the patriarchy as a stifling, the reduction of woman to mute flesh. Men can bear women as objects, but not when they infringe on the masculine dominion over thought, language, and rationality.

Lacan argues that the masculine psyche believes in his ego ideal, looking into the mirror and identifying with a Schwarzenegger-to-be, while the feminine psyche, with no stable, internally coherent societal ideal—signifying simply non-man, hence Lacan’s infamous, oft-misread “la femme n’existe pas”—is defined by an anxious masquerade. We understand what men want from us (no-frizz long blonde hair on command; skinny enough that pregnancy is unsafe, yet at least three heirs), but it’s obviously impossible to fulfill, let alone to align with anything we might actually want. To put it another way: men never have to give up power to fulfill a societal ideal, no matter how many trite thinkpieces bemoan the strain of ‘not being in touch with your emotions.’

Womanhood becomes the quest for legibility and safety within an identity defined by male desire, the management of a body and psyche that refuses reduction to baby-making sex doll. This materializes as an endless spiral of paranoid, abjected self-production—it’s why we preen and pluck and palpitate in front of mirrors, but it’s also why I see my smartest friends keep their mouth shut in the face of mansplaining, because what could a woman gain from phallic power? Lacan’s radical move was to locate these bodily-social complexes outside of Freud’s biological essentialism, and instead in the structures of embodiment and signification as such. Womanhood is not a collection of aesthetic techniques or body parts or makeup brands as much as the need to make up for your body in the first place.

But, of course, I’m not a cis woman. When I cringe at the mirror, it’s not just that I don’t look like Bella Hadid (or even Hari Nef)—it’s that my body is cursed to be the image of failed femininity. Following mentions of models and makeup and mirrors, it might seem like I’m simply reiterating the most vile of misogynistic discourses, defining femininity by girlish, aesthetic self-involvement. But my feminine failure is not banally aesthetic; if this were the case why would the ‘trap,’ the trans woman so pretty she tricks her unsuspecting sexual victim into assuming she’s cis, be the default cultural metaphor for ‘justified’ anti-trans violence?

Pinning the violence of hegemonic power on a more-oppressed, non-normative group is an assimilationist technique par excellence, but even beyond that, this classic ‘feminist’ reproach has even less of a grasp on femininity than I. What is more female than asking if what you think you want (to be, to look like, to do) is actually someone else’s desire—namely, a man’s? Is womanhood inside me or pinned to me with a long, sharp tack? Medical historian Jules Gill-Peterson explains that gender dysphoria cannot be substituted for transness, or found within the subject (much as, for example, feminine masquerade cannot be found somewhere in the female brain):

“This is why gender dysphoria is not actually a trans term… I experience emotional distress like fear, guilt, or shame, not because I am trans, but because my gender is treated as abnormal, illegible, dangerous, or undesired by the social world in which I live. This might manifest phenomenologically in my flesh, for instance, when I think my shoulders too broad, or my breasts too small, but it is because I fear how I will be treated when others assign and surveil my gendered body. I fear the penalties of my culture for my disobedient form.”

In short, it’s not really my fault that my body signifies (feminine) abnormality, but I still have to live in it.

+++

Rowbottom is also deeply concerned about how and where we can diagnose womanhood—deep in the body, in language, or somewhere else entirely? Jell-O Girls opens with Rowbottom and her mother Mary watching a TV program about the girls of LeRoy High School. In 2011, a senior cheerleader woke up with uncontrollable spasms and her face half frozen, an affliction that soon spread to other cheerleaders, classmates, and adults, over a dozen women in total. Theories abounded, but the medical establishment could never pin down concrete causes, stuck in the idiopathic; the New York Times hedged, “researchers think the illness might have something to do with the amygdala.” Rowbottom notes that throughout the whole ordeal, their mothers refused social or psychological explanations, reassuring reporters that their children were normal girls, that “there must be something physically wrong with” their kids—nothing accursed here. Mary, however, sees the girls’ spasms as part of “a system of symbolism… as old as men and women and world”—a physical reaction to the patriarchal curse, analogous to her petrified hand after her assault.

This type of socially viral, physically unexplainable affliction, termed ‘mass psychogenesis,’ is most common in groups of young women. The doctor’s final ‘diagnosis’ was a combination of this and ‘conversion disorder,’ which Rowbottom describes as “the literal transformation of emotional stress into physical symptoms”—the embodied consequences of social non-being. Rowbottom notes that we’ve inherited conversion from Freud, who used it semi-interchangeably with hysteria to name “the patient’s conversion of sexual impulse and emotional trauma into physical trauma.” Hysteria comes from the ancient Greek hystéra, for womb, at the time believed to be a moving organ which caused infirmity as it wandered around the body, signifying the woman’s lack of (self-)control. The medical-discursive frame has not shifted much since Hippocrates, argues Rowbottom, depicting “the anorexic, bulimic, obsessive-compulsive woman as disordered and vain rather than the logical product of the culture she’s grown up in.”

As much as a curse, Rowbottom considers hysteria a “specifically feminine protolanguage, communicating via the body messages that cannot be verbalized” (citing theorist Elaine Showalter). It’s a disempowering epithet used by male doctors to dismiss Mary’s burgeoning awareness of her developing cancer, and the grounds of female solidarity, “a common language we express through our bodies before we learn it is safe to speak,” a “coping mechanism, a system [the LeRoy girls’] minds’ found to tolerate the

intolerable.” Mary writes that “disorder is… in its own way, an ingenuity.”

Hysteria can certainly be a productive, female knowledge, in that it names and medicalizes the behaviors of those bearing ‘unruly’ bodies, but these definitions veer into classic TERF territory by fetishizing an originary, properly female body. This ‘woman’ is proto- or pre-linguistic, instead of a political contestation rooted in the inseparability of language and the body. Even when it seems like Rowbottom steers away from essentialism, it lurks; she writes that women have “been saddled with an unbearable weight, one assigned to us at birth… lose the body, gain the freedom.” As any trans woman whose ‘male socialization’ or ‘assigned gender at birth’ has been weaponized against them can tell you, these definitions simply cling to a more socially acceptable essentialized femininity. Rowbottom laughs off what she calls her mother’s “essentialism” as only a cis woman can, writing that she admired it “even though I knew it was dangerous or, in academic parlance, ‘problematic,’” implicitly presenting non-biological definitions of womanhood as a “haughty” scholarly debate, not a struggle over body and word and patriarchy as real, material, and common as anyone with a hystéra experiences.

+++

It makes sense for definition to be so central to the feminist project—when all hegemonic representations of your identity emphasize abjection, there seems to be no way to bear or embody ‘woman’ without grasping for a silver lining. I get the impulse: I’m lacking the ‘natural,’ primordial female privilege of childbirth, but on the flipside, isn’t it so beautiful that trans people everywhere make such brave choices, with a clarity cis people could only dream of? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d love to not have to make a brave choice for a while, as much as my uterine cisters would probably love to not have to pump out a baby anytime soon, or be referred to as ‘uterine.’ Essentialism has always been contested, often as part of the call to decouple femininity and childbirth—De Beauvoir wrote that “one is not born but becomes a woman” in 1949, and explicitly identified pregnancy as the root of women’s “enslavement… tighter or looser depending on how many births the society demands.”

So what’s behind the recent rise in essentialist feminist discourse that paradoxically fights for womanhood to be reduced to baby-making? For example, TERF philosopher Kathleen Stock’s argument that female “designates a person with XX chromosomes, and for whom ovaries, womb, vagina and so on are a statistical norm,” and more subtle regressions: viral tradwives, “womxn,” the over-aestheticization of female pain. These trends define women as bearers of an inherently more violent socialization or assignment-at-birth which grounds their ‘protolinguistic,’ mystical unity. Suddenly, a curse becomes a disorder—contingent, unresolved relationality becomes an inevitable trauma affixed to one’s birth certificate. Anyone who paid a lick of attention in an intro Gender & Sexuality class could point out that these descriptions reek of the patriarchal characterization of womanhood as ‘natural,’ ‘bodily,’ or ‘emotional,’ the sensitive earth mother in contrast to rational, intellectual, practical Father—but I’m much more interested in why transness, and specifically transfemininity, is cursed to be the target of this growing reactionary feminism.

Stock refers to her biological definition as “in good order,” so stable and atemporal that she tosses “and so on” at the end of her female taxonomy (“ovaries, womb, vagina”)— you know it when you see it. Yet, as trans theorist Paul Preciado writes in 2008’s Testo Junkie, “the fiction of biofeminity as it is ‘produced’ in the West today doesn’t exist without a whole array of media and biomolecular technologies,” including IVF, DNA sequencing, pre-

scription hormones, and contraception—the tangled web of desire, capital, and medicine that delimits our contemporary embodiment. This biofemininity doesn’t exist without transsexuality. When psychiatrist John Money inaugurated the split between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in 1955, shrinking the definition of bodily womanhood down to the molecular, hormonal level, he boasted that through “surgical, endocrinological, and cultural techniques,” one could “change the gender of any baby up to 18 months.” The gender/sex split comes out of his brutal, non-palliative surgical interventions on those whose physiognomy confounded medical standards, such as intersex babies. Well into the late 1900s, surgeons practiced deeply unsafe, non-consensual experimental treatments on patients whose ‘sex’ didn’t match their ‘gender.’ This reduction of agential subject to malleable flesh instituted an essentialized biofemininity. Here, the proper ‘female’ body is defined by an anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal stability only possible by erasing and mutilating any ‘abnormalities.’

For Preciado, transness names not an essential, constitutive practice of changing one’s sex but the people whose use of techno-sexual supplementation (hormones, dildos, genital surgery, clothing, varied gendered performances) is stigmatized and denaturalized, allowing cisgender people to position their sexual technologies (Viagra prescriptions, contraceptive techniques, dick enlargement surgeries, boob jobs, and pronouns, to name a few) as essential, simply a natural extension of one’s settled gender. If, following Edelman, transness is not an atemporal, fixed identity group but a description of those cursed to represent the instability of identity itself, trans women are not so much women with a singular need to ‘supplement’ their femininity as the symbol for the need to supplement femininity in the first place. Trans people (alongside gay people, Black people, and women) have bodies coded as exponentially more ‘disordered’ or ‘deviant’ than the norm, but appointing us as the paradigmatic figure of body-language incongruence simply reinforces and essentializes our othering.

Edelman cites Afropessimist Calvin Warren: “whenever we equate an ontological position with an identity formation, we perform the very violence that sustains the antagonism.” This is what Jules Gill-Peterson is getting at in her critique of dysphoria as not an “idiopathic medical issue,” but a “social situation of transphobia… the result of a social world where cisgender is granted immense power as the ‘normal,’ default category of human experience.” A curse is never idiopathic, spontaneous—it’s always invoked, projected, pinned onto the unfortunate martyr. One of the major problems with the pathologization of trans people, our longstanding designation in DSM editions as ‘transsexualism,’ ‘gender identity disorder,’ or today, ‘dysphoria,’ is that these labels essentialize transness, presupposing empirical, positivist proof of a unique ‘disorder’ or ‘disjunction’ present inside our brains—a biomedical aberration, not a curse, a social-historical condition, nor the expression of the universal inability for any words to encompass a body.

+++

I have a high school friend, a few years younger than me, who recently came out as trans. The waitlist for gender care in Massachusetts under her insurance was over six months, and she needed to find a psychiatrist to write in ‘support’ of her transness. I gave her as much of my own estrogen as I could, but the Brown Health Services nurse practitioner (who has seen almost every trans woman I know here, and whose gender affirming care training seems to comprise of a couple professional development days over the years) had me on an estrogen dose so low that most endocrinologists would barely consider it HRT at all,

so I had to be stingy. In the last few months before she finally got a prescription at her small New England liberal arts college, she oscillated between a gut-wrenching, full-body desire for hormones and an anxiety that not enough medical professionals had ‘approved’ her identification. (Note for my cis readers: the ‘irreversible’ effects of HRT on trans women take months and months and months to begin, while much of the intense socio-emotional-bodily shift comes in during the first week or two. In short, your body won’t really let you make the wrong decision.) A couple weeks ago, when I got diagnosed with ADHD in a co-working space on the fringes of Providence, half of the nurse’s questions were about my transition, and which surgeries I wanted. Partway through, she offered to write me a letter ‘proving’ the medical necessity of any future facial feminization surgery— she ‘knew a guy in LA.’ I wondered if it was the same guy my roommate was scheduling consultations with, after gathering the requisite litany of doctor’s notes and carefully maintaining the most legible, binary narrative of transness every step of the way. From the forced surgical mutilation of the 1900s to the inaccessible bureaucratic hoops trans people must jump through to legitimize their healthcare as ‘non-cosmetic’ for insurance purposes today, the medical-psychological establishment constructs and reproduces a definition of transness that is antithetical to our actual needs and desires.

Helping trans people by trying to ‘cure’ dysphoria is like fighting for women’s liberation by trying to cure hysteria. These symptomatic interpretations of embodiment mistake cause for effect, and orient identity and liberation around reductive, essentialist standards and an assimilationist politics—defending the woman’s right to their womb instead of liberation from it, or the right of ‘properly’ diagnosed, medicalized trans people to take hormones, instead of unrestricted, uncredentialed access to gender care. Any Foucauldian worth their salt will tell you that biopower is no unidirectional process, but something we must buy into, settling into inherited, institutional identities and expectations while, at least in the best case, contorting them to our needs. Just because a woman or a trans person opposes the patriarchy doesn’t mean they can’t define themselves in reactionary, (bio)essentialist ways that further alienate and disempower others who ostensibly fall under their coalition. One of the hardest parts of being a trans woman is experiencing crippling, fetishizing, pathetic misogyny, then almost always being turned away from the few institutions that have fought tooth and nail for a precarious position beating back the patriarchy. In my four years at Brown, I haven’t seen a single trans woman staff our women’s (and, circa 2018, ‘gender’) center. Well, I guess until two weeks ago, when I got the job—yay? The brutal, infuriating irony is that this TERFy ivory tower—a feminist horizon of efficient pregnancies, corporate IVF benefit programs, and, above all, the exclusion of trans people—curses women to occupy yet another prison, filled with Rapunzels who believe themselves queens. It seems germane to mention that in the original fairy tale, her plans are foiled when she sleeps with her knight in shining armor and grows a baby bump, tipping off her sorceress captor to her escape.

+++

Preciado argues that modern biomedical ‘advances’ don’t alter the underlying power dynamics of sexual difference—“women’s bodies are still constructed… as a public reproductive system… at the service of the national interest.” His concept of an ideology of public reproduction is key for understanding ‘pregnancy’ as a signifier, a weapon wielded against all women, irreducible to pregnancy as a bodily act or experience. The spectral curse or expectation of ‘pregnancy’ hangs over all women, regardless of how many children they do or do not have. Further differentiating pregnancy as biomedical ‘fact’ from the social pressure of ‘pregnancy’ is the way we treat children once they’re actually

born. A classic pro-choice argument notes that Republicans limiting abortion access seem to only care about the child while it’s an unborn fetus. For these conservatives, pregnancy is not about the birth of a child as much as it is about the regulation and control of social, national reproduction. The “public reproductive system” aims for the procreation of a specifically white, wealthy, cishetero child, not the betterment of every woman’s pregnancy. If the recent expansion of anti-abortion legislation demonstrates anything, it’s that just because abortions or the Pill or IVF gives people more control over their own pregnancy doesn’t mean it reduces the power of ‘pregnancy’ over them. One can never reduce signifiers, as elements of social language, to the individual—‘pregnancy’ is never commensurate with anyone’s pregnancy.

In 2004’s No Future, Lee Edelman lays out the political and psychoanalytic consequences of what he calls “reproductive futurism,” or the cult of “The Child,” arguing that all politics are based on which Child society should work to reproduce. Importantly, The Child is a figure, not any individual child, just as ‘pregnancy’ or the “public reproductive system” is no individual pregnancy. The unborn child, with its infinitely naive, innocent possibility, defines how we think about the reproduction of social order— what sort of world will my child inherit, and how can it be free from that which might spoil them? Edelman identifies this impulse across the political spectrum and argues that we must opt out of this rubric altogether, because it inherently excludes queer subjects (those cursed to represent nonreproductive, ‘mechanical’ sex), and opt for a radically presentist politics, not the eugenic urge to control the future. While Edelman only explicitly mentions pregnancy once in the book, keen to emphasize that The Child can never bear any relation to any actual child, it’s clear how this “reproductive futurism” lands upon the female body. Constitutively absent from any politics grounded in the production of a certain Child is choice. The crushing weight of the societal expectation to bear children is what marks the body as female, turning it into an instrument for the reproduction of society, of a ‘correct’ humanness, irrespective of any individual desire for motherhood. This mechanization of the body inaugurates feminine stereotypes of irrationality, sensitivity, and hysteria—the womb can only ‘wander’ if the womb has a duty or telos divorced from your own desires, grounding stereotypes of a feminine body-mind disjuncture.

Historically, hysteria pathologized subjects who were simply resisting reduction to cisheteropatriarchal, reproductive expectations of womanhood. Historian Nancy Theriot notes that 1800s gynecologists, believing “the uterus is the woman,” used hysteria to locate woman’s anguish at “the assumption of marital and maternal obligations” in biology instead of social relations. Hysteria’s meaning has drifted from uterine disorder to emotional excess, revealing how ‘pregnancy,’ even latently, materializes as affirmations of women’s essentially sensitive, pre-linguistic, or sensual (read: maternal) nature. ‘Pregnancy’ has subtly (and not so subtly) remained the central metaphor for the distinctly feminine inability to instrumentalize the body and bring it in line with patriarchy. The woman’s body is always already lacking, meant not to simply exist, but instead bear The Child, and with it, the future. +++

Clearly, all feminine identity tied to the experience of pregnancy is bound to fail, since no woman can give birth to The Child—no actual child can ensure a specific political future by themselves. Feminist struggle centered on ensuring a more ‘perfect’ pregnancy excludes subjects who bear the violences of patriarchal reproductive futurism less because they have a uterus and more because they’re excluded from normative social reproduction altogether. Preciado notes that the Pill was originally designed to curtail births in “poverty-stricken slums,

jungles, and among the most ignorant people.” Black women, colonized women, and disabled women don’t experience patriarchy because of the unique biological fact that they can have kids as much as because they can’t have the ‘right’/white kind of kids. Particularly in a world of IVF and sperm banks, queer and trans people as a class are no less biologically able to have children, yet have become the archetype for spoiling or contaminating innocent youth—an ideological threat to the reproduction of a (cishetero) social order more than a solely biological one.

Certainly, we must fight for the experience of pregnancy to be more supportive and patient-focused, with goals like universal healthcare, the end of non-consensual delivery procedures, and the radical expansion of maternal leave. But defining womanhood and feminist politics around uteruses simply reinforces characterizations of women as baby-machines, and perhaps more importantly, excludes many women who experience misogyny and dehumanization based on their non-relation to ‘pregnancy.’ Truly pro-choice politics requires the separation of the woman’s body from the imperative of social reproduction. This is what is so threatening (and on the flip side, liberating) about the transsexual woman: since we could never give birth in the first place, we paradoxically exemplify the woman’s right to choose. The only proper feminism is a transsexual feminism. +++

So if plumbing the female body for an essential, liberatory truth cannot help us end patriarchy, what can? Emma Cline’s recent book The Guest takes a radically different approach. Cline follows Alex, a 22-year-old sex worker kicked out by her latest male patron, Simon, as she hops from party to party in the Hamptons, carrying little more than an oversized purse, a broken smartphone, and whatever pills she can scrounge from unlocked medicine cabinets. It’s clear that Alex is gorgeous (or at least “tall and skinny enough people often assumed she was”) and fastidious with bodily self-production, constantly pumping eyelash curler, relentlessly poking at a stye, smoothing her wrinkles, brushing her teeth “hard enough that her gums [bleed].” Her beauty, refracted as it is through her (implied) whiteness, is a survival strategy, allowing her to flirt with poolboys to stay in their employer’s mansions and wriggle her way into a friend group’s rental house—“I’m Alex, I think we’ve met, maybe? Right?”—where everyone assumes that someone else must know her, that she must belong.

More than aesthetics, she’s mastered social pliability that lends her legibility, if not power, in almost every scenario. Meeting Simon for the first time, she allows him “to order her a real drink,” laughs while covering “her mouth with her hand, as if she were especially shy,” “her napkin spread primly on her lap,” a performance that doesn’t subside when she moves in with him. Her “point” is “to offer no friction whatsoever”—“if she drank from a glass, she rinsed it immediately,” she didn’t “leave the toothpaste uncapped,” and when she steals painkillers “to stitch the looser hours together,” she monitors her stash “to avoid Simon’s detection.” She makes “a point of cooing over Simon’s dog, and when he comes back from work,” she “splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth… waiting, like the end of every day was a first date.” Of course, even this abjected display is not enough for him, as he kicks her to the streets after he finds her—drunk, impulsive, bored—splashing in the pool with one of his friends’ more youthful husbands during a dinner party. Her talent for social lubrication lets her drift through the Hamptons, slipping into beach bonfires and finding teenage boys willing to house her and feed her, while her pill collection dwindles and an ex-lover demands a

debt repaid, but in the end it isn’t enough to win back Simon, leaving her alone on the lawn of a party she wasn’t invited to.

Alex is little more than a flat screen for the men she manipulates, a reflection of their feminine ideal, a naive, prepubescent sex-dollmaid-therapist-mother transformer, constantly shifting her disposition to deflect tension. Cline is clear about the dissociation associated with this nervous masquerade, her need to pop pills and let her mind wander during sex. When she wakes up next to a teenager at a party, caught trying to make off with his wallet, she sleeps with him to protect herself, and at his touch “suddenly her body was involved, her brain forced to recognize what was happening… then nothing.”

Alex has some sort of agency over her objectification, literally turning her docile performance of every signifier of desirable femininity into wage labor, but seems to lose her body, and perhaps her history too, in this move. In repressing her desires, metamorphizing into “a sort of inert piece of social furniture… the general size and shape of a young woman,” her identity becomes reduced to pure reaction, the crisp observations of a novelist-protagonist gathering “more information to file away” in order to glide through hostile, wealthy, male-dominated spaces. After hearing about one man’s friends from elementary school, Alex muses:

“Imagine the thread staying the same, the world remaining static. Would it be stifling, punishing, or was it the reason why all these people had this peculiar certainty about who they were, confidence that their identity had a context? In her hometown, there was context, but the context was negative, a vortex.”

Abandoning context, history, and kinship in order to curse oneself to the infinitely malleable sign of a woman utterly dissociated from bodily desire might let you survive for a while, but you’ll never be anything more than a guest.

In her review of Cline’s novel in Bookforum, Jane Hu identifies “this kind of aggressively spectral heroine—thin in more ways than one” as “increasingly a mainstay of contemporary Anglophone fiction” from Rachel Cusk to Salley Rooney to Ottessa Moshfegh, defined by “characterological outlines [rather] than their interior motivations.” Last year, in this very paper, Anabelle Johnston read East Asian “racial melancholia” into this trend of chick-lit about “self-inflicted powerlessness, trading I can’t for I won’t,” the absence of choice exchanged for the twisted, marginal agency of abjection, disaffection, and the rejection of intersubjectivity altogether. But is this really a viable resistance to the burden the patriarchy puts on our bodies and relationships? How does the endless troping of young female pain into a meta-textual given, little more than a contemporary genre convention, help us define a more liberatory womanhood? (It’s worth noting that if anything, Cline is satirizing this trend by evacuating Alex of clear motivation and history altogether, expressing the impossibility of this comportment, how it constructs femininity as a two-dimensional looking glass incompatible with the fullness of being.)

Pain and abjection are certainly central to transfemininity, and if anything, dissociation is a distinctly trans technique of bodily management, but I don’t think I have the same access to this hollow masquerade. No matter how pliable, young, submissive, white, and uncommitted to kinship and basic dignity I am, social legibility in the cishetero halls of power seems inaccessible. If anything, the base transfeminine experience is defined by deference and contraction, the need to make oneself coquettish, small, and non-threatening, so that, God willing, the men might just ignore us instead of kill us, and the women might let us into their world as something of a particularly effeminate gay best friend instead of a sexual predator prowling their sacrosanct restrooms. Let’s just say that I don’t think I’d be able to crash glitzy Hamptons parties looking the way I do today. Of course, these

pliant strategies are far from a panacea for cis women either—as Alex learns in the most brutal ways, being fuckable doesn’t necessarily make you marriable. However, when I talk to my trans friends, our answer is not a better, more convincing masquerade but a return to an active, impassioned intersubjectivity—chosen family, caustic misandry.

I saw a sticker the other day that said transsexuals have got to get meaner. No matter what my 70-year-old media studies professor says, trans women aren’t simply reproducing and reifying patriarchal signifiers of femininity by learning to do makeup and laugh with their hands over their mouths. As harrowing, difficult, and dangerous as it is for us to demand even the most basic dignity, our near-total social abjection requires the creation of new communal structures—trans mutual aid networks, rave fundraisers, T4T love—because most of us will never have the option to settle for underwhelming, well-behaved, cishetero domesticity. Sure, I’m a little biased, since basically all my trans friends are lesbians, but in the same way that the political lesbians of the late 1960s represented a shift away from any womanhood defined by men, this separatist trend marks a refusal for trans woman to bear the same curse as cis woman. Nonetheless, taking anti-essentialism seriously means recognizing that these techniques are not static. Traditional masquerade is not foreclosed for every trans woman, and trans assimilation is not a pipedream but a quickly approaching reality in modeling agencies and software companies across the country (if not quite the globe). The key lies in a constantly shifting, adaptive feminism that orients itself around those most punished for their relationship to ‘pregnancy’ and The Child without simply replacing one fixed, essentialized future with another, so that we might actually escape a form of social reproduction that reduces our bodies and relationality to reflections of phallic power.

+++

In short, women’s liberation cannot be founded in either body or language by themselves— the exclusionary bioessentialism of TERFs nor the evacuation of bodily pleasure at the service of social legibility—but in the very gap or disjunction between the two, where womanhood comes to mean in the first place. I find transition a deeply contradictory process. The pills I take decimate my libido and thin my blood, but never have I felt more bodily pleasure; getting misgendered in public still feels like a bucket of ice water being dumped on my head, but a pronoun circle makes me want to leap out of the LGBTQ+ Center window. Even when my boobs grow in, I’ll still probably end up feeling like a man half the time I have sex, and as nice as it is for people to comment on my Instagram posts the way they do on cis women’s, I’ll still look at half the images and only see the broadness of my shoulders. What could be more paradoxical than working to be read as the very thing my infertility and queerness foreclose? No collection of labels and signs and relationality alone can lead me, or us, towards a womanhood that works, that falls upon the body without violence, just as no sexual technology or reproductive efficiency can spare us the pressure of reproductive futurism on our bodies. This, perhaps, could name a transsexual feminism—the body that refuses the Child and the sign that refuses the reflective, isolated void of masquerade. That’s the thing about curses. The only way to break them is a prayer—the complete belief in the power of words to do more than signify, and the power of matter to mean more than what you see.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 is keeping the living room mirror.

To me, there is something special about the way the feet and legs feel like they are floating. I like how the skin color matches the floor and the way the socks are shaded.

JOSHUA KOOLIK B’24

the can and can’t hangs

Embarrassed Friends, Concerned Freshmen, and Indie Turns 21

Poorly rolled joints, sweaty basement beer, lukewarm Barefoot moscato—mix that all together, and you have the sweet, sweet smell of college!

As I write this on a Friday night, it feels almost unnecessary to proclaim that I fall into the esteemed camp of the “can’t hang.” I’m usually among the first to go home, was (fittingly) the last to turn 21, and have spent innumerable nights pathos-, logos-, and ethos-ing a friend to stay in with me. As many of my friends were experiencing a wild life in The City (yes, that one), I was living a largely sober summer, aside from the occasional glass of wine with my parents at dinner. Ultimately even that fell through, as few things are more embarrassing than your dad noting that you seem “a little tipsy.”

My drinking journey in college has also been interesting, even if not unique. Following what might qualify as a traumatic event (the aftermath of the very freshman “rager” I referenced in my debut issue), I swore off drinking for the rest of the year. And to be quite honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever fully recovered from that fateful night, which involved an ill-timed bowl of spicy ramen and an encounter with the icy streets of Providence. I’ll leave it at that.

Dear Indy,

But wretched memories aside, I’ve come to accept that substances play a vital role in the campus ecosystem for participants, bystanders, and conscientious objectors alike. They give us the license to do those things we’ve always wanted to do—chat up the funny girl, climb the chain link fence, check out the upstairs bathroom. And I wonder, does this freedom have to be a bad thing? Sometimes, yes. I’m not telling you it’s okay to be an asshole. But I also propose this: we need our innocent but messy friends, regrettable texts, and spilled secrets to keep things interesting amidst the drudgery of work. Plus, your shenanigans give me something juicy to write about. ;)

My friend gets super embarrassing when they’re drunk. What should I do?

Sincerely, Fremdschämen

Dear Fremdschämen,

Your question illuminates a cornerstone of college drinking culture: which is that it’s very, very embarrassing. Beyond the fact that milling about in a room semi-drunk is arguably inherently awkward, being drunk drunk can lead to even further humiliation. However, your question also leaves a lot to the imagination, as “embarrassing” is a pretty sweeping category. Is your friend dancing-a-little-too-hard-embarrassing? Yakking-in-the-street-embarrassing? Or (and I pray this isn’t the case) telling-people-where-else-they-applied-to-college-embarrassing?

If the embarrassing act is a threat to national security (or just really weird), you should bring it up with your friend the next morning. What they need is a reminder that while drinking gives them some license, it’s not an all-level security clearance pass. Bring them a blue Gatorade and tell them: “You need to stop telling people that you early-ed to Yale,” or, “It wasn’t cool when you tweeted about my Sayles sexual fantasy.”

But apart from such extreme circumstances, my advice is to extend grace to your friend. You can gently guide them out of the room when you hear them searching for elevated surfaces, deftly enter the conversation they’re fumbling, and remove them from spaces with glassware or potential hookups. And as long as they’re not hurting anyone (including their future self) in their endeavors, let them have their fun. My dad tells me that it’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed, and I’ll piggyback off of that great point and say that you can only be embarrassed if you remember it. They don’t need to know that last night they told everyone Jack Harlow was their top Spotify artist, or answered someone’s “Hi!” with “I’m good!”

Finally: I’d advise you to let go of your own fremdschämen and lean into that embarrassing stuff. Because age has given me great wisdom (I can legally drink), I’ll tell you this: someday down the line, when you’re old and boring and picking up diaper rash creams, you’ll probably wish that you’d spent a few more nights yelling at the aux-man for more Drake. Life is short and college is even shorter, so go embarrass yourself a little.

Dear Uncharted Territory,

Dear Indy,

I feel weird because I wasn’t cool in high school, so now I’m at college with no experience drinking, doing drugs, or going to parties in general. Do you have any advice?

Sincerely, Uncharted Territory

Contrary to what your peers want you to believe, a recent Fox News poll shows that 94% of Brown students were not very cool in high school.* You might be surprised because of how sensationally cool I am now (I mean, look, they gave me my own column!), but your very own Indie was Key Club President, highly involved with the yearbook, and went a very long time without a first kiss. And not that everyone will be as radically honest with you as I’m being, but I can promise you that the longer you’re on campus, the more the illusion of coolness will fade. One day you’ll look around and realize that you’re actually surrounded by hordes of theater kids, varsity badminton players, and well-known names on the Northeast debate circuit. With that aside, I asked my friends for some suggestions. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Just like with sex, most people have less experience with this stuff than you think.

2. When your drink starts “actually tasting really good,” that’s a sign that it’s time to take a break.

3. It’s totally fine to not take the shot. No one will care. At all.

4. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t (i.e. how to smoke with the strange contraption you’ve just been handed). That is embarrassing, and people will know.

5. If there’s a theme, respect it. The jeans/black top combo can wait another night.

6. When you inevitably find yourself at a table of men playing beer pong, don’t let them tell you that there are any legitimate rules about when you have to drink. It’s beer pong, not the Constitution.

7. And finally: beware the Jungle Juice.

*Obviously, not real. The fact checkers made me include this.

The Bulletin

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Friday 09/29 5PM-8PM: The Magic Car Wash

Join Portal Rental, a Providence art band, as they transport viewers to a portal inside the back of a box truck. Explore a series of short experimental films featuring music, live-action footage, stop-motion, and puppetry in these videos. The event is free, and screenings run for eight minutes at a time. Each portal can hold four to six visitors at one time.!

Location: 195 District Park, Downtown Providence, Providence, RI 02903

Saturday 09/30 @10AM-12PM: Pollinator Party

Community Libraries of Providence are hosting a Pollinator Party to connect with nature in the city and connect with the lovely pollinators in your home garden. Come explore the pollinator meadow with URI Master Gardeners, attend a wild bee walk with an entomologist, learn how to grow native plants, check out honeybees with a beekeeper, and participate in a giveaway with surprises! Take advantage of the fall season to grow a garden of your own. This event is open to all ages.

Location: Davis Park Community Garden, Providence, RI 02909

Saturday 09/30 @10AM-2PM: Youth-Led Intergenerational Hike

This youth-led hike through the Narrow River, geared toward Black and brown folks, will take participants on a two-mile hike while sharing in guided mindfulness exercises and discussing the Black and Indigenous history of the land. This 45-minute hike will be on mostly flat terrain, with frequent stops and the occasional root or rock underfoot. Pizza will be served afterward. This hike is intergenerational and open to the public!

Location: The MEO Lodge, 518 Snuff Mill Road, Saunderstown RI 02874

Saturday 10/07 @11AM-12PM: Let’s Play Mexican Lotería! | ¡Vamos a Jugar Lotería Mexicana!

Bring your family along to play Lotería, a traditional Mexican bingo game that uses pictures on cards rather than numbered ping pong balls. Play for the chance to win prizes in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month! This free event is open to all and recommended for children ages three and up.

Location: Pawtucket Public Library, 13 Summer St, Pawtucket, RI 02860

Arts

Saturday 09/30 @1PM-3:30PM: Motion State Dance Film Festival

Launch

Enjoy a series of dance films in the sixth annual launch of the Motion State Dance Film Festival, a year-long traveling short film festival in New England. The films are dedicated to a diverse range of exploratory contemporary choreography. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session and a Dance Community Conversation to discuss filmmaking in dance. Make sure to RSVP for free at motionstatearts.org!

Location: Providence Public Library, 150 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903

Monday 10/02 @5PM-6:30PM: New Battambang Market Opening Reception

Join artists Dana Heng and Moy Chuong as they showcase their art in an experimental exhibit named after the grocery store that Heng’s parents owned in the 2000s. In this collection of the mundane and mythical, temporalities mix in the ceramics, prints, and other installations that will be on display for ten days at the Joan T. Boghossian Gallery. Stop by to check out their work!

Location: Providence Public Library, 150 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903

Wednesday 10/04 @6PM-7:30PM: Bump in the Night – Four-Week Horror Writing Course

Are you an adult interested in spooky stories, and looking to write one of your own? Prepare for Halloween with this four-week horror writing course with Victoria Dalpe, a Providence-based writer and painter. The course will contain a selection of reading assignments across various horror genres, and writers will be participating in group shares and critiques of their writing. This is open to writers of all levels. If you plan on attending all four classes, sign up and register through Eventbrite for the course.

Location: Mt. Pleasant Library Community Room, 315 Academy Ave, Providence, RI 02908

Friday 10/6 @8PM-10:30PM: Hermit / Awfully Pretty / sevenbasicplots / Good for Willow

From Rhode Island to New Jersey, the northeast screamo scene invites you to join some of its newest bands for a night of emo-violence at the Red Ink Community Library. While Good for Willow has been around for the past few years, this show will serve as the EP release for Providence’s Awfully Pretty and the first show for sevenbasicplots since their EP came out last week. Tickets are $10, PWYC.

Location: 130 Cypress St, Providence, RI 02906

Every Monday and Thursday @5PM-7PM: Canvas with the Stop Torture RI Coalition

Help knock on doors in District 2 with the Stop Torture RI Coalition as they raise awareness and advocate for the Reform Solitary Confinement Act. If you are interested in assisting them in codifying solitary confinement policies and legislation, check out their Instagram and Facebook at @reformsolitaryri.

Mutual aid* & community support

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

Saturday 09/30 @2PM-5PM: Community Baby Shower

Form link: bit.ly/sfbabydrive | Instagram: @sistafireri

SISTA Fire, an intergenerational network of women and nonbinary people of color organizing in Rhode Island, is hosting a Community Baby Shower that will have a pop-up clothing station for baby and maternity clothes. If you have any clothes for newborns from infants to eighteen months that are new or lightly used, visit the link above or sign up to coordinate your donation.

Location: West End Recreation Center, 109 Bucklin St, Providence, RI 02907

Order Free National COVID-19 Rapid Tests

Beginning on September 25, every household in the United States can once again place an order for four more free COVID-19 rapid tests ordered directly to their home. Make sure to check online to see if your rapid test’s expiration date has been extended before throwing them out!

Sunday 10/01: Pocket Rocket / Vertigo / The Moon Rakers / Austin Come support a benefit concert where proceeds go to a Providence musician to help with mobility and comprehensive care so that he is able to play music again. This show is also sponsored by Ross Music, a local music shop. Show up for a fellow artist! Tickets are $10 at the door.

Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St, Providence, RI 02906

Hispanic Heritage Month

As of last summer, folks who identify as Hispanic/Latine made up more than 15% of Rhode Island’s population. Providence, specifically, is home to a beautiful, bustling Latine community. This Hispanic Heritage Month, the Indy is featuring Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA for short) and its role as a champion of Latinidad in the Ocean State. As a part of the “Latino Places that Matter” project, RILA’s Barrio Tours take participants through neighborhoods, streets, and other landmarks significant to the rich history of Latine people in Rhode Island.

The Calle Broa’ barrio tour travels through a handful of locations along Broad Street, which has historically signified a steady cultivation of Latinidad in the heart of South Providence. First stop is Fefa’s Market, established by Doña Josefina Rosario in the mid-1900s—the first Dominican bodega in Rhode Island, which would also eventually become the first Dominican restaurant in Providence. The Latin American Community Center (LACC) is next on the barrio tour, which opened in 1970 to help Latine immigrants in their transition to U.S. life. Between employment support and access to language services, LACC was a hub of resources for the new generation of Latines that would grow into the bustling, vibrant community we see today. Soon after LACC was established, the Calvary Baptist Church, or “El Calvario,” opened its doors to a Spanish-speaking congregation, and became pivotal in La Calle Broa’s deep history. The Antillas Restaurant, once located across the street from El Calvario, served Latin dishes to Providence-area workers, largely Latin and Caribbean migrants. Though the restaurant itself was demolished decades ago, the legacy of Antillas lingers in the brigade of Latin restaurants that remain on Broad St. today. Finally, paying homage to the thousands of Puerto Rican migrants that have come to characterize much of the Latine community in Providence, the Calle Broa’ tour visits Borinquen Street. Originally called Bishop Street and causing trouble among the Puerto Ricans who lived in the area, the changing of the name to Borinquen not only marked early forms of resistance as Rhode Island rapidly diversified, but helped carve a space for Puerto Ricans specifically in the gradient of Latinidad in the Northeast.

Other Barrio Tours include trips through Cranston, Blackstone Valley, and other historical streets in Providence. The next Barrio Tour through La Calle Broa’ will take place on Tuesday, October 10 from 5:30PM-7PM. Registration is required, and more information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/barriotours23.