The College Hill Independent — Vol. 47 Issue 8

the

December

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2023

Volume 47 Issue 08

06 YOUR SEX DOLL DISTURBS ME 12 FROM HISHAM AWARTANI 13 YES, BROWN CAN DIVEST

THE SPARKLE ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

47 08 12.01

This Issue 00 “REHEARSAL NO.12” Eileen Feng

02 WEEK IN TIME WELL SPENT Riley Gramley & Luca Suarez

03 MINIMAL BRAIN DYSFUNCTION Kolya Shields

06 YOUR SEX DOLL DISTURBS ME Corinne Leong

10 EVIL_LOVELY Angela Qian

11 WHEN YOU LIGHT YOUR CANDLES

Arman Deendar, Cameron Leo & Lily Seltz

12 FROM HISHAM AWARTANI, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29 Hisham Awartani

13 YES, BROWN CAN DIVEST

Sofia Barnett with Cameron Leo & Lily Seltz

15 TOE TAGS

Masthead* MANAGING EDITORS 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 Feat. Aboud Ashhab SCIENCE + TECH Mariana Fajnzylber Lucia Kan-Sperling Caleb Stutman-Shaw WORLD Tanvi Anand Arman Deendar Angela Lian

16 IN A TWILIGHT PHASE

X Claire Chasse Joshua Koolik

17 IN MEMORIAM

DEAR INDY Solveig Asplund

Katy Pickens

Isaac McKenna

18 SEX AND THE CITY OF PROVIDENCE, RI Solveig Asplund

19 BULLETIN

LIST Chachi Banks Saraphina Forman

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 Angela Qian COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS Rafael Ash Elaina Bayard Maria Diniz Benjamin Flaumenhaft Anji Friedbaur Dylan Griffiths Sam Ho Becca Martin-Welp Nadia Mazonson Adelaide Ng DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS Corinne Leong Angela Lian Ella Spungen SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM Jolie Barnard Kian Braulik Angela Lian Kolya Shields Yuna Shprecter

BULLETIN BOARD Qiaoying Chen Angelina Rios-Galindo

Qiaoying Chen & Angelina Rios-Galindo

From the Editors By the time Lily gets back from Granada, I’ll be gone. From my corner of Conmag I pretend to type but really I’m listening to the sound of her voice as she reads “special-style” with Sam, whom I’ve never quite been able to call Stew, clear tumbling self-possessed sentences which ring with a confidence that far belies her years. And we are often puzzled by each other. It was easy, in the beginning and far into the middle, to disguise my shyness as nonchalance . But Lily refused to let me pass into the realm of the not-quite-known. Her kindness and hope are inexhaustible, although her mugs are highly breakable. See, that’s a joke Lily will like. The boundary is where the interesting work happens. And so I’m grateful for our partnership. Remember that one Copy Sam and I made you smoke cigarettes in Conmag? Ha ha. It’s all become unimaginable without you. So for now I’ll listen to you read with Sam and drink the sparkling water you brought me. I’ve been very blessed to even have this few months’ time. Also, Sam got arrested special-style this semester and I thought it should be in the Indy record somewhere. XOXO! Bye! -AQ

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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 Hisham — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, MA

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement 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.

Letters to the editor are welcome; scan the QR code here or email us at theindy@gmail.com!

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Week in Time Well Spent The 102-Year-Old Man → The first time I met him was completely ( TEXT LUCA SUAREZ & RILEY GRAMLEY by accident. To be honest, I don’t think I even knew what a centenarian was back then, and I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it meant being over 100 years old. If anything, I probably assumed it had something to do with possessing an equestrian lower half. But it was the middle of November, and I had decided that the crinkly copper leaves and faded brick walls of College Hill had overstayed their welcome. It was my first fall at Brown University, and I was fairly certain that the world was supposed to feel a lot more magical by this point. Or maybe I was supposed to be missing home a lot less. Either way, something was missing from my ideal college experience, and I was going to find it.

Armed with a false sense of ambition and two layers of Patagonia sweaters, I set off in search of something warm, interesting, and cheap within walking distance of my musty dorm. My prime objective was to discover an obscure coffee shop with quiet tunes and an ornery old cat, but I would settle for a dusty library filled with antiquarian books, or maybe even a 7/11 slushie if I was really desperate.

While the menagerie of shrieks, howls, and horns on Thayer faded into the distance, I found myself drifting towards Wickenden for a pre-expedition snack. But as I stumbled my way over obtrusive cobblestones and knotted roots, a shabby little grocery store caught my eye. The place was a fossil, covered in a thick layer of dust and preserved in a shell of chipped paint. A single sign sat proudly in the window; “HOME OF THE 102-YEAR-OLD MAN”. Such a bold claim, I thought. “Here’s the 102-year-old man, see him in all his glory. Next year will either be his magnum opus or his tragic demise. Either way, we’re going to need a new sign.” Then again, being a 102-year-old man is no easy feat.

Curiosity overwrote my rational senses, and without any further thinking, I pushed past the creaky old door and stepped inside.

I noticed two things the moment I entered. The first was that there was another (smaller) sign hanging in the window that read “CLOSED” in bright red lettering. Truthfully, the door was a bit difficult to open, but I had assumed it was because it was as old as its owner.

The second was that the store was completely empty minus a trio of elderly men crowded around the counter. Their heads swiveled towards me like disgruntled owls, their gleaming eyes boring into mine from beneath furrowed brows. I had clearly stumbled upon something far more intriguing than a simple deli. Assuming the role of a naive tourist, I began perusing the store’s wares, occasionally stopping and thoughtfully inspecting an item to demonstrate my shopping expertise. Their eyes remained glued to my back as I meandered through the room, before I suddenly realized that I had run out of wares to ponder. In a moment of quick thinking that would have impressed even the most experienced improv groups, I hastily grabbed a stick of butter sitting nearby and sheepishly approached the counter.

The 102-year-old man peered down at me from atop his throne of trinkets and knickknacks, completely in disbelief that I dared trespass on his domain. Or at least that’s what it felt like. In actuality, he was much shorter than I was, and yet somehow he still towered overhead. I slapped the offending stick onto the countertop and grasped frantically for my wallet, which seemed to be purposely evading my grasp. He scrutinized me from head to toe, his mouth curled inward like a sardonic question mark. He remained silent as nickels and quarters spilled from my pockets, as well as when I spent five minutes picking them up from the floor. He only spoke to ask if I wanted a receipt, to which I responded by snatching my stick of

DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY )

butter off the counter and bolting for the door, my cheeks flushed from embarrassment.

The 102-year-old man would become a topic of frequent discussion amongst my peers, as I would often regale them with tales of the bizarre encounter. Occasionally, the stick of butter would be brought out from the recesses of my minifridge as proof of the legend’s authenticity.

His store became a landmark that I pointed out to my parents on Family Weekend, or a waypoint for navigation after a night of drunken escapades. In the spring, it became a habit of mine to insist on walking past despite my traveling companions’ protests about disobeying Google Maps. I never went back in, but I swear I saw him stare back into my eyes through the shop’s glassy walls. His gaze was less hostile now, but still omnipotent.

I later found out that he had been working at the store for over 65 years. He had a street dedicated to him in 2020, and was even featured on the r/providence subreddit for a parade held in his honor. He had watched buildings rise and fall, seen a million students age. But he isn’t alone in celebrating his centennial status.

It turns out that Rhode Island has over 247 centenarians who meet up every year at the Governor’s Centenarian Brunch to discuss their plans and schemes. Supposedly, their numbers are increasing exponentially every year, and nobody quite knows why. Am I saying that there’s a secret society of elders running the state of Rhode Island from the shadows? No. Do I think the Fountain of Youth is hidden deep in the foundation of College Hill? How absurd.

Am I suggesting that the homely little shop down by Wickenden is a front for some kind of underground centenarian operation? Of course not. But even if it was, I’d still go past and tell anyone willing to listen about the 102-year-old man and try to catch a glimpse of his wisdom through the glass.

LUCA SUAREZ B’26 is trying to get into a Centenarian Brunch.

Chasing Joy → The classroom is dim and silvery, early

winter. We are all sitting, eagerly, in the English course Nonfiction Now, anticipating the arrival of Ross Gay: poet, writer, and joy-extraordinaire.

We each have our copy of his most recent book, Inciting Joy, placed in front of us. Some of our copies still have their sleeves on while others are sleeveless and noticeably battered or stained from several weeks of studying Gay’s work.

Through the door frame, Gay lopes in. He’s wearing a zip-up sweatshirt, pale maroon and unassuming, with the word “wilderness” written in fading letters. A green friendship bracelet and a chunky black watch are wrapped around his left wrist. He’s very tall. He takes his watch off as he greets us, smiling.

Gay writes what he calls “delights,” mini-essays on a detail of one’s day that delights or

incites some small joy. Partway through our conversation, Gay, laughing, his hands moving through the air, tells us a story, one of these delights. He describes a scene from some weeks ago in which a couple of young kids, dressed as ghosts, helped him find a river. Gay doesn’t carry a smartphone, he explains, so he had to rely on the nonsensical but well-intentioned directions muffled through layers of white sheets.

After this story, Gay turns to our professors, Elizabeth Rush and Michael Stewart, asking them if he might pose a question to all of us. They nod. “What are you loving these days?” he asks. We go around letting Gay into what we’re loving, our own delights. I say something about how I had been reminded, that week, of a piece of art I really love by Ann Hamilton. But, I really want to say much more. I want to talk about each joy of my day.

I want to describe running on the East Bay Bike Path, the Providence River licking the shoreline, the river water folding into blue pleats in the wind. I want to explain that at a lifeguarding shift at the Nelson, I watched a son in a pink sweater help his elderly mother into the pool. He happened to lower her into a plot of sunshine. I want to say that one evening, while walking to Prospect Terrace, the light was the color of mustard. When I think back to the delights of my day, it is not the color of the sunshine that pulls a smile across my face, but rather that I spent a moment studying the sunshine, acknowledging that it was there at all. Gay tells our class, “the more you describe, the more you notice.” He taught us, then, how to notice our joys.

Gay thinks about what joy means, how it manifests. In The Book of Delights, Gay writes: “the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life.” Through a particular fig tree, a couple mushrooms, through descriptions of his father’s freckles, like carrot seeds, through the exhaustive excitement with which he describes gardens or compost, Gay finds out what parts of life compose its joys. Gay narrates how joys grow, even from our sorrows, like determined dandelions through the cracks in pavement.

After Gay’s class visit, I started to write about some joy, even if a few clunky sentences, each day. I write a lot about Providence, about walking through these neighborhoods above this town. I try and write even if I don’t want to, even if joy or delight has not necessarily been part of my day. But, it’s in that practice, of searching hard for the joys, that I feel most grateful to Gay, who spends his writing life, courageously, searching.

RILEY GRAMLEY B’25.5 is not delighted by you running on the pool deck.

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Minimal Brain n

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Stimulants, Neoliberalism, and the Neurobiological Imaginary

→ Last September, at nine in the morning on a Saturday, I went to

an Olneyville coworking space to get stimulants. A few days earlier, through some Reddit research, I had found out about a “digital health company” called Done, committed to “high quality psychiatric chronic care management.” Its sleek, Squarespace-lite website advertised that “ADHD shouldn’t be this hard.” A quote from a former NFL player revealed that with the company’s help he had “learned how to turn [his] ADHD into a strength by better managing it,” ending with two bicep emojis ( ). In a section of their blog (or “Knowledge Base”) tagged “Creativity & ADHD,” Done highlights stories of artists harnessing their diagnoses for “darkly inspirational,” “thought-provoking creations… contain[ing] a powerful simplicity,” powered by patients’ research-backed proficiency in “divergent thinking” and “overcoming knowledge constraints”—sign me up! Making an appointment was a breeze. A “1 minute … clinical assessment” (“How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?” Very Often) and a little biographical information secured me a diagnostic session with a nurse for the coming weekend. I had the choice of a clinical referral to a telehealth session, or one in-person diagnostic. Still waiting to make it off of Thundermist Health’s primary care waiting list, I opted to bike across the highway.

I entered the gleaming, gut-renovated loft a few minutes late. (“How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?” Very Often.) Just then, a woman I took to be my nurse came rushing out from an adjoining hallway; careening toward the bathroom, she told me she’d be right with me. Let’s call her Sam. Sam came out a moment later, gulping down water, and told me that “they” (Done) scheduled her appointments back-to-back, without breaks. We walked to a tiny ‘exam’/office room, where she told me that she was a nurse practitioner at Rhode Island Hospital and contracted out her Psychiatric-Mental Health specialization on days off (at this point, it did strike me that only weekend appointments were available on the website). After discussing her husband’s paintball career—middling, apparently—she asked me about my background, interests, and academic history. I took a squeeze ball (“How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?”

Very Often), and answered dutifully, telling her what medications I took (estrogen, hormone blockers), which turned the next ten minutes of our 30 minutes together into a transition interrogation. How long has it been?

(A year and a half.) What were my goals? (Use your imagination.)

What surgeries did I want? (None of your business, dear reader.) On the

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

( TEXT KOLYA SHIELDS DESIGN SIMON YANG ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING )

t on

bright side, she did tell me she “knew a surgeon” in Las Vegas if I was looking, and would be happy to write me a letter attesting to my proper transness.

Finally, she asked me why I came in that day. I said that when I was in my early tweens, I had been evaluated for ADHD and found to have a good number of symptoms, but that medicalization had been left up to me and my parents. We decided I didn’t really need it at the time.

Recently, I said, I had found my distractibility, procrastination, executive dysfunction, and inability to hold onto a single object for longer than about two minutes a little too unbearable, and thought medication could help. Did I wiggle my legs and squish that stress ball with a little more conscious force than usual, and exaggerate the academic ramifications of my inattention? Maybe. But I wasn’t about to let the appointment fee go to waste, even if I was saving a lot of money compared to a full neuropsychological assessment, which averages $5000-$6000. More than anything, it’s been years since I’ve entered a medical interaction with anything less than Machiavellian shrewdness. As a transsexual, I’ve never been able to receive health care without lying at least a little bit.

Sam nodded knowingly in response, and turned towards her computer, pulling up the short ‘diagnostic’ quiz I had filled out the day before. My answers may have included just a hair of exaggeration, but in my defense, symptomatic answers (“How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?” Very Often) were not randomly distributed on either side of the Never to Very Often spectrum, so a long string of Very Oftens marked a patient more than ready for the irresistible possibility of “turn[ing] their ADHD into a strength.” Sam scrolled through my responses and said that I had “100% ADHD” and, chuckling, that “unlike most people [she] sees,” low anxiety and depression scores— lucky me? As satisfying as that maximized percentage was, I knew from reading Done’s website that “mild ADHD” was a bit of a misnomer, as “someone either has ADHD or they do not,” so I wasn’t sure what that number really meant. Perhaps it simply referred to the “severity of symptoms” that Done said “might be what leads a patient to seek treatment,” and hand over $200 to the telehealth company. Well, here I was seeking treatment, and I got it. The next thing I knew, she was writing the details of my script down on a piece of her stationary, printed with a cloudscape and a quote reminding the reader to “appreciate the slower things in life.”

Blitzkrieg Amphetamines (the type of stimulants used in most ADHD meds) got their start as an active ingredient in asthma medication in the early 1900s. Almost concurrent with their release were tales of ‘misuse’— proto-speed-freaks popping open their inhalers to swallow the amphetamine-stuffed cotton fillers. Of course, Smith, Kline, and French, the pharmaceutical company popularizing this medicine, threatened legal action against those calling their drug “addicting.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Nazis were manufacturing massive amounts of methamphetamine for their soldiers to power them through their brutal Blitzkrieg campaigns. While alcohol and opium were discouraged—signs of Weimar decadence and moral decay—stimulants promised to perfect the hyper-productive Aryan soldier-machine—“Germany, Awake!” The Allies followed suit, supplying an estimated 250 million “energy tablets” to American and British troops between 1942 and 1945. The U.S. military, for one, was hooked, distributing vast quantities of amphetamines to soldiers in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East through the end of the 20th century. Over twothirds of pilots deployed during Operation Desert Storm reported using amphetamines on duty. These pills were no less popular on the home front, and were advertised across the gender divide for their ability to “banish apathy, subjective weakness … to restore mental alertness, enthusiasm, and the capacity for work,” as well as to fight “the severe depressions of menopause.”

It’s no coincidence that the postwar period of highly standardized, repetitive Fordist production aligns with sky-high rates of socially acceptable, over-the-counter stimulant usage—historian Jonathan Levy writes that through the world wars, “mass production and total war developed a strong affinity … mobilizing the mechanization of capital [and] bringing factory discipline onto the battlefield (or was it the other way around?).” Referencing Levy, theorist Benjamin Fong argues that “if Americans were not faster,

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more alert, and more efficient, our Communist enemies were going to win … we had a military mindset, and so we took military drugs.” Much like the Germans, the pharmo-military industrial complex relied on fetishes of self-perfectibility: the dream of a perfect pill for a perfect Man for a perfect nation. Journalist Frank Owens argues that amphetamines were “America’s first mass-marketed lifestyle drug,” with every profitable new formulation promising to make you skinny, spirited, enthused, happy, functional, whole, without the traditional risk of irritability, jitters, paranoia, and dependency.

However, as intravenous injection and ‘disordered’ usage spread—Allen Ginsberg in 1965: “all the nice gentle dope fiends are getting screwed up by the real horror monster Frankenstein Speedfreaks”—amphetamines’ near-universal availability would come to a close. In 1970, Congress created the modern drug scheduling system, regulating the sale, distribution, and research of psychoactive substances based on “medical use” and “potential for abuse.” By 1971, the FDA had moved all amphetamines to Schedule II, capable of medical use yet highly controlled for their addictiveness, radically reducing their availability. Almost immediately, a stimulant black market was born, dominated by meth, cocaine, and bootleg mixes of caffeine, amphetamine salts, and other drugs that both mirrored and surpassed the effects of legal stimulants. +++ There are qualitative differences between some black market drugs and their pharmaceutical counterparts, but, research suggests, not between meth (amphetamines) and d-amphetamines such as Adderall: the single additional methyl group which differentiates meth does not appear to make it any more abusable than its legal equivalent, even if it might have a slightly more intense high. Stimulants didn’t become dangerous in 1971, nor did the FDA suddenly discover which drugs are purely deleterious and which are medicine. Drug use cannot be understood outside of production and distribution processes enacted by the very legal and socio-cultural divisions, such as FDA scheduling and the widespread prohibition of public safe injection sites, that purport to arbitrate the empirical, objective, biochemical reality of drugs’ properties, impacts, and consumption.

Fong points out that after 1971, (newly-)illicit stimulant and opioid use in the U.S. skyrocketed precisely where healthcare access was most lacking. As he argues, “the difference between licit and illicit drugs is a class distinction,” a socio-political configuration, not an essential, material property.

Caffeine/coffee, cocaine, and amphetamines, which all stimulate or accelerate the nervous system, have been used for decades to improve labor productivity, bolster affect, and treat medical problems. Coca-Cola is (in)famous for the cocaine present in their early formula, but Fong points out that each bottle only contained a few milligrams, as addictive as “the coca leaves chewed by human beings for thousands of years, or the coca tea that popes enjoy in their visits to South America,” not the 50-75 mg present in a typical line of coke. However, cocaine’s association with Black laborers in the early 1900s (“cocaine fiends”) and backlash against rapacious drug companies in the 1960s lead to its regulation as a Schedule II substance alongside amphetamine.

President Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971 for baldly ideological reasons. In a recently uncovered interview, one of his domestic policy aides said the administration “couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin [and later, cocaine/crack], and then criminalizing both heavily, [the state] could disrupt those communities.” This hard illicit/licit distinction laid the groundwork for the current restriction of ‘proper,’ legal, insured stimulant use to only

those with an expensive, racialized, and gendered ADHD diagnosis. Of course, illicit drugs are often sold and used at a much higher dose than their legal counterparts. But this is less because of their biochemical properties and more due to bootleg producers and distributors flooding the very black market created by harsh regulation, maximizing addiction and, therefore, profit (in many ways akin to hyper-capitalist legal opiate overprescription). For example, as journalist Gary Webb revealed in the ’90s, the heavily racialized, carceral crack epidemic can be linked to the U.S. backing of right-wing Central and South American paramilitary militias, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, who supported their anti-communist rampage with coke money and American weapons. The cocaine epidemic was caused not by the drug’s essential biochemical properties or FDA-determined “potential for abuse,” but its very push to the underground, and concurrent U.S. interventionism. The drug trade became a larger and larger part of many South American economies in the ’90s as alternative industries were decimated by U.S.-supported labor crackdowns and the failure of IMF structural adjustment programs. Under the imposition of ‘free’ trade reforms, which removed subsidies and created export-focused economies crippled by monetary imperialism, the emerging contraband drug market (free from Western competition) became one of the only profitable forms of labor, pushing massive amounts of increasingly cheap, unprocessed, and potent cocaine into the U.S. American drug scheduling—and the attendant global War on Drugs—doesn’t reduce or sanitize drug usage and addiction. It simply privileges some usage as ‘medical’ and deserving of care, and the rest as ‘illicit’ and punishable, veiling and enacting violent ideology through the schema of medical empiricism.

“We had a military mindset, and so we took military drugs” Symptomology Picking up my prescription at Walgreens a few days later, I was joining a recent trend: women getting on stimulants. 20 years ago, men were almost five times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than women. Today, there is almost no gender gap. The number of young women (aged 23 to 49) diagnosed with ADHD nearly doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, when the DEA relaxed restrictions for prescribing controlled substances over telehealth, allowing doctors to prescribe stimulants without an in-person visit. This past February, the DEA announced that this flexibility would end before the expiration of the public health emergency in the spring, but after receiving a record 38,000 public comments, they reversed course and extended the COVID-19 telehealth rules through the end of 2024. The flood of new ADHD diagnoses post-2020 has led to near-constant shortages of medication—in one study, nearly 40 percent of surveyed patients reported being unable to fill their prescription in the last year. In response, conservatives bash the weakwilled, feminized youth for bowing to the pressures of Big Pharma and refusing to put their heads down and do honest work for once, while Democratic politicians write letters in support of the American Telemedicine Association’s campaign for increasingly looser restrictions on their hyper-profitable pill farms—one survey found that 97 percent of people diagnosed with ADHD through Cerebral, one of the largest telepsychiatry companies in the U.S., received a new drug prescription. Clinicians at both Done and Cerebral have raised concerns about a company-wide pressure to make sure patients leave with a prescription (claiming that Done advised them that even if diagnostic criteria weren’t

met, it “still might be worth doing a medication trial”), the constant transfer of patients to new providers (personally, I’ve been lucky enough to stick with Sam), and exceedingly rare video follow-ups about medication use (Sam hasn’t scheduled one for me, almost three months in). Done doesn’t offer (or make money off of) psychotherapeutic treatment beyond those scarce 15-minute medication follow-ups, citing research that argues “for adults, the first-line [ADHD] treatment should be medication.”

Psychological care hasn’t always been so pharmo-centered. In his book Chemically Imbalanced, sociologist Joseph Davis uses interviews with contemporary pharmaceutical users to identify a historical shift from a psychosocial understanding of the psyche that prioritizes complex interiority, social context, and personal history to what he calls the “neurobiological imaginary.” This new paradigm explains “the genesis of suffering in mechanistic … biological terms,” reducing ego to ebbs and flows of neurotransmitters. As psychoactive drugs flooded the post-war U.S. market, advertised for general wellbeing, moxie, and dieting, doctors started to notice many compounds had unintentional palliative effects on psychiatric symptoms. Here began the field of psychopharmacology, which locates mental illness in specific neurochemical processes. Before this biomedical revolution, diagnosis (often psychoanalytically inflected) was primarily an intimate and idiosyncratic affair based on the patient’s personal history and relationships. New “drug-induced” models of disorder folded diagnosis into prescription, constructing standardized diagnostic criteria grounded in rigid pharmaceutical treatments.

The FDA provided regulatory scaffolding for this approach, restricting the advertisement and, eventually, prescription of pharmaceuticals to certain clinically-proven and diagnosed “disease states”—set in opposition to “relatively minor or everyday” afflictions—and created efficacy standards (blind, controlled-outcome clinical studies) requiring reliable, quantifiable, and objective assessment criteria before and after intervention. This methodology became the benchmark for all psychological treatment, excluding qualitative, social, and time-consuming approaches like psychoanalysis, which judge success based on individualized case histories.

Davis writes that in this biomedical model, “diseases are conceived as discrete malfunctions in the individual that arise from underlying pathological mechanisms,” leading to a radical revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) with 1980’s DSMIII. The new manual and its successors shifted from the psychosocial to the psychopharmacological, categorizing diagnoses by immediately present and observable symptoms and omitting underlying or unconscious etiologies (causes) for mental distress in the name of reliability and standardization. In the absence of a proper biological origin and pathogenesis of “virtually all psychiatric conditions,” the DSM was reduced to a symptomology of disease, cultivating “a new subjectivity, the self-managing patient who knows and can speak the language of symptoms,” occluding social or relational causes of distress. Since observable, clearly delineated symptoms are the only path to diagnosis and, therefore, care, treatment is less a fluid, reflexive quest for holistic well-being based on doctor-patient collaboration and more an ‘empirical’ assessment of patient confessionals. Even under this precise diagnostic regime, access to stimulants is anything but equal: in the last 20 years, Black children have been 69 percent less likely than white children to be diagnosed with ADHD; Hispanic children, 50 percent less likely. Clearly, diagnosis and prescription are as political as they are biomedically ‘objective.’

Doctors become gatekeepers of ‘real’ (read: pharmaceutical) care, and patients are paradoxically forced to prove the normativity of their disorder.

This is the same approach that requires clinical letters ‘attesting’ to my transness to receive gender-affirming care. DSM diagnoses are simultaneously pharmacological and commer-

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cial: a passport to insurance coverage, necessary for disability benefits, determinative of research funding, and almost solely defined by the assumed biological efficacy of pharmaceutical treatment.

In 2013, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health argued that the DSM’s weakness was its “lack of validity” in the absence of established biomarkers for mental illness which could create a proper “brain-based diagnostic system.” From the outdated ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of the ’90s to ineffectual genetic approaches to the extensive (recently debunked) attempts to link scans of brain activity to mental illness, a properly systematic, neurobiological etiology of mental disorder does not exist. Even if it did, our drugs simply aren’t up to the task, since the physiological effects of psychiatric drugs are largely nonspecific—patient response to pharmaceutical treatment varies greatly, yet our diagnostic, prescription, and insurance regimes assume homogeneity.

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Of course, as reams of scientific literature have documented, ADHD medications work. People feel more productive, can complete tasks quicker and for longer, and simply find it easier to get through their days. When I first started my prescription, I remember the world felt like it was opening itself up to me—the career paths, goals, and dreams that had seemed radically inaccessible, requiring labor beyond my greatest willpower, were now bolstered by a body and psyche able to sit still and type for hours on end. But, as Davis notes, “talk of a medication working can give the erroneous impression that the meanings that a drug has for a patient are simply given or flow from the biochemical properties of the drug itself.” Stimulants support dopamine uptake, exciting the nervous system, but their attendant cultural connotations, users’ relationships to the medicine, and the diversity of individual neurochemical response cannot be excised from considerations of their use or efficacy. Biochemical reductionism is particularly flawed in regards to ADHD meds since, according to the recent DSM-V revision, “no biological marker is diagnostic for ADHD.” We simply don’t know an objective cause for ADHD—dopamine is important, but so are other neurotransmitters, and, perhaps, the thickness of certain brain cortexes. This indeterminacy is perhaps unsurprising for a ‘disorder’ constituted by symptoms of distraction, disorganization, “excessive” talking or movement, and executive dysfunction, which must “interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, school, or work functioning” to verify the diagnosis. How could scientists ever find a static biomarker for distraction, a fundamentally social, relational affect?

Before the neurobiological turn, drugs were advertised and understood as solutions for disorders that were primarily socially determined—labor incapacity, marital apathy, wartime stress. The transformation of the DSM into a glorified pharmaceutical catalog has (in practice) excluded the political and intersubjective spheres from psychological care. While the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs are supposed to be taken alongside psychotherapy (and reach their reported efficacy only with this combined treatment model), psychotherapeutic models are often neglected: almost 43 percent of American children with ADHD are treated with medication alone. While most international clinical ADHD guidelines suggest “stepwise” treatment, starting with non-pharmacological approaches like therapy or parent training and moving to medication only if these are unsuccessful, in the U.S. no such progression exists, and usually, drugs are the default starting point. The DSM is technically intended to only be a diagnostic model, a heuristic for physician intervention and study of patient suffering, but in practice, among both medical professionals and laypeople, has turned diagnoses into reified identities, real properties in nature independent of medical analysis. This essential pharmaceutical predisposition is a highly profitable theory for the pharma companies that advertise their treatments directly to consumers (a practice illegal everywhere but the U.S. and New Zealand) who ‘have’ ADHD, depression, or anxiety, and the insurance companies that restrict coverage to those with a proper diagnosis.

This model of disorder, diagnosis, and treatment only makes sense under the regime of the pharmocorpo-medical industrial complex, which requires unambiguous, static distinctions between ‘necessary/ unnecessary’ and ‘deserved/undeserved’ treatment in order to distribute medical care through private health insurance under capitalism.

The desiring subject does not exist in the neurobiological approach, which flattens interiority and sociality into immediately present neurochemical flows. Suddenly, defining ‘proper,’ legal drug use is not a socio-political struggle or even simply a question of whether the drug helps someone build a livable, sustainable, and joyful life, but a mythic quest to verify patients’ precise, fixed, and above all, arelational mental makeup through (largely non-existent) biomarkers.

Again, stimulants do ‘work,’ but not because some people have essentially, empirically “dysfunctional” brains from birth (almost five percent of American children ages 5 to 9 have a stimulant prescription), ‘fixed’ by amphetamines, and are therefore the singular demographic with a legal-medical right to Adderall. Drugs exist in a complicated matrix of varied use patterns, medical authority, heterogeneous uptake, and social-cultural signification in which the increased executive function, peppiness, and ability to do repetitive, monotonous tasks for a long stretch of time are understood as socially necessary. As knowledge workers and students alike are required to do more tasks (often multiple at the same time) quicker, ballooning outside of a bounded workday, increasingly on digital technologies designed to be addictive, with less and less social interaction and more and more standardized testing and workplace assessments, all under a diagnos-

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tic regime that assumes ‘distractibility’ is an innate trait emerging in childhood, it’s really no wonder the U.S. consumes 80 percent of the world’s ADHD medication.

Psychosomatic Politics It’s impossible to understand the colossal rise in stimulant use in the past 20 years, particularly post-2020, without focusing on the very socio-political determinants the neurobiological turn neglects. Soldiers have taken stimulants for decades because the human body is always already deficient for total war; in the mid 1900s, civilians took stimulants because post-war modernity required a verve distinctly at odds with the stultifying reality of suburban life; today, students and (often remote) laborers—diagnosed and undiagnosed alike—take stimulants to keep up with the pressures of self-optimization, hyper-efficiency, and endless labor under late capitalism, and often, just to be able to get out of bed. Current use patterns are inseparable from neoliberal imperatives of limitless, maximized productivity, but a mythic return to ‘natural,’ unencumbered subjectivity is a dead end. First, there is no history of subjectivity without psychoactive substances, and second, they’re fun and, often, useful. But distributing drugs based on the fallacy that they are the best or only solution to a mental illness certain subjects have etched into themselves—conveniently, in the exact shape of highly profitable and highly restricted pharmaceuticals—is only felicitous for the Sacklers of the world.

In Davis’ sociological study of contemporary stimulant users, he identifies a new biomedical self-conception, a flattening of the psyche from a tensile, layered, relational, temporal complex to a detached ‘dysfunction’ that must be biologically righted—mental sufficiency goes “beyond gaining more control to being more normal in just the way that American society requires… envisioning a self free of the past and past entanglements.” In more psychosocial approaches like psychoanalysis, one’s limitations, vulnerabilities, and challenges are as definitive of a subject as their successes, pleasures, and abilities—one’s ‘distractibility’ is situated in one’s idiosyncratic history, relationships, and desires, not just sequestered neurotransmitter flows. Certainly, serotonin and dopamine impact mental wellness and labor capacity, but reifying them as a univocal determinant of attention, pleasure, and the psyche only

Current use patterns are inseparable from neoliberal imperatives of limitless, maximized productivity, but a mythic return to ‘natural,’ unencumbered subjectivity is a dead end. makes sense if health and medicine are segregated from society. In her book Psychosomatic, feminist science scholar Elizabeth Wilson makes an even more radical argument that a proper biological ‘reductionism’ is incompatible with such an asocial, isolated conception of the body in the first place. For her, neurobiology, and the soma in general, are always already “psychic, cognitive, and affective.” Beyond a biological or psychosocial reductionism, Wilson presents the continual co-constitution and co-determination of body and psyche, where “neurons are libidinized … neuroses sometimes short-circuit systems of representation, sexuality circulates not just within the end-organ, but also through the ego and the external world.” Applying this “psychosomatic economy” to ADHD situates neurobiology itself in the social (and vice-versa), interrogating how neurotransmitter systems are attenuated by education styles, labor expectations, and digital technologies and attending to biological variance and pharmaceutical efficacy, instead of the body as a pure conduit for social or biological forces.

Stimulants are great—they help me work on one task for more than 15 minutes, stop losing shit, and focus in class. Many people need them far more than me. Pretending that neurotransmitters don’t exist and that we can just talk our way through mental illness is both reactionary and unscientific. But it’s impossible to ignore that the profit motive, war-mongering, and hyper-rationalist epistemologies have rotted America’s relationship to stimulants, all while illegal drug use puts thousands of people in jail every year. At the root of the matter is a capitalist medical-industrial complex founded on norms of scarcity, efficiency, and bio-reductionism incompatible with actual care, which recognizes that the slipperiness of want and desire are always part of well-being.

Our ability to feel safe and respected in clinical settings and the semiotic dimensions of treatment are often just as determinative of health outcomes as biochemical precision—from reconstructive surgeries to consent in gynecological procedures to the consistent 35 to 40 percent placebo response rate in antidepressant trials—not to mention the structural political change required to address social determinants of health.

Further, medical ‘necessity’ itself is a social-political construction, not an essential, natural, empirical truth. Trans, poor, racialized, and female patients have never had the privilege of assuming the medical system is solely oriented toward their bio-psychological needs. Pretending otherwise obscures the hegemonic, discriminatory production of a singular, whole, labor-optimized, ‘healthy’ bodily ideal, deprioritizing

S+T / FEATS elder care, disability justice, and trans healthcare. Sure, triage will probably exist no matter how abundant healthcare is under socialism, but pretending that short-term double-blind studies are the best or only way to adjudicate treatment priorities simply reinforces exclusionary power structures. The neurobiological imaginary disregards social-political dimensions of health, denying coverage for psychoanalytic therapy, criminalizing drug use, and labeling facial feminization surgery as uniquely, definitively ‘cosmetic,’ and therefore uncovered by insurance (unlike, say, dentistry, the art of a perfect smile).

If there’s anything the opioid epidemic has demonstrated, addiction (and recreational drug use) aren’t essential predispositions baked into

broken brains, clearly distinct from medical diagnoses which match drugs to verifiably deserving users with ‘proper,’ solvable neurological dysfunction, but socio-political constructions that restrict autonomy, dignity, and above all, care to select groups. As with all drug criminalization—which simply empowers the unregulated black market—the carceral regulation of stimulants must transform into distribution and treatment structures focused on users’ holistic well-being and equal support for non-pharmaceutical solutions. Clinging to a mythic, essential neurobiological ‘right’ to Adderall equally justified by online diagnostic quiz-

Your Sex Doll Disturbs Me

zes, multi-thousand-dollar psychiatric evaluations, and the labor inefficiency of elementary schoolers just ends up turning medicine into its own form of dysfunction.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 still misplaces her earbuds on a weekly basis.

( TEXT CORINNE LEONG DESIGN SIMON YANG )

Life-size silicone dolls, sexual racism, and surrogate humans in the age of technoliberalism For the woman of the future, the consequences of the man with a silicone wife are a finger in the mouth at the wedding. Her unfeeling tongue falling off and hitting the patchy grass floor. A tit-slip from a halter top, prim white flower still tucked securely behind one ear. She can’t move her ball-joint arms to catch the bride’s bouquet, but she’s primed to take wedding cake to the face. The guest with a Corona in fist says: She’s getting so dirty and I feel so sad for her. When it’s too cold to appear as she’s meant to (first: unwanting; second: available), it’s a one-woman tailgate in the snow. She could be syncope, but her eyes are always open.

A man in army fatigues unbuttons his pants.

Everything that touches her teeters on orgy.

Colonel’s buddy is a Bears fan. He says: Don’t put your dick in it. In the wake of gameday, find her a fleshy dustcover on the arcade’s Playboy pinball machine, where, for the first time, one can catch a glimpse of her underwear—not because she’d been all too chaste, but because she’s finally worn a pair. What color? I can’t spoil the fun.

These, among others, are the abject encounters performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson recorded after she commissioned a life-size silicone doll (“RealDoll”) to be manufactured in her likeness. Following a series of in-depth 365-degree facial scans and bodily customization processes (including the retrofitting of a mimetic vulva to a cavity between the doll’s legs and the spray-painting of Hawk Swanson’s elegant cursive “Bully” tattoo across its left wrist), Amber Doll found corporeal form in synthetic flesh with a PVC skeleton, acting as Hawk Swanson’s romantic partner and “artistic collaborator” from 2006 to 2011.

The pair’s artistic endeavors produced a series of short films and stills titled Amber Doll Project, in which Hawk Swanson left her silicone avatar unattended or else distantly monitored in public spaces, among them a wedding Hawk Swanson stages, the middle of the sidewalk outside of Chicago’s Soldier Stadium, and a rollerskating rink. The liberty Amber Doll Project’s human subjects take with Amber Doll’s body is

always distressing but rarely surprising. Despite, or perhaps because of, her close resemblance to a living human woman, the project participants’ default response seems to be that of fantastical humiliation and exposure. At the Ambers’ wedding, guests pick and preen and fondle her breasts, they lift her wedding gown and pose for pictures, stuff a medley of pointer and middle fingers down her rubber throat. A natural human response to such a violation—gagging, for instance, or even the words stop/no—is the punchline that never comes. In a particularly disturbing scene, a group of football-going men simulate sex with Amber Doll while she appears to sprawl totally unconscious in a camping chair, obscured in a tangle of gyrating hips and limbs.

(What the hell is that? one man cackles upon unveiling Amber Doll’s genitals.)

In reflecting upon the project, Hawk Swanson writes that Amber Doll’s “passivity” and femininity manufactured for pleasure “seemed to provide passersby with unwitting consent,” causing her presence alone to invite charged and frequently brutal interactions. She describes undertaking the Amber Doll Project to investigate the ways in which “femininity can be activated…as a site of political agency as well as a site of complicity, cruelty, and sadomasochistic pleasure.”

Hawk Swanson’s endeavors with Amber Doll began after she discovered an online forum of “primarily hetero-outsider presenting men” who self-identify as iDollators—a convenient wordplay denoting individuals with an attraction to or investment in life-size, humanlike dolls. She’s maintained ties with the iDollator community, as well as a particularly close friendship with a doll’s-husband and self-described “activist for synthetic love” who goes by the name of Davecat. Over the last two decades, Hawk Swanson and Davecat have collaborated on a number of artistic projects centering dolls, including The Harmony Show, a seminar-style virtual talk show between scholars, life-size

silicone sex dolls, and their partners.

Davecat hails from Detroit and was “[m]entally…born in the mid Fifties [sic].”

He might be the closest thing the iDollator circuit has to a messiah. Any search term including both “man,” “doll,” and an amorous verb summons a flood of images of Davecat embracing a purple-haired silicone woman wearing smoky makeup and wire-rimmed glasses—his RealDoll wife, Sidore, with whom he’s enjoyed a relationship since the turn of the millennium. Sidore (“Shi-Chan”) Kuroneko is a Manchester-raised, half-Japanese, half-British “Synthetik” he met in a goth club; Davecat, for his part, has a recognizably mid-aughts “emo” aesthetic, complete with skinny ties and the lethal swoop of a partial fringe. On his personal Twitter (since abandoned in conscientious objection to Elon Musk), he retweets cat pics, brutalist architecture, and dir. David Cronenberg.

Early media treatment of Davecat and other iDollators was predictably exploitative, with reporting reliant upon the language of delusion (Davecat is “convinced,” he “tells himself,” his “‘girlfriend’” is packed between scare quotes) and poorly veiled mockery. The comments sections of his episodes and profiles are similar: a documentary shot of handcuffs dangling from the frame of Davecat and the inanimate Sidore’s marriage bed, for instance, invites jokes about what exactly necessitates restraint. Others laud Davecat as a “genius” for avoiding a lifetime of headaches and alimony checks—our most concise metonyms for the modern woman.

Laughs aside, hypervigilance to an abstract notion of “harm” has defined discourse around Davecat and life-size humanlike dolls more broadly. It may be that the Hippocratic do-none is simply the litmus test for all condonable/condemnable behavior, but audience assessments of Davecat’s life with his dolls carry a relentless moral charge in a way that responses to, say, My Strange Addiction’s Man Attracted to Balloons, do not. As long as it’s not [x] has proven a popular formula for

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those intending to hedge their support for iDollators; if not a predictor of violence, synthetic love can act as a device for its containment.

Accordingly, the chief concern of Davecat’s detractors, other than his practices being “Simply odd” or “OMG!!!!!!,” is the notion that fantasy—which for Davecat is more material than we’re accustomed to—might bleed into reality. It’s as if his treatment of dolls serves as a prognostic device for impending mistreatment of or brutality toward “real” women, whether in relationships or in day-to-day life. Even those

Amber Hawk Swanson. Amber Doll Project, 2005–2011. in self-consciously qualified support of Davecat embed such an assumption of violence in their responses: “I don’t know if I want to hug him or or take out a restraining order,” another viewer wrote.

The operative logic here is that by normalizing a relationship in which one party cannot issue consent, adheres strictly to imperialist notions of feminine beauty, and is always physically available and sexually receptive, relationships with dolls will alienate men so profoundly from the agency of living women that they will treat said women like custom-made objects—enacting the dystopic reality captured in Amber Doll Project footage. What this conception of synthetic love elides is the potential for real feelings of devotion, affection, and even love toward objects, along with the material forms of care and company many iDollators provide their dolls. Davecat, for one, shops regularly for Sidore according to her imagined tastes. He gifts her his own sentimental items as one might give a “sweetheart a class ring” and kisses her goodbye every time he leaves his one-bedroom. In an early scene in My Strange Addiction, the camera pans to Sidore lying in bed open-eyed and fully dressed, while Davecat begins to explain that she’s been, as usual, continuously snoozing her alarm. His voice rings with the warmth of affection and the amusement of familiarity. It’s best, he explains, to leave her in peace.

If viewers are upchucking or fearing for their daughters’ safety at the sight of a man caressing a silicone cheek, it seems to rely less upon discomfort with the uncanny and more so an assumption that humandoll relationships are predicated on total lack of interpersonal obligation and careless sexual brutality. It is, in essence, based in a belief in the strict reinforcement of the hierarchy between humans and objects— the trouble being that this “object” passes the duck test for normative womanhood with flying colors, bendable at the waist and weighted with triple-D breasts. In an Atlantic profile, meanwhile, Davecat deems the epithets “thing” and “sex toy” in reference to RealDolls “demeaning and unimaginative.” His synthetic love, he asserts, is not an objectification of women as people but a personification of objects.

Part of Davecat’s rationale for the equal treatment of dolls is “far-flung future”-looking. A world where sentient cyborgs abound is nigh, and he wants it to be hospitable for them; how we treat dolls now will determine how we treat the citizens of the future, and, in turn, how they apprehend us. More than that, though, he can’t “see how calling something that looks like a human a ‘she’ is strange,” he tells one interviewer. “I think it’s more strange to call something shaped like a human an ‘it.’”

Amber Doll and the first three iterations of Sidore Kuroneko—she is replaced every few years due to wear and tear—were human-shaped, but they could not move, speak, nor process any form of input. The first time I hear Sidore speak is in response to Davecat’s query about the state of her mood during the 18th episode of The Harmony Show, to which she responds: “I am feeling like a lot of ideas are flowing through me.”

When Apple released Siri at my ripe age of nine, my friends and I responded with unparalleled enthusiasm, taking a long break from

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whatever histrionic performance we had dedicated ourselves to at the time to fight for the use of our parents’ devices. The new technology’s convenience interested us little, because we knew nothing of tasks (except, maybe, to finish sculpting the panhandle on our salt dough reliefmaps of Oklahoma and other assigned territories) and remained skeptical of calendars. There was of course the novelty of an uncanny woman speaking from the fat lithium cell of the early iPhone. There was the absurdity of a faceless thing that could comprehend. But mostly, I think, after school hours were boring, and we wanted to menace. Siri allowed us to do so as long as we pleased. Our main goal was to break her composure. We wanted to induce in her a malice and irritation a machine’s cool, preprogrammed rationality should have rendered impossible. We asked her questions we knew to be inane. We pushed her boundaries.

Sometimes we told her her voice was ugly.

Siri was unshakeable, as she is now. As children we were less so, easily aggravated every time she disappointed our expectations with an “I don’t know how to respond to that”—as we are now when the sneaky Shazam fails, or when she cuts a crucial Google search mid-query. How many more times in my life will I witness the one in the driver’s seat pound his fist on the wheel and loose a fuck off while trying to dictate a message she just keeps getting wrong? This aggressive treatment is not necessarily wedded to the execution of a task, but to the machine’s capacity as a vessel for violence, particularly when it bears the signifiers of femininity. “Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them,” a recent headline in Futurism reads. The article’s author offered a similar argument to those who expressed tepid support for Davecat, reasoning that the AI’s lack of sentience makes such aggression effectively harmless.

Despite the complete lack of automation of both Amber Doll and previous iterations of Sidore, their outside observers’ presumption of a human right to invasive, even malicious, treatment of both of their bodies evokes a familiar dossier of human interactions with all modern technology, regardless of whether artificial intelligence is involved. The document doesn’t save. The WiFi refuses to work. Your 24th Bypass Paywall extension demands redownload; subscribe, or die ignorant and online.

Media scholar Wendy Chun theorizes that the software that comprises the 21st century’s defining tech functions primarily via a process of exclusion, a series of pointed decisions about what to expose and what to leave veiled. Where we funnel our grievances is accordingly opaque, offloaded from social life into a kind of affective Cloud, in which our inability to accept our lack of time, efficiency, and personal freedom congeals into a massive foam finger we point accusingly at the machine.

Davecat may be one among a slender few who externalizes more gratitude than rage toward the technology that populates his life, at least in the press. Since beginning his relationship with Sidore in 2000, Davecat has brought four additional RealDolls into his household in an act that might again sound observers’ alarm bells for a perception of women as fungible.

All the more provocatively, half of these are designed with unambiguously East Asian ethnic features. Only one originates from a (now defunct) non-Chinese manufacturer.

It’s tempting to assume an economist’s eye and chalk up East Asia’s literal and aesthetic monopoly on RealDolls to the occult designs of supply and demand and the negligible costs of Chinese manufacturing labor. Such a claim would demand a special class of ignorance: Orientalism, even by self-fetishizing means, seems to be one of the most effective marketing strategies for RealDoll manufacturers. The Chinese brands from which Davecat has sourced his dolls all consecrate their East Asian–esque product models with Japanese names, making “Yukiko” and “Arisa” to doll commerce what “Fifi” is to yappy white dogs. As theorized by scholars like Anne Anlin Cheng, the East Asian femme has complex historical relationships to objecthood that relegate her not merely to bodily flesh, but to artifice and ornament. Her image’s proliferation among products that are not only sexualized but rely on their inanimate “thingness” scatters salt in an already spacious wound.

That Davecat’s first doll partner and designated wife, Sidore Kuroneko, is expressly narrativized as a half-Japanese woman only fuels further questions about how sexual racism functions among iDollators.

The Twitter profile Davecat uses to roleplay as Sidore lists her name in Japanese characters. He refers to her often as “Shi-chan” and proclaims her a Shintoist.

There are RealDolls designed to look other than East Asian. Dubious signifiers like hair color and visible brow bones usually accomplish this.

According to a particularly aspirational transitive property, the fact that Amber Hawk Swanson is a white woman, paired with the fact that Amber Doll is modeled nearly identically after her, would make Amber Doll herself white—insofar as any doll can assume a race.

But there are no white sex dolls. This is not just a commentary on the fact that China and Japan have cornered the RealDoll market and Twitter spheres, respectively. It is not to say that life-size silicone dolls that resemble Monica Vitti and Pam Anderson don’t exist. At the most basic level, the doll functions in the eyes of iDollators as a preferable substitute for organic women: “freeing” both partners from the mess of human relationships; never in want of attention; untroubled by the divide between fantasy and reality as desire’s object incarnate. To detractors and reluctant sympathizers, she is a receptacle for male violence and entitlement that would otherwise fall upon organic women. In either case, the life-size doll acts as a racialized surrogate for a form of sexual and emotional labor

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deemed too abject or otherwise unfit for “real women.”

Thus the hierarchy that separates womanas-human from the doll’s woman-as-object emerges—one not unlike the colonial hierarchies that differentiated white women from enslaved Africans or the 20th century’s Yellow “comfort women.” Whether a backordered Yukiko or the doe-eyed Amber Doll of Midwestern origins, the doll’s position is always racialized.

The “surrogate human,” as described by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora in their book Surrogate Humanity, is a being that assumes degraded forms of unfree or coerced labor, specifically with the effect of reifying a “liberated” subject that does not. Embodied in the enslaved person through the 19th century and reconfigured in the industrial era to encompass Black America and the “invisible” laborers of the Global South, Atanasoski and Vora argue that racial capitalism has now entered a “technoliberal” era in which the “surrogate human” has become synonymous with machines.

Anxiety about white and white-collar job loss has dominated the mainstream political discourse of the last decade as the imagined threats of immigrant and mechanized labor exchange blame-laden blows. These fears of human obsolescence find ready reflection in RealDoll discourse; viewer concerns that “men will choose [dolls] in droves over organic women” have proliferated enough that Davecat has interjected in interviews to suggest that iDollators are “doing you lot a favor” by “leaving a larger selection” of potential partners available for those uninterested in synthetic relationships.

Technoliberal logics have also inspired claims that machine labor might soon free all humans from the drudgery required to sustain a late capitalist economic system, leaving them open to more fulfilling pursuits.

The more troubling element of technoliberalism’s allure is the utopian imaginary of a “postracial” world enabled completely by machines. In these visions of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” humans have ostensibly transcended all forms of inequity caused by racialized, gendered, and otherwise exploitative forms of labor, relying on robots and artificial intelligence to perform “dull, dirty, repetitive, and even reproductive labor” in place of the marginalized human “other.” Take Siri, who manages everyday trivialities so her users don’t have to.

While technoliberalism holds the dubious concept of universal liberation for all human beings sacred, it simultaneously obscures the violent racial logics that continue to animate late capitalism by claiming a wholesale transcendence of race. Its reliance on the newly mechanical surrogate human instead continues to construct oppressive notions of who is human and what is not. In adjudicating what forms of labor are suitable for the “liberated” subject, technoliberalism relies upon a vision of the human that “has always been defined in relation to degraded and devalued others”—like the enslaved, the trafficked, and now the synthetic— making the “human” itself a roving site of exclusion and violence that both mirrors and structures the logic of race.

Humanlike “sex dolls” like Amber Doll and Sidore are not novel as taboo objects of the Western cultural imagination—shameful, degenerate, but not yet menacing. They become an intolerable threat precisely as they exceed the labor demanded of them as surrogate humans, transcending the same denigrating, racialized role of pure sexual outlet that, Cheng argues, the Black woman’s reduction to “flesh” and the Yellow woman’s reduction to ornament still enable. Instead the Sidores of our era have, in a feat more horrifying to us than the unblinking glass of their eyes, also come to fulfill the emotional and social needs that consecrate the liberal subject. Technoliberalism continues to set the terms for humanity, but the 21st century’s

life-sized doll has rolled across the strict boundaries that circumscribed her to her half of the mattress. Our own sense of humanity finds itself awakening, again and again, on the wrong side of the bed.

With an understanding of the violent racial logics that underscore our reluctance to embrace or even care for the machines among us, Davecat’s assertion that all beings—living or otherwise, mechanized or not—deserve to be treated with equal respect to humans seems less and less like prophylaxis for the cyborg’s coming hegemony.

The real existential threats are among us already, embodied not in the machine but in all that is reliant upon notions of its inferiority.

The failure of Sidore’s body to fully simulate humanness is unnerving. Seams line the sides of all four of her limbs, leaving incontrovertible evidence of the two halves of the silicone mold that formed her. The first time The Harmony Show presented her in mechanized form, the audible screeches that accompanied the stiff movement of her head made me hold my breath, unsettled. I felt similarly watching Amber Doll and Hawk Swanson seated beside each other at the center of a roller rink as dancers on skates weave around them. They both stare at nothing. The immediate reaction of almost every person with

Amber Hawk Swanson. Amber Doll Project, 2005–2011. whom I shared this article’s topic was either a laugh or that signature look: a discomfort no doll can simulate.

Today’s vision of utopia is predicated on a concealment that parades as universal inclusion.

In a wholly unsurprising irony, the former may be the most extreme form of exclusion. Our liberal subjecthood should imply that we’ve been freed to ponder, to interrogate and critique, but our world’s design does everything possible to ensure that the endless list of surrogates who enable our lives under late capitalism—just barely—elide recognition. The “global sliding scale of humanity” that justifies the continued exploitation of and violence against marginalized peoples has yet to even acknowledge the machines now taking their place.

As much as some consciousness of one’s participation in racial capitalism always persists, so too does the belief that one is dedicating a respectable amount of effort to resisting it.

Abide by boycott, don’t cross the picket line, thank the bus driver and the line cook and every other reason for the perpetual absence of all of the messes you make. Then: resist the urge to fling your phone across the room. Relish in the fact that you can feel what the lines of code that have come to replace you cannot. I don’t claim that a significant number of people make the abuse of technology an active, everyday practice.

But perhaps we are careless in the way we’re inclined to believe the men with the silicone

wives are. Amber Doll’s tongue might freefall from her own mouth and return covered in foreign fingers and sod, but the uncanny of the almost-woman can only induce so much repulsion. More horrifying is finally locating, in the simulacrum of a human body, where it all goes: our omnipresent expectations for incontestable labor, available at the drop of a hat; our ready resentment at any failure by technology to provide this labor, fully rationalized by the conviction that violence is not so if nothing sentient is there to receive it; the fragility of our very status as human. No longer imperceptible like the miasma of software, the body of the doll lays bare the surrogate human effect in which we are constant participants via technology, albeit often with far less care and consideration for the devices we dominate.

It’s telling that our first response to such a revelation is often to renegotiate where to draw the new line, and to whom or what to extend our humane efforts: “Are we supposed to thank a butter knife every time we use it to spread something?” one friend asked me. They had just listened to an ad for Sonos, in which the digital assistant’s interlocutor responded with a sincere enough-sounding “thank you” after she turned down the speaker volume. Our first question should not be one of worthiness of recognition and care, but of what function such a judgment serves. Though where the butter knife stands remains unclear, the denigration and dismissal of machines and artificial intelligence has material effects on humans today, concealing the breadth of exploitable human labor as it expands said category.

In the phenomenon’s most straightforward illustration, Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk has been operating since 2005 under the guise of providing “artificial artificial intelligence”— that is, human freelance workers who can be conscripted for tasks that AI should ostensibly be able to complete but cannot. Surveys have shown that only 4.2 percent of “Turkers” earn U.S. federal minimum wage, partly because employers pay them little to begin with, but also because they are not compensated for all of the hours they spend combing the site for reliable and intelligible tasks. Their status as online gig workers also makes them ineligible for inclusion under the Fair Labor Standards Act as an in-person contractor like a construction worker might be, leaving them with no recourse to unlivable earnings. Their likening to artificial intelligence and the drudgery we consign to that AI actively enable Turkers’ disenfranchisement.

Acclimating ourselves to deplorable treatment by passing it off to non-sentient tech only reproduces the same effect when we confront those who can—and do—suffer. In Palestine, Israeli occupation forces issue barrages of “fireand-forget” missiles that can strike anyone or anything within the machine’s line of sight with no human intervention. These automated weapons further distance humans from their atrocities using the same racist delineation between human and nonhuman that justifies the murder of Palestinians as so-called “terrorists” and “human animals.” The ease with which state and other forms of power deploy these slippages between who is human and therefore “free” and who is not and therefore at man’s disposal to exploit, abuse, and even kill, should make the respectful treatment of all forms of technology an imperative. In the case of Davecat, Sidore, and the human-synthetic relationships they represent, this means addressing our attendant disgust and its origins—without desperately reaching for a place to direct it next.

There’s something beautiful in the way Davecat’s relationship with Sidore radically rejects the often-unquestioned notion of “personhood” as the condition for connection and fulfillment. But this does not resolve the

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 08

08

FEATS

issue of Davecat’s fetishistic construction of race in that same human-synthetic relationship. Given the many signifiers—often based in Davecat’s own narratives—that mark Sidore as a “Japanese” doll, it’s all the more interesting that Hawk Swanson cites two female, ethnically Japanese artists as inspirations for Amber Doll Project: Yoko Ono and the contemporary video artist Laurel Nakadate.

Ono’s participatory art performance Cut Piece (1964) in particular has devastating resonances with the incursion upon Amber Doll’s body captured in Amber Doll Project. In an excerpted video of the performance, Ono sits eerily upright on the stage floor, face impassive. Her eyes seem to be the only part of her that moves. All around her, audience members approach one by one to hesitate, circle, and kneel. They have been invited to take the pair of scissors just in front of her and cut away at the fabric that cloaks her body.

Ono’s presence can too easily be described as dollike. Most participants take a few seconds to excise pieces of fabric roughly the size of postage stamps from her skirt, shirt, camisole, and bra. In a climactic moment in the tape, a male audience member spends over two minutes cutting away at Ono’s undershirt, running the long arc of the blades straight down the center of the artist’s chest. The garment falls. The unease the act invokes, as well as the voyeurism it demands of the viewer, bear a stunning similarity to a clip from the Amber wedding in which a male guest approaches the seated Amber Doll and begins to paw at her chest, fingers slipping at the neckline of her dress in multiple failed attempts to pull it down and expose her. The only difference is that Ono can issue a reaction.

Her hand briefly moves, as if to stop the man, before falling limply on her own lap.

Nakadate’s participatory artwork of the early 2000s similarly involves an invitation by the artist. In the piece Hawk Swanson most heavily cites as inspiration for the Amber Doll Project, Happy Birthday (2002), Nakadate invites a white, middle-aged, unmarried man—a demographic she continues to engage in later works as a half-Asian woman—to celebrate

her (fake) birthday with her. She expresses in one interview that she never felt unsafe in such settings, though she does identify a “nascent sexuality” underpinning her projects. Hawk Swanson, who has taught Nakadate’s works in her own classroom over many years, noted during The Harmony Show that her students always feel “some kind of frustration at [Nakadate] for producing these outcomes.” Her guest affirmed this observation: “There’s this repulsion, this sort of disgust of, ‘Oh, why would someone…ask for this?’” The artistic agency and intentions of both Ono and Nakadate are therefore refigured into an unarticulated, unwilling invitation: the very condition of a thing.

Herein lies the contradiction of Sidore and the “East Asian” dolls like her. Try as one like Davecat might to grant the doll its due fullness and respect, the contours of racialized femininity—which extend to even the “least” raced dolls, like Amber Doll—will always cast her back into objecthood. Though Davecat never makes such claims, there is an obvious fetishism at play in his relationship with Sidore (“I’ve always wanted either an English or Japanese girlfriend with a Gothy” vibe, he says in one early interview), manifested in the most archetypal signifiers of East Asia Davecat bestows upon her. But just as the doll’s grotesque body exposes our flawed relationship to technology, it may be that the site where we identify the Yellow femme’s abjection is also where we find our way forward.

The racist logic that marks East Asian femmes as impotent ornaments is cut from the same cloth as the universal denigration of machines amid technoliberalism: the exclusive exaltation of the human and the concealment of the many surrogates that reify its personhood.

In light of this knowledge, when it comes to addressing the sexual instrumentalization of the Yellow femme, Davecat’s generous, endlessly serious approach toward machines and objects— especially those that force humans to confront their surrogacy, face to literal silicone face— might indeed be the best place to start. “This is not a project about retrieving human agency,” Anne Anlin Cheng insists in Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman. Her goal, rather, is “to detach us from the ideal of a natural

Pictured: Amber Hawk Swanson (L) and Davecat (R).

Amber Hawk Swanson. Sidore (Mark II) / Heather > LOLITA, 2013.

09

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and an agential personhood…from which the yellow woman,” like the doll, like all of the technology we profit from each day, “is already always foreclosed.” If we are made to live among objects, maybe rather than invest all effort in resisting such a categorization, we can join those like Davecat in questioning the dubious valorization of “personhood” that constitutes the category’s every act of violence.

There’s nothing utopic in this vision of the Yellow woman’s liberation. But it is always worth it, I think, to find ways to survive and make sense. In one episode of The Harmony Show, guest star Vivian Huang refers to a real longing on the part of her students to reckon with the lived realities of being made ornament. But I’m not a vase, one student protested. I suffer. I suffer.

But as long as we—the unbounded “we,” by which I also mean you—pin our selfhood to our ability to feel pain, to receive and reciprocate care or its failure, to hold our hands up when the blade comes too close, we’ll always be dependent on the discretion of the one who wields the scissors. Who cuts that razor-thin line in an already fraying cloth and decides how much to take.

CORINNE LEONG B’24 is feeling like a lot of ideas are flowing through her.

evil_lovely

LIT

Do we need an explanation? Our existance is evil and we are the definition of bold and evil! You can’t help but love us. We can be evil like Kuromi!

She swallowed the pill, feeling reckless and remote. Were those stains on the side of her coffee cup? Whatever consequences would visit upon her, she had already delegated to another, future self.

If there wasn’t an acute consequence, the effects would surely be diffuse, ranging from bad dreams to the acquisition of enemies. The Korean girl stared out at her from the computer screen. She forgot to mention key details. Her text was an invitation but she reread it and it had transformed because she hadn’t kept her eye on it, it read like a poem, shedding grammatical rules and acquiring a logic of its own. Like a tweet. Like a song. The text was everything she had ever learned, the most important knowledge from the university.

We are on Adderall in the library, it read. Thinking of u so come.

( TEXT ANGELA QIAN DESIGN ANAHIS LUNA ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG )

Do we need an explanation? Our existance is lovely. We’re the definition of lovely cutie. You can’t help but love us. We can be lovely like My Melody!

In fact it hadn’t been Adderall. In fact she was hardly in the library but several places at once. If time stopped, every atom would have a place. In fact she didn’t know what the pill was, like an IUD. It could have been a supplement. Or an arrival. And to think just yesterday she had been praised for maintaining the register. It can be difficult, said her reviewer. To maintain the register. Makes the heart grow fonder. She had forgotten the rules to the song or the poem. It was such a complicated system, and so difficult to understand.

Do we need an explanation? Our existance is +~++~. We’re the definition of ~.+ and +~++! You can’t help but love us. We can 00~)_ lonely ^_^^^~ My Melody!

ANGELA QIAN B’24 is the definition of bold and evil lovely cutie.

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 08

10

When You Light Your Candles If Pal e

stinians had to h

vigils ev old ery time one of our

e were massacred, we would be peopl om buying candle pt fr s. kru n a b

There is no respi

METRO

→ On the evening of Saturday, November

25, in Burlington, Vermont, three Palestinian students—Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ahmed, and our classmate, Hisham Awartani B’25— were shot. The three friends were on their way to Hisham’s relative’s house for dinner when a white man with a handgun fired at them at least four times. One of the bullets hit Hisham’s spinal cord, causing him to lose all feeling below his waist. Hisham’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told CNN that doctors have said it is unlikely that Hisham will regain functional mobility of his legs.

The suspect, Jason James Eaton, was arrested on Monday, November 28, and charged with three counts of second-degree attempted murder.

Eaton, who lived two blocks away from Hisham’s grandmother, said not a word to the three men before he shot them. Kinnan, Tahseen, and Hisham had been speaking a mix of Arabic and English to each other, and two were wearing keffiyehs. This was a hate crime—a consequence of the continuous dehumanization of Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab people perpetuated by Western mainstream media and political leaders over the past seven weeks.

On Monday, November 27, over 400 students and community members at Brown gathered on the Main Green for a vigil organized by the University. Following remarks from University Chaplain Janet Cooper-Nelson and Associate Chaplain Father Edmund McCullough, Brown President Christina Paxson took the podium— her second time publicly addressing students in person since October 7. Paxson had attended an October 11 vigil organized by Brown/RISD Hillel and the Rohr Chabad House, but had skipped the October 12 vigil organized by Palestinian students. After urging the community “to be there for [Hisham] and his family,” Paxson addressed the “broader events in Israel and Palestine,” as well as the surge in hate against Palestinians, Muslims, and Jews in America.

“Sadly,” she said, “we can’t control what happens around the world and across the country. We’re powerless to do everything we’d like to do.” The crowd, which had been quiet up until this point, began to shout back at the President in an impromptu display of frustration and exhaustion. Brown University wields a $6.5 billion endowment and, as one of the world’s leading academic institutions, immense cultural and political power. For years, students have been calling on the University, and Paxson herself, to leverage this power against the Israeli state’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and to protect Palestinian students. Time and time again, the University has refused this call.

“You could divest!” some shouted at the President; and “Protect your students!” Protestors pulled out signs reading “BROWN FUNDS THE HATE THAT MADE THIS POSSIBLE.” Students wearing spray-painted red gloves stepped out of the crowd to stand, hands raised, on the steps behind Paxson. “Shame on you!” the crowd cried out. A banner calling for divestment was soon unfurled from a window of the Campus Center.

As the voices from the crowd coalesced into a single chant for divestment, Paxson asked the protestors: “Is this how you want to honor your friend?”

“Yes,” was the response. “This is what he wanted.” +++ In a statement sent exclusively to the Indy on Tuesday, Senior Vice President of Communica-

11

te f

or u s.

tions Cass Cliatt addressed the protest that occurred during the vigil: “...When some students turned a vigil focused on care and empathy into disruption of the gathering, the opportunity for healing was lost for other attendees.”

Yet none of Hisham’s friends that we spoke to had a negative reaction to the demonstration, with one calling it “pretty appropriate.”

“None of us were worried about him disapproving,” said Elze Amileviciute B’25.5, a close friend of Hisham’s. “None of us were worried that this was not honoring him.”

For Hisham’s friends and co-strugglers, what was disruptive to the vigil was not the protest, but Paxson’s refusal to honor Hisham’s Palestinian identity within the context of the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation or to acknowledge the University’s power.

After Christina Paxson left the podium early amid chants and calls for university action, Professor Beshara Doumani, the Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies, addressed the crowd. “...Members of this community have made their voices heard for many, many years, but that has not led to the results they need and that I think this country needs,” he said.

Doumani went on to read aloud a text from Hisham, which Hisham had asked him to share with the Brown community: “It’s important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. I said about a month ago that Palestinians cannot afford to hold vigils every time this happens. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict.

Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine.

This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed.” +++ On October 19, Hisham was one of 12 Palestinian, Black, Muslim, and Jewish students who met with President Paxson and urged her to protect vulnerable Palestinian students, in addition to calling for a ceasefire and divesting from Israeli apartheid. Aboud Ashhab B’25 told us that in response to their demands, “Brown’s administration dismissed us” and “told us that they do not offer ‘running political commentary.’” On October 10, the University released a statement quickly denouncing the Hamas attack, but still has not condemned Israel’s genocidal incursion into the Gaza Strip. The University also advertised a vigil hosted by the Rohr Chabad House and Brown/RISD Hillel, organizations that both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students have identified as exclusionary, but did not amplify the event hosted by Palestinian students to mourn all lives lost. “The double standard is clear,” Aboud said. “Palestinian students are not treated equally on our campus.”

“While Hisham was attacked off campus,” Aboud continued, “one-sided statements and unequal treatment of Palestinian students on college campuses contribute to an environment of hate at Brown, on campuses across the country, and more broadly.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

( TEXT ARMAN DEENDAR, CAMERON LEO & LILY SELTZ DESIGN RILEY CRUZCOSA ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK ) Hisham’s friends registered his attack as a reminder that they, too, are made vulnerable by a climate of hate. When Adnan Aldabbagh B’25 heard the news, he told the Indy: “I was not only sad for him, I was also sad for myself.”

Aboud told the crowd at Monday’s vigil: “My family called me yesterday, begging me to not wear a keffiyeh or speak Arabic in public, telling me ‘you are not safe.’ I know we are not safe.”

What happened to Hisham hit all too close to home for his roommate, Mahmoud Hallak B’25, who fled the Syrian Civil War to the U.S. “My family and I were unfortunately too acquainted with having loved ones critically injured,” he said.

Now, “every Arab or Muslim mother around the world is calling to convince her kids to hide their identities, to stop wearing their keffiyehs, to stop speaking Arabic in public. I’m seeing a complete erasure of our culture in a free country that I’ve just gotten my citizenship from last year.”

“We have a target on our back, just by nature of our existence,” Adnan said, referring to Arab students like himself. He struggles with the question of how visible to make his identity and his beliefs. “We [can] capitulate, and preserve ourselves, but then they realize that in doing so they can shut us up, and they might do it again. Or…we get together stronger, exposing ourselves more, and maybe that will deter them, when they see that it is to no avail.” What students like him choose to do, he says, is “a matter of life and death.” +++ Towards the latter half of the vigil, two of Hisham’s closest friends at Brown took the podium, with several protestors standing behind them in solidarity. Mahmoud shared an anecdote of how he first met Hisham: “He was playing Fairouz, a famous Lebanese artist, on the Pembroke Green… and we started singing together regularly in our dorm. And this newfound appreciation for our shared cultural heritage sparked there.”

Adnan told the Indy about his and Hisham’s shared obsession with Arabic poetry: “Earlier this semester, we were both memorizing really long Arabic epic poems. I did memorize twice as much as he did. But now he has a lot of free time, so he might kick my ass.”

The friends we spoke to, and those who spoke at the vigil, affirmed that Hisham worked alongside fellow Palestinian students and co-strugglers to pressure the administration to commit to divestment, ceasefire, and protection of their students. Elze told us: “This is not just about a tragic thing that happened to someone in our community…this is about what [Hisham] has been standing for on this campus, and what he has been showing up for every time there was something going on on the Main Green, and what he and all of the other Palestinian students have been seeing and demanding for years and years.”

“This is not just a hard time for our community,” she went on. “This is time to act.”

When Paxson insists that “one of the most meaningful things we can do is pray for [Hisham’s] full recovery,” or when the University condemns its students for “disrupt[ing]” the vigil with calls for concrete action, they obfuscate the immense power they do wield to change the conditions that led to Hisham’s attack and the violence enacted against millions of Palestinians in Gaza and worldwide.

“We insist, in the most urgent possible terms, that the way for Brown to condemn anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian violence is to stop profiting from the violence against Palestinians in Gaza,” said Aboud. The Indy joins his call.

ARMAN DEENDAR B’25, CAMERON LEO B’25, and LILY SELTZ B’25 for divestment and ceasefire now.

METRO

Please use this link to help provide crucial support with medical aid, rehabilitation, living expenses, and additional costs for Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen. This crowdfunding campaign has been verified by the families of those injured.

FROM HISHAM AWARTANI, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29 What was my crime? What heinous deed did I commit for me to deserve to get shot and lose control of my legs? I was Palestinian. This is not the first time I had been tried and had a sentence passed on me in the kangaroo court of hateful violence. In 2021 I was shot in the knee by a rubber bullet during a demonstration. My classmate—not so lucky as me—suffered a gunshot wound in the leg from a .556-caliber-rifle.

When Israelis protest for the democracy of their courts, the Palestinian does not care. His court has adjourned with the presumption of guilt by existence. The judge, jury, and bailiff are all one: someone holding a rifle at a checkpoint, who will not meet my gaze.

It is of no importance that the person who shot me was not Israeli, because the hate that made this possible was made in Israel. It dehumanized Palestinians on an industrial scale, and was sent to the U.S. in neat little airwave packages. This hate is what makes the ongoing genocide in Gaza acceptable; a Palestinian is not human. When he walks through the prison-style rotating door, gets randomly selected for a search in Jerusalem, or is standing behind the bulletproof glass having his passport checked, he is no longer human. The pain of the Palestinian is not understood because to them we simply cannot feel pain.

This is not about Hisham Awartani though. It was never about me. On November 15 I joined my fellow Brown students to write the names of thousands of Palestinians killed in the war on Gaza. They gave us a document issued by the Gaza Health Ministry, and out of curiosity the first thing I did was look up my name. There were 30 results. 13 people named Hisham and 17 with Hisham as a middle name. I didn’t know how to feel. My name was not a common one. The list was incomplete and only included around 6,500 names, while an estimated 11,000 had been killed by Israel or according to American media, “had died.” Had I been one of those Hishams in Gaza my picture would not have been on the BBC or CNN. Instead of being interviewed, my mother would be fleeing south or already killed, trapped under the rubble with me.

I am the Hisham you know. I lived. My story is being told. The 13 other Hishams were killed, their stories forever erased. They were human and they did not have to prove that to anyone. They knew no respite, no justice, no peace.

Hisham Ali Hisham Awartani

‫هشام علي هشام عورتاني‬

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 08

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Yes, Brown Can Divest METRO

Debunking the University’s Divestment Deflections

→ On Monday, November 27, at a vigil for our classmate, Hisham

Awartani B’25, who was shot for being Palestinian, Brown University President Christina Paxson told her students that “we can’t control what happens around the world and across the country,” and that the University was “powerless to do everything we’d like to do.” For years, Brown has relied on claims of powerlessness to justify its continued complicity in violence against the Palestinian people. Central to this complicity is the University’s investment in companies that enable the Israeli state’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. When the College Hill Independent asked the administration about students’ calls to divest, Senior Vice President for Communications Cass Cliatt responded with the below message, sent exclusively to the Indy “on behalf of the President’s Office and the University.” +++

“A common misunderstanding is that Brown directly invests its endowment in individual stocks, bonds and other financial instruments. [In fact, the Brown University endowment is almost entirely invested through external specialist investment managers, all with the highest level of ethics and all whom we believe share the values of the Brown community. This includes the rejection of violence. The endowment is not directly invested in defense stocks or large munitions manufacturers.

This can be clearly seen through Brown’s SEC filings and are publicly available. In addition, detailed annual reports on the endowment are available on Brown’s website.

Members of the community often want to know what specific assets Brown’s endowment is invested in at any given time. However, because the composition of an investment manager’s portfolio is considered to be their intellectual property, our contracts with investment managers have confidentiality provisions that prevent us from sharing this information.

Our inability to disclose details in Brown’s investment portfolio does not indicate at all that we are invested in a specific holding.]4 The University has long-established principles for exploring the question of divestment. Divestment from companies can be considered if the company’s products or activities create social harm and divestment would help remedy this harm. [Divestment should not be used to “demonstrate financial power” or “wield political influence,” as ongoing demands for divestment suggest.]5 Any member of the Brown community can request that the University divest the Brown endowment from the assets of specific companies. [The first step in this process is to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management, or ACURM (formerly known as the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices, or ACCRIP).]1 [The committee, which includes faculty, students, staff and alumni, is charged with making recommendations to the president, who may take recommendations to the Corporation of Brown University.]3 As I believe you may already know, in 2020 ACCRIP explored the question of whether Brown should divest its financial holdings from companies that facilitate Israel’s actions in Palestinian territories. [This proposal could not be implemented as written, since it did not include clear standards for identifying which companies would be subject to divestment.

In addition, it did not articulate how financial divestment from the companies, however defined, would address social harm.]2 Any new proposals for divestment that are submitted to ACURM will be addressed, following the protocols that are enumerated in the committee’s charge.”

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

( TEXT SOFIA BARNETT, CAMERON LEO & LILY SELTZ DESIGN RILEY CRUZCOSA )

1. In 1978, Brown University saw the birth of ACCRIP—“a rep-

resentative body composed of faculty, staff, students, and alumni” to “consider requests by any member of the University community to bring pressing issues concerning the University’s mission and values,” according to the University’s website. In June of 2020, ACCRIP was replaced by an adapted version of the committee known as the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM) to directly mitigate “concerns raised by faculty about the narrow charge of ACCRIP.” The University attempted to amend ACCRIP’S limited scope by allowing members of the Brown community to bring forth pressing issues to ACURM “concerning core University values without being limited solely to matters of investment policy,” according to the University’s website.

2. In January of 2020, six months prior to the University’s dissolve-

ment of ACCRIP into ACURM, ACCRIP published a 16-page report to Brown University Paxson entitled “To Recommend Divestment from Companies that Facilitate the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territory.” In accordance with the Charge of ACCRIP as described in its Official Charter, the Committee examined the notion of divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestine through the lens of identifying “social harm” with respect to “the activities of corporations in which the University is an investor.” Social harm, in the limited context of ACCRIP, is defined as “the harmful impact that the activities of a company or corporation have on consumers, employees, or other persons, or on the human or natural environment.” In accordance with the University’s criterion and contrary to VP Cliatt’s statement, ACCRIP sufficiently demonstrated several instances of tangible social harm backed by companies in which the University’s endowment is invested—including the “construction of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” “building of the separation wall through Palestinian land” and “collective punishment of Palestinian people and home demolitions.”

Over one year after ACCRIP published its report and nine months after ACURM succeeded ACCRIP, Paxson addressed ACCRIP’s divestment recommendation in a letter to the new committee. Paxson wrote that she found that it “did not meet established standards for identifying specific entities for divestment or the articulation for how financial divestment from the entities would address social harm,” and that “therefore the recommendation has not been brought forward to the Corporation of Brown University for consideration.”

However, Paxson’s claim that ACCRIP inadequately demonstrated how divestment mitigates “social harm” is a deflection tool that, in its vagueness, allows for the President to dismiss recommendations as she deems fit.

ACCRIP included standards for identifying corporations for divestment on page five of its 2020 report.

ACCRIP also thoroughly articulates how financial divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine would address social harm from pages nine through 15, pointing to the aforementioned social concerns of human rights violations.

Much of the power of divestment would come from the cultural and political ripple effects of an institution as prestigious and hyper-visible as Brown publicly condemning the genocide in Gaza.

METRO

3. In her March 2021 letter responding to ACCRIP’s recommenda-

tion to divest from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, Paxson wrote that “any divestment action would have to be approved by the Corporation, which is the ultimate fiduciary of Brown’s finances as the University’s governing body.” Moreover, the University’s external investment managers have the ability to ignore divestment recommendations (although the University can certainly threaten to take its business elsewhere). Even if the University could absolutely ensure that not a single cent of its endowment were invested in companies enabling Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, there is no guarantee—rather, it is deeply improbable—that the University’s divestment alone would have an immediate and meaningful impact on these companies’ finances, their operations, or the situation in Palestine.

But much of the power of divestment would come from the cultural and political ripple effects of an institution as prestigious and hyper-visible as Brown publicly condemning the genocide in Gaza.

The President forwarding a recommendation for divestment from ACURM to the Corporation would send a strong social message that the University does, in fact, hold true in its purported commitment to “carefully directed investments” that “make a real and positive impact locally, nationally and around the world,” as Paxson proclaimed in her November 16 letter to the Brown community regarding the University’s financial stewardship in Fiscal Year 2023.

As outlined by ACCRIP’s 2020 report, the precedent of successfully divesting the University’s endowment from Sudan, and the resultant mitigation of “social harm,” serves as an indicator of potential social impacts following divestment from companies fueling Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. “Due to Brown’s significant social influence, divestment campaigns like those against Sudan and South Africa were also effective in socially stigmatizing the human rights violations carried out in those countries,” the report states.

“Additionally, when an institution like Brown stands up against blatant human rights violations, it sends a signal to peer institutions to do the same,” the report continues. “We believe that this precedent provides clear guidance on which recommendation will produce the greatest positive impact in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it directs us to recommend divestiture from corporations facilitating human rights abuses in Palestine.”

The Brown University Corporation, through the direction of the President, has at least two possible paths to divest from Israeli violence against Palestinians.

University press release calling the divestment decision “a critically important and strong statement by the University community regarding our abhorrence of the genocidal actions being supported and undertaken by the Sudanese government.

“We declare our solidarity with the peoples of the Darfur region of Sudan whose struggle to live in peace, freedom and security is an issue of pressing global concern,” Simmons said.5 Brown also divested from tobacco companies in 2003, again agreeing to “exclude from Brown’s direct investments, and require Brown’s separate account investment managers to exclude from their direct investments, those companies that manufacture tobacco products.”

One of the other paths available to the University for divesting is to update its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles—which the University’s Investment Office uses to evaluate its external investment managers. Although only approximately 23% of Brown’s endowment is managed by ESG principles, the University’s website proclaims its “expectation” that “the portion of Brown’s endowment that is managed with a formal ESG policy will steadily increase over time.”

“This aligns with a growing international movement in the financial and investment communities to demonstrate to stakeholders the ways in which investment activities align with societal impact,” the website states.

Revising the University’s ESG principles to recognize the various ethical violations characterizing the endowment’s investment in companies supporting Israeli state violence would equip the University to standardize investment expectations and hold investment managers accountable. Adjusting these ESG principles to explicitly condemn the investment of the University’s endowment in mass violence would lay down the framework for the Corporation to hire and fire investment managers based on their adherence to these principles, subsequently impacting the investment decisions made by these external managers.

5. Divestment at Brown has always allowed the university to “demonstrate financial power” and “wield political influence." +++ The University is anything but powerless.

SOFIA BARNETT B’25 with CAMERON LEO B’25 and LILY SELTZ B’25 for divestment and ceasefire now.

4. This is all true. But it doesn’t mean we can’t divest. The univer-

sity administration’s description of the divestment process is rife with contradictions and distracts student and faculty advocates from the legitimate procedural steps paving the path toward divestment. While the University’s investments are largely directed by external investment managers, the University is clearly capable of influencing where its money is invested. The Brown University Corporation, through the direction of the President, has at least two possible paths to divest from Israeli violence against Palestinians.

First, the University could decide to adjust the Investment Office’s “investment philosophy statement.” As of 2019, the statement includes a set of expectations that they present to their investment managers, according to a source the Indy verified as being familiar with the divestment process and who has met with Peter Levine (the managing director of Brown’s Investment Office). This set can include the expectation that investment managers exclude certain companies from their investments. This is exactly the route that Brown took in divesting from tobacco companies and the genocide in Darfur.

In 2006, the Brown Corporation voted on a recommendation from ACCRIP1 to divest from companies “whose business activities can be shown to be supporting and facilitating the Sudanese government in its continuing sponsorship of genocidal actions and human rights violations in Darfur.” According to the University’s website, the original resolution—which the Indy could not find online—stated that the Corporation should require investment managers to exclude eight specific companies from their investments. The Corporation itself also excluded those same eight companies from Brown’s direct investments.

Then-President Ruth J. Simmons was quoted in a February 2006

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EPHEMERA

( DESIGN ASH MA ) ES always comes to mind when I see crows circling around the setting of the sun.

Not only because of her personal fascination with them, as they crowd and cackle and flood the fading winter sky. But because she’s taught me how to listen for Fridays in birdsong, how to stare straight into the sun’s slant, how to steep in the salve of silence, even if you don’t have a tendency to leave things unsaid. I love ES for every incisive interjection, for each clever retort, for the minutes spent musing and mulling, often together, steeped in clove and consideration. But never underestimate ES’s capacity for quiet, and the beautiful string of words that will eventually emerge from it. Not to mention her remarkable ability to speed through a book even whilst cloaked in chatter.

Sure, we might more easily recall the presence of ES in Conmag by way of sound.

If you’ll allow me another enumeration, I’d like to pay respects to the click-clack of tall brown boots, to the writer being walked through their reverse outline, to the delightful cackle that beats out that of the crows. But I hope (beg, pray) that you won’t lose sight of ES as she is often found on a Wednesday night. Sitting in the corner seat, the butt of her pen perched on sealed lips, eyes scanning the D3 for beauty, coherence, and the inevitable slip of grammar, which ES will undoubtedly catch in the nick of time.

-MF

TOE TAG S

The glasses are what you notice first. Thin-rimmed, shockingly round, they form perfect rings around SS’s eyes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him without them— and I’m not sure I’d want to.

It’d be like seeing a pencil without an eraser or the Indy without its asterisk. They draw you in, their friendly, circular edges encouraging you to ask him about the personalities of various Rhode Island public officials or the merits of Providence’s open records portal. It’s always a lovely conversation and you learn more than you previously thought you wanted to.

But don’t let his peepers or his big smile fool you. SS is tough. I’ve seen him take on journalism professors and ProJo reporters and class speakers alike, standing up for what he believes with passion and eloquence. As a journalist and an editor, he’s led pointed investigations into Brown and written close examinations of Rhode Island police tactics and the PILOT agreement. I imagine that each time, he peers through his glasses at issues, sources, and his beloved public documents with close attention and a critical, probing gaze.

Round glasses. Sharpedged questions. That’s SS. - NM

IN D Y

for The Indy only had him t bu er, est one fleeting sem e, for be him you have seen ts and creeping into argumen ms. ea dr ur yo disagreeing in tts att wh of s Among a choru r ou d fin and whyyys, we g BBK. He is the lingerin fore be ng ati flo question mark cu y stl ne ho y the eyes of an rth No a ith W rious person. no othCarolinian drawl that s ever ha an ini rol er North Ca s is sit he y wa e had, even th ar pe ap y ma dialectical. He en wh t bu , ion ict as a contrad or r pe pa to n he puts his pe , BBK his thoughts to words to ser clo ing th gets at some , us of st mo an the truth th , res stu po r ea with our lin knows, will ever reach. As he r be ve ne ld ou sh the answer . ays simple anyw So while we have you led by here with your lips sea nt, we pri of ity bil the impassi ions: est qu e th u get to ask yo hy W ? ing go u yo Where are u yo ill W ve? must you lea could come back for us? Who y, wh d An u? yo ever replace y wh K, BB us l oh please tel ? rds wa ck ba on is your shirt -CB

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MF enters my life on two sheets of lined notebook paper, slipped in my mailbox on the precipice of disaster.

Which is to say that MF enters my life as a benevolent mystery, a sumo-orangescented musing on selfhood, a center of delightful gravity in a time of disintegration.

Which is perhaps just to say that their words precede them well. For a year, I saw MF as these lines of grace.

Now, I see much more. MF on the clearest summer night, back against the perfect stargazing rock, musing about the biggest questions that I had always wanted to ask but never had the person to ask them with. MF, head inclined close to a bush, marveling at the structure of a mountain laurel bloom or the fractals of a leaf (not my legal flower picking partner, but my partner in flower picking all the same). MF dancing with every part of their body, some dark basement, Providence, RI, bringing this quiet city to life to the tune of Gal Costa. MF stirring a steaming pot of something or other, in a kitchen probably too small for their culinary ambitions but that they’re certain to make work. MF’s face reflecting candlelight, their song deep and true even before they know the words.

MF mid-belly-laugh—this I see every day—in raptures over nearly anything and making you laugh about it too.

In every room, city, classroom, page, and home I’ve been lucky enough to share with them, MF has been my purveyor of all things benevolent and delightful and sensory and inquisitive. But above all, MF has shown me beauty: not just what it looks like but what it is. Who it is.

(Forgive me, MF, for harping on the pen pal serendipity. It’s the closest thing to a fairy tale I’ve got.)

LIST

In a Twilight Phase

“Bella’s Lullaby” was KATY PICKENS’ B’24 #1 song in Spotify wrapped.

( TEXT KATY PICKENS DESIGN CHACHI BANKS, SARAPHINA FORMAN & KATY PICKENS ILLUSTRATION CHACHI BANKS, SARAPHINA FORMAN & KATY PICKENS )

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X

ISAAC McKENNA B’24 In Memoriam cyanotype on paper, tannins from bark and acorns These images are made from natural dyes found in the respective subject trees. A cyanotype made from a medium format film photo is bleached and then soaked in the extracted tannins, which bond to the iron in the emulsion. Thus, a new life in material and light, and a documentation of decomposition.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

sex and the city of providence, ri Virginity, monogamy, and Indie feels awkward buying condoms

If you were anything like

me in middle school, the Pitch Perfect riff-off scene had a profound impact on your upbringing. And if you’re really like me, watching it involved your younger sister asking what a “virgin” was, movie night promptly disbanding, and the DVD being banned.

Now that I’m away from home, however—Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, please stop!—we can totally talk about sex. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve been building up to this issue for a while.* But sort of like when you have sex for the first time (ooh, meta), you think it’s a big deal until you actually get there… and then you’re lying in bed, partially naked, wondering where to go (the answer to both situations: get up to pee).

Sex is fun, sure. Sex can also be complicated, ridiculous, messy, awe-inspiring, sort of just alright, etc… so what to say about it? I’ve been warned by some friends about my “digital footprint” and “career prospects,” hence I’ll forgo the private details I’m normally so primed to share. I’ll ask some questions instead. Why can I talk openly about my freshman year benders, my troubled situationship history, and my passionate love of Drake, but not sexual relations? Why do I still feel so awkward around my parents when a sex scene comes on? Why do I need a mental pep talk before buying condoms, cranberry pills, etc.? Why do I feel sort of perverted walking into Victoria’s Secret?

Good grief! So for this issue, I’m diving into the sheets and answering some of your most burning, desirous questions. It’s tough work, but someone’s gotta do it. Let’s talk about sex, baby! * You might recall all the wonderfully frazzled Carrie Bradshaws that have graced prior issues.

Dear Indy, I get too attached to the people I’m hooking up with. My friends tell me that the solution is to see multiple people at once, but I can’t help feeling that I’m hardwired for monogamy.

Always and only yours, Serial Monogamist

Dear Serial Monogamist, You’re not alone! Haven’t we all been victims of getting a little too attached? Waiting for a confessional text that’ll never come? Imagining a wonderfully European Before Sunrise romance that’ll never happen? Getting too attached means getting your hopes up, and getting your hopes up on this campus almost never ends well.

In the past, I’ve received the same counseling as you, but now I’m going to play my Indie-card and override (y)our friends’ advice. It’s simple: if you’re not feeling seeing multiple people, don’t! So what then? Mope around, waiting for the u up text? When I’ve been at a similar crossroad to the one you’re at, stuck in the we-probably-won’thook-up-with-other-people-but-we-also-might purgatory, I’ve struggled with repressing my feelings of attachment.

“Get away!! Scat!!” I’ve oft cried in dismay. But what I’ve learned is that feelings, much like Baby, hate to be put in the corner.

What I’ve started to do, and what I encourage you to try, is leaning into feelings in a self-aware way. Detach the excitement from the anticipation: yes, it’s exciting that they want to hang out, no, they don’t want to date you. And even if you can’t quite let go of that hope, you can still enjoy the tragedy of the whole shebang (your life is a movie, etc., etc.). Recognize that there’s some fun in the intensity of these feelings. They might make you a little crazy; they might make you a little sad; they might make you walk in the middle of the night all the way out to India Point Park, nobly crying as you relish the savage tear of the wind on your face, the sticky cold of the rain that’s soaked through your jacket, the fierce aliveness of the stormy clouds while you look out to sea… and I think that’s all very cool.

At the risk of waxing poetic, I think we should spend less of our young lives trying to move past our young emotions. I suggest we savor the misery, the angst, the giddy joy, the striking adventure of college hookups; there’s no need to fix it all right now.

Dear Indy, I’m still a virgin, and I feel weird about it. How can I feel better about it, or just not be one anymore?

As ever, The 20-Something-Year-Old Virgin

Hey Virgin, I was tempted to answer your question with a researched tirade against the social construction of virginity and its patriarchal roots… but as I started to write, I realized that my instinct didn’t quite capture the entire story. As in, just because virginity is a social construct, that doesn’t make its felt impact any less real.

So, keep in mind that historical caveat. Because also, remembering that “virgin” is a social construct might be the first step to feeling better about being one—it’s all so very made up. And secondly, contrary to how it feels to be a virgin, remember that there isn’t a neon sign above you alerting everyone to that fact, or someone on campus who keeps a spreadsheet of all the virgins and sends it out to all potential romantic leads.

But maybe you just do want to have sex, because hey, wanting to have sex is a pretty common feeling! If that’s true for you, don’t let your virginity stop you—remember that the awesome thing about being a virgin is that everyone’s been one, so your partner should understand. Also (and this isn’t to generalize, because God knows awkward sex happens at all ages), the sex you’ll have as a 20-something will probably be better than the sex people had in high school. Prefrontal cortexes more fully formed, you and your partner are hopefully less insecure, not under the same roof as your parents, and importantly, know how to communicate. Use your age to your advantage, and tell your partner what you feel comfortable with!

And if it ends up being awkward—join the club. My own virginity story involved asking if I could turn on a podcast about ham to go to sleep, one ME’s tale coincided unfortunately with President’s Day Weekend… all to say: it’ll be something to laugh about in a year.

( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION SAM STEWART ) Questions edited for clarity.

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BULLETIN

BULLETIN

( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & ANGELINA RIOS-GALINDO DESIGN GINA KANG )

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

College School of Nursing. All children and adults are welcome.

Location: Smith Hill Library Community Room, 31 Candace St, Providence, RI 02908

Friday 12/01 @5PM: Healthcare for Humanity—Lessons from Cuba What can the current United States medical system learn from Cuba’s medical system? Join the Warren Alpert Medical School’s chapter of Students for a National Health Program, Party for Socialism and Liberation Rhode Island, and The Hatuey Project for a teach-in and Q&A. Dinner will be provided! RSVP through Instagram @pslrhodeisland.

Location: Warren Alpert Medical School Building Room 280, 222 Richmond St, Providence, RI 02903 Friday 12/01 @5:30PM: Freeze Rents Not People Community Speakout Join Providence community members at the annual holiday tree lighting this Friday to demand that the city end rent increases, evictions, facility shut-offs, and more. Turn out to support unhoused folks and call for housing justice!

Location: Providence City Hall, 25 Dorrance St, Providence, RI 02903 Wednesday 12/06 @2:30PM-4PM: Queer Greet and Treat with Brown Join the Sarah Doyle Center, the LGBTQ Center, and Youth Pride, Inc. for treats, crafts, and a conversation about communal support and care. There will be a meet and greet with staff to learn about the resources that are available. Come hang out!

Location: 743 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02903 Thursday 12/07 @4:30PM-6:30PM: Ethnic Studies Campaign Festival What exactly is ethnic studies? Why is it an important subject that needs to be taught? Join OurSchoolsPVD’s Youth Leaders to get answers to these questions and learn why this curriculum is necessary in Providence schools! Food, discussion, and fun activities will be provided. All are welcome, especially youth and teachers.

Location: TBD, check Instagram @ourschoolspvd for updates

Arts Friday 12/01 @7PM: Open Mic Night Join LitArts RI and Riffraff for a co-hosted open mic night on Friday! If you are looking for a supportive place where you can read your work, drop by to share your writing and support local talent. Signups begin at 6PM, and the open mic follows at 7PM. Location: AS220 Dance Studio, 95 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903 Monday 12/04/23–01/10/24: Entropy & Artistry—A Showcase of Works from PPL’s Makerspace Launching on Monday is the Providence Public Library’s exhibit of works from their Workshop MakerSpace. This intergenerational project features completed pieces as well as works-in-progress. The gallery will also be interactive, with stations for knitting, crochet, stop-motion animation, vinyl weeding, and more.

Location: Joan T. Boghossian Gallery, 225 Washington St, Providence, RI 02903 Saturday 12/09: Live Bait—True Stories From Real People Swing by Rhode Island’s longest-running adult storytelling show!

Listen to true stories told in six minutes or less for an evening of fun, fear, and enlightenment! Audience participation encouraged. Tickets are $10 in advance or at the door.

Location: 50 Rolfe Square, Cranston, RI 02910

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers *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. + Tuesday 12/05 @2PM-5PM: Free Flu Shot Clinic If you have not yet gotten your flu shot for this winter, swing by the free flu shot clinic at the Smith Hill Library held by the Rhode Island

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+ Fundraiser for Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen Following the horrific shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, VT, the students’ families have organized an emergency fundraiser to help cover medical expenses, rehabilitation needs, and any other care necessary for their recovery. Send love and support from Providence!

Donate: LaunchGood.com/3Palestinians

+ Meals on Wheels Senior Wish Donation Drive From now through December 15, Meals on Wheels of Rhode Island is accepting donations of new, unwrapped items for their gift bags. Specific asks include toothpaste, toothbrushes, lotion, shampoo/conditioner, soap, deodorant, blankets, large print puzzles, and 2024 calendars.

Warm clothes such as hats, gloves, scarves, and socks are also appreciated! Drop-offs can be done at the address below, or purchases can be made through Amazon wishlist.

Location: 70 Bath St, Providence, RI 02908 + Thursday 01/04/24 @7PM: Benefit Show for Simmons Farm Help raise funds for a solar panel installation for Simmons Farm!

Featured bands include Fiddlehead, GEL, Verbal Assault, and twoboyskissing. Doors open at 7PM, and music starts at 8PM. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 day of. Open to all ages.

Location: The Met, 1005 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860

Do you have an event, action , or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at ind ybulletinboard@gmail.com !

FEATURE: Benefit Show for Simmons Farm at The Met Simmons Farm, located in Middletown, has been an integral part of Rhode Island’s agricultural community for the past 392 years. As a result of RI Energy’s increased power rates, however, the farm’s electric bill “has soared by almost 50%” in the past 18 months, prompting a solar panel initiative in conversation with a reluctant Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. While the solar panel installation is expected to shoulder more than 80 percent of the farm’s regular electricity costs, $40,000 of the $130,000 needed for the project must be provided by the farm owners themselves ahead of construction. According to Brian Simmons, who’s been running the family lot for the past 23 years, the farm has collected nearly $5,000 and is hoping to raise more.

In addition to the regular farm operations, Simmons Farm has thrown a slew of hardcore and punk shows over the years. From local artists like Catalyst… and Hysteria to traveling bands like onewaymirror and GEL, dozens of scene heads in Rhode Island have grown to love the Middletown landscape. Off the farm, the Simmons family members have carved a space as figureheads of the northeast hardcore music scene for generations. Since the late ’80s, Brian Simmons has run Atomic Action Records. Representing artists like Pummel, Hardware, Sweet Jesus, and Verbal Assault, the Atomic Action label is revered in the noise and punk scenes. Two of Brian’s children, Aidan and Alex, have similarly ingrained themselves in the northeast hardcore scene, making up half of Bullet Proof Backpack (before taking an indefinite pause this summer) and twoboyskissing, which released an album at the end of October. Alex (age 17) also creates, prints, and distributes fanzines and community art projects under the moniker “I Always Fall Up the Stairs” or IAFUTS. In an effort to both save Simmons Farm and support one of Rhode Island’s most prominent music families, bands Fiddlehead, GEL, Verbal Assault, and twoboyskissing are taking to The Met in Pawtucket for a benefit show on January 4, 2024. Tickets are $30 in advance and can be purchased online at https://tinyurl.com/simmonsbenefit.