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Letters to the Editor
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Jasmin Kreutzer Portraying
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Isaaq Tomkins La Grande Bouffe
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Irina Husti-Radulet Dandy
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Sylee Gore On Asphalt and Satin Musings on Oxford and Berlin
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Max Morgan Trifling
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Grace Lawrence come home from the dark
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Ainhoa Santos Goicoechea Rosalia - Motomami - Camaleona Cultural Revival, Expansion, Appropriation
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Zhao Changxian Complaints from the Chinese Boudoir Male Constructions of Female Laments in Tang Dynasty China
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Eliza Browning Parodying the Political On Sally Rooney and Oscar Wilde
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Anonymous Academics in Dog Collars Chaplaincy in Crisis
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Thalia Roychowdhury Hypnotic Degeneration An Ode to Curation
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Em Power Everyone is Scared of the Guillotine These Days Clemmie Read Fashioning Decline The Hypocrisies of the Aesthete
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Meesha Williams Eucharist Gabriel Blackwell After Hogarth
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Nia Large Swerfing the Net The Politics of Being Anti-Sex Work
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Ore Gazit God Pities the Nursery-Children A View from Folly Bridge
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Bumping into each other on an unusually sunny day in Bloomsbury, London, our conversation turned to our summer plans. One in an indulgent postMods haze, the other with an Aesthetics book tucked under her arm, our minds turned to what to make of the magazine we had just inherited, whose life for one sole Trinity lay in our hands. In the wake of our lockdown asceticism, we craved a kind of selfish indulgence. Soon enough tensions arose, between these false realities of the extravagance we had fabricated, and the real world we were stepping back into. DECADENCE explores how a society forced into abnegation could react to its newfound freedom. Here we present Punch-ian parody, musings on Bosch, complaints from within the Boudoir, taking you on elegiac journeys on the Oxford Tube, along the Greifswalder Straße underpass, and the roads of Bilbao. As you glance at the niche interests our writers and editors have been mulling over for weeks, take these moments of small detail back with you as your decadence. This edition would not have come into its fruition if not for the work of some 50 members of The Isis. Thank you to our Deputy Editors, Susie, Fódhla, Millie and Andrew, for not-so-lazy Sunday mornings, Victoriana visits to the archives, and copy-editing galore. To Faye and Natalie, our Creative directors, for dotting the pearls on our balustrade of ideas and putting the cherries on top of our trifles. And to the team at large for their unending labour, compensated in part with jazzy drinks, potluck picnics and barnhouse painting and wine (Part 2 TBC). We hope that we have done justice to your brilliance. We now gift this gem to you. May it remain part of your collection. Yours, Ananya and Kiana
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR In classical conflict, man has three possible enemies: man, God or nature. For my heinous sin of living by the river in South Ox, I have been suffering through the latter conflict. This is an uphill battle that I am losing, despite being armed with makeshift bug swatters (i.e. freshly marked Jurisprudence essays). Please send supplies (i.e. Sudocrem). Bug-bitten and beleaguered Recent reports of the Tory party targeting so-called ‘Waitrose women’ for their campaign has given rise to the unique phenomenon of the ‘Missing Bean girl’, examples can be seen on Turl street sipping caffeinated beverages, dressed in vintage or second-hand items and discussing holiday plans. Their counterpart, the ‘Hassan’s bro’ is a nocturnal creature. The Turl Street Tittle-Tatler It was love. Impassioned, I wanted to shout it from the highest tower. I ran to chapel. “You need a tutor’s permission to go to the roof. It’s a common spot for jumpers.” Still impassioned I ran to my tutor’s lodging. He was out for the weekend. Still impassioned I composed him an email. 3 working days later I had permission. As I climbed the steps, I got a text: “Sorry about the other night. Besties? Back down I went.
Contributors: Anna Li, Mipham Samten, Isaaq Tomkins
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The Anti-Rapunzel
Hanging out with prospective bankers, I thought money was the most important thing in life, now that I’ve met prospective creatives, I know that it is. Said creatives also provided a wealth of quotable lines, which the writer has borrowed and promises to return with interest. Journey to the Centre of The Isis Offices (the World)
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IN THE POST... We recently received a letter from a Mr Andrew Robertson (Worcester, 1964) which contained within a copy of Isis no. 1500 from 11th November 1965, which is a memorial “Victoriana” edition - tracing the years from the first edition in 1892, during the latter years of Queen Victoria’s long reign. Included as well within this missive were anecdotes from Mr Robertson’s own time at Oxford, excerpts from which are here reprinted: I was active in the theatre, but mostly “off-stage”. One highlight was putting together the first performance of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” at the Edinburgh Festival 1966. This launched the “now famous”, Tom Stoppard! I enclose a couple of press cuttings. I also enclose a Weekend Telegraph article from 26th May 1967 entitled “Oxford: Portrait of a University”. Reading it again after 55 years it seems not that much has changed! But there is an interesting section on funding on page 16, where it comments that for years “entry to Oxford lay not through examinations… but in the ability to pay fees”. As late as the mid-1960s I was a beneficiary [of the Butler Act of 1944]. I was granted what was then called a “Country Major Award”, which paid all fees and gave me a perfectly adequate allowance, so I graduated after three years without a penny of debt. How things have changed – for the worse? Yes, access to university has broadened, but with a generation now entering the workforce with £50k of debt…
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By Jasmin Kreutzer Art by Dowon Jung
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Hetta Garber had been his muse. She was sitting on a divan, watching him paint her. If she leant back far enough and looked in the mirror above her, she could see herself shimmering for a moment before the trick collapsed and she was swallowed up by the turquoisegreen and shell-pink background. “Fashionable colours, Hetta,” he said, “fashionable colours. Now – fashionable smile!” Her arms were resting on the seagreen chair, eyes unmoved. The chair’s colour had mellowed, lost its vibrant edge, as if covered by a layer of dust which could not be brushed off. He was in his usual mode: flurrying about, stumbling over cables while crossing the room, grabbing lamps, bits of paper, colour palettes, all the time mumbling with a cigarette between his teeth. It moved up and down, replacing the lacking inflection of his speech with its rhythmic undulation. She turned her face away. He was now titled Fluttering Bird, an Abstraction in Oil in her mental portfolio of miniatures. She had already caught the Artist in all sorts of poses that might bring her immense fame. “Arch your back, my girl. So – just like this.” She could tilt her head far enough to catch a glimpse of his legs beneath the easel. He was leaning over to take another look at her every time his weight shifted. Her head always turned away just before their eyes could meet. This way she looked unstirred
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and absent, a silent shape pulsating on his velvet chair. All his moving about would be solved so beautifully too, if his flat were big enough for a separate studio. This way, in his single, all-use room, his art never lost the quality of being a sudden attack. Some shape among the outlines of his dim place would seize him, he would pat her shoulder to make her move, and give her a poem of instructions: Fashionable colours, Hetta, fashionable smile. Now – arch your back, my girl. So – just like this. What shall I do with you, where shall I place you, on my soft mermaid bed? “Yes, Hetta, that’s the smile I need.” Her face was resting against her arm, her mouth opened wide but gently, too gently to speak. Had she wanted to, she would have told him that the colours were not fashionable, they were too much from another time. Van Gogh had already discovered their combination in his still life of pink roses, Degas’ The Orchestra at the Opera employed them for the background, but neither of them had realised that these colours belonged in an underwater scene. She did not complain – nowhere outside of the Artist’s studio would she get to put on a dress in such a shade of pearly rose. It shimmered in the artificial lights which he coloured with purple and pink and deep-blue sheets of paper. “Do you know that this is the best painting I’ve made of you so far?” “Mhm?” She was listening to the sound of his brush against
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the paper, slowly lulling her to sleep. colour of his curtains. He undid her “ H e t t a ? ” hair by moving her about – he had She flashed her eyes as a no hairbrush. At least she had time to response before closing them again. stop by a drowsy café on the corner. She would not ask how much longer The cold evolved into a plot as she she had to sit. There was a thrill in watched it from inside, following the enduring like this, watched by such invisible whirls of wind with unblinking, eyes. Seemingly in her sleep, she dried-out eyes. She would sip her moved her leg to make the fabric coffee and share her secrets with slide off a little. Such gestures always the morning, sotto voce. One mustn’t made her tingle. The Artist stepped stir the morning too much. Once she out of his circle of lights and cables was warm, she got up and walked to and walked up to her chair, tripping school, where she did her homework for a moment. His trousers rested in the fluorescent corridor light. against her thigh. He was waiting for Her only thought, as she her to react. She kept her gaze fixed moved through the progressing on a spot ahead, somewhere in the states of daylight, was to hold onto deep distance, and flinched when the grey morning and wear it all day. a hand came down to play with her Alone in the front row, she could let earring. It gave forth a ripple of waves her right leg dangle for a whole hour in the lagoon on the opposite wall. as she rolled through her thoughts. “Hetta, tell me, what She loved her black lacquer shoes. do you see in my eyes?” The absence of a brush still caused a He moved himself in front of stirring of discomfort, but it was offset her, blocking out the light. The by the way she held her body. The spell of the artwork on the wall others would respect, even admire vanished. She turned to him. her for her pose – they would carry the “I see artistic genius.” sight of her effortless dormancy with “Wrong. Try again.” them all day. But she could not avoid “I see the the arrival shapes of the Modern of the “The absence of a brush Age – Man Reclining burning still caused a stirring on a Green Divan. This s t r e a k should be a painting.” of noon, of discomfort, but it was “No, Hetta. offset by the way she held painting Try again. What her desk her body.” can you see?” and herself She did with the not try again. material “Lust,” he said. She still felt outline of things. Daytime hurt, as something cramp when hearing the did her eyes. The skin surrounding word, but its meaning had worn out. them was less white now than it She had liked the dress, she had had been on his canvas. Green and liked the warm chair, but she didn’t pink swollen patches only appeared mind him taking her out of the one in the mirror above the classroom and then the other. She didn’t mind. sink, but with a definitiveness “Hetta, why are you shivering?” which she could not easily ignore. His sheets were cold. One As soon as the bell rang for would think that they would warm up lunch break, she was able to retreat after a while, or that his lips would, but into the church on the opposite side both remained as cold as the street of the street, where the sunlight never onto which she stepped once the reached the shrines. The coolness of grey morning light had changed the the place was a reconciliation. Each
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day she lit a candle for the Holy Virgin And yet, more and more visitors crowded Mary and wrote down a heartfelt prayer. around him, bending forward to find out She did not believe in the Virgin, but she the meanings of their lives by a glance at did believe in the way her eyes turned what the press called his “unsurpassable upwards to implore. Without her eyes the masterwork,” “a statement on the current face was nothing. Not even her praying times and the nightmarish eroticism hands could affect much if she was not of the moral dangers surrounding us allowed to see. Hetta would have gone everywhere.” The colours he used were on tiptoe to stroke the girl’s smooth “only produced in one country in the cheek had the candles not been there. world,” and “each drop costs the same as Something reminded her of her own a bottle of champagne.” The champagne look when she had posed for the first was actually running out, the noise painting on his bed – they had only just reaching an unbearable point. Hetta met. “What secrets do we share?” she had drunk more than she had meant wanted to ask. “Tell me.” Fifty minutes to. Only she knew the truth, and only later she had to return into bright sunlight. she knew how to forget it – something * with nights, and velvet shades, and him Hetta watched the gallery touching her body. There was not much opening from a corner while holding a to him, and where there was something, martini. The way she moved in her black it was in the wrong places. The corner of velvet dress and her mask of evening his eye twitched when he spoke with a makeup was so convincing that no one cigarette between his lips; his underarms asked for her age. Anyways, all eyes were waved flaccidly with each concentrated on the girl on stroke. Behind him, the the turquoise most beautiful colours “The champagne was d i v a n , glistened in her shape. actually running out, the shimmering Then it was over. She noise reaching an back from had missed the gallery unbearable point.” the life-size closure – the next thing c a nv a s . she felt was a hand on her The girl’s dress was the same shade shoulder. They were the last two people of pink as the lipstick which Hetta’s hair in the room. She asked him if it was kept getting caught in. It was almost morning yet – the light was too unnatural as if they had arranged to match. to tell, and she could barely keep her Every visitor was playing their role, eyes open. He said that it was only a moving in the throng of sounds which only quarter past one. Inside his car, she was exist in the sfumato of a late-night gallery warmed for an instant by each faint light opening: a gentle blend of champagne from a late-night café or theatre they glasses, a distant jazz band, voices passed, giving her hope before dying rising in embracing waves. The Artist away. They stopped by one of them, a was being drowned in compliments, café with his paintings up on the walls. and yet he never turned his back on her. Next to their table, a girl was lying on a They raised their glasses to him, put their bed, wearing only black lacquer shoes. hands on his shoulder, slipped him calling Hetta couldn’t take her eyes off her. cards. His strokes were unique, and in “ H e t t a ? ” such bold colours. The girl looked almost He was sipping an espresso, the smoke recognizable. A couple of people tried of his cigarette finally pleasant after to pull Hetta into the congregation, but hours of inner suffering. She could barely she laughed it off, sensing his stare. She smell it now; it was a trace that mixed wanted to reassure all of them that she with the soft light and formed a question saw the similarity too, that she knew the on her plate of oysters. She nodded. Artist intimately. That no one else knew “Why are you nodding like why he chose such fashionable colours. that? Are you too tired to speak?”
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“No. I loved it.” was disintegrating, just like the friendless His fingertips were touching his lips, ash he had spattered all over the delicate twitching ever so slightly every few white things. Her head turned back to the seconds. He smiled the smile of a thin man girl on the wall and her elegant shoes. who was forty. He rested his hand on hers. Some thoughts suggested themselves, “What did you love about it?” but she was in that state of tiredness where “Your painting of me. I things are better brushed aside. A Crepe saw so many things in it. And Suzette and a fig tart materialized from everybody I saw loved it too.” somewhere. By the time she had finished “I didn’t tell you that you eating she was almost asleep again. could speak with the others, did I?” “Let us go then,” he said. “No, I didn’t speak. But I still He took her hand in his, clammy with the heard them speak. They saw me in it.” tightness of an approaching fit of painting. “What things did you see in it?” Just then her tiredness solidified into a “I saw myself, distant musing. and poetry. We have “everyone only cares about She stopped lingered in the chambers and turned the colours, of the sea. That’s from to him, her and not the meaning Prufrock. The colours eyes laughing really give it an aquatic in the dark. of what I paint.” feel, don’t you think? “What do you To the painting, I mean. see?” she said. The Turquenite was just the right choice She had thrown her head back slightly for combination with the Fluorite pink.” and was holding it at an angle, her right “I don’t care so much about the hand on his shoulder and her lacquer colour shades,” he replied. “Everyone shoe tapping against his foot. Slowly, she only cares about the colours, and not moved up against his impressible body about the meaning of what I paint.” and kissed his cheek before removing “But don’t you think the her hand from his shoulder. He would colours are part of that meaning?” find it impossible to fathom just what “They are an important part of the she had meant. It was the knowledge effect,” he said, “but they are just tools. Why of foreknowledge: she had just seen the should they carry more meaning than the Artist take one of his spatulas and tear actual subjects and objects I paint, or the his artwork to shreds with it. She, on perspective, or the size of the canvas?” the other hand, still possessed an intact “You really mastered the portfolio of miniature character studies, colours in this one, though. You differing states of daylights, and religious made them speak for themselves.” statues. Each one of them held endless “ M a s t e r e d ? answers to the question he was avoiding. And what do they say?” She looked once more – he had already “It’s not as simple as that, turned away. Armed with that knowledge, otherwise you could say it with words. she was happy to accept his defeat. The whole point is, you need the colours – not even poetry is quite the same.” His body was still for a moment. Then he coughed, making the ash of his cigarette fall across the tablecloth. The question mark had long since dissolved. He patted her hand – he should have palmed the ashes, or at least traced a symbol in them with his finger. There were pigmentation spots on his hand when she let her eyes look at them. He
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There is no fate worse than dying with a fully stocked wine cellar. He wasn’t sure where he’d read that, or if he had come up with it himself, but he took those words very seriously. As did they all. There were four of them in the dining room of Château de Montbrun: a Butcher, a Banker, himself, and a local journalist. Of course, there were others scattered around the place: chefs, waiters, a porter, and the like. They’d organised everything meticulously. The food would be delivered via a dumbwaiter into the long narrow room, and nobody would stop eating until it was over. The journalist had agreed to document the affair on the condition that he would not interfere under any circumstances – the Banker suspected that it was morbid curiosity rather than journalistic integrity which prevented him. The reason they had gathered was simple. They were all going to die at some point – some sooner than others – but they had mutually agreed that they’d all like to go on their own terms. So, there they were. For their first course each
man had jambon cru fumé with brown mission figs, goat curd, rocket, and candied walnuts. In the centre of the table sat a bottle – a Balthazar of Clos des Mouches, twelve litres in total. It was advertised as dark and oily with a silky texture and aromas of pepper, tobacco, humus, and undergrowth. A silence settled around them. He wondered how to start them off. Should he say grace? Or perhaps just shout “Bangarang!” and let them all tear into the food with their hands? The Butcher settled it for them all by reaching out and pouring himself a drink. In fact, he struggled to lift the Balthazar, so the journalist ran over to help him, but eventually he poured out three glasses, albeit with some spillage. They toasted to nothing in particular, and dug in. There was no overarching logic to the order or choice of food because none of them knew how long the affair would last. Rather, each man chose a series of his favourite dishes, which were sent up to the dining room as they were prepared. The first course was quickly followed by boeuf
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bourguignon, which must’ve been the Butcher’s choice since he took to it with such zeal, bringing forkfuls to his mouth. The Banker liked it, but he didn’t care much for the dish personally – though he did enjoy the sliced carrots, which had been quickly simmered with fresh orange juice, honey, ginger, dried currants, and some spice which he couldn’t quite place (it was turmeric, but that was beside the point). The first few courses were difficult. Despite the brave faces and lofty comments (perhaps spoken a little too forcefully) they were scared of what was coming. Perhaps it was nerves. In any case, once the procedures began in earnest, they took to the task with vim, devouring each course with ease as it came at them, like cows swatting flies with their tails. The day wore on and more food was brought. At some point, Bouzigues oysters with mousseline sauce, parsley crumb, and foraged sea herbs were sent up in the dumbwaiter. With them came a bottle of 18-year-old Talisker whisky and three crystal tumblers, each containing a perfectly transparent sphere of ice. The glasses were so chilled that condensation formed on them, wetting his fingers ever so slightly as he passed two of them down to his companions. The cool sensation of the glasses made him realise how hot he had become, holed away in that long, narrow room, and he instinctively brought his glass upwards and pressed it against his forehead. Slowly the room seemed to come into focus, and he surveyed it, taking in all the elements together. He saw the journalist in the corner, eyes trained on his notebook, only glancing up briefly
to check on their progress. He saw the Butcher slurping down his oysters – his pace had slowed since the beginning of their adventure, but he pressed on. He noticed the Banker had abandoned the present course in favour of a more impressive feat: he had a block of Emmental in front of him and was carving off chunks and placing them onto a raclette grill. (Did he bring that from home?) He then began to pour the cheese over everything in front of him before stuffing it into his mouth. Gnocchi, potatoes, and tomatoes were all being covered in cheese and shovelled into his face. A wave of nausea came over him. By this time the heat from his head had begun to melt the ice in his glass and he had no more desire for clarity anyway, so he hastily poured some whiskey into the glass and gulped it down. At this point a tray with some cakes on it had been brought in, at the centre of which was some unidentifiable figurine in a toga (an emperor perhaps, or maybe a god?). He pitied whichever pâtissier had laboured over it. The figure had a tasteful arrangement of orchard fruits in his lap: apples and plums, damsons and dates – all sorts of sweet delights. He expected the Banker to say something grand, but no words came, so pausing only briefly, he reached out to take a handful of fruit. At the very lightest touch, however, the cakes and fruit would spurt out an unpleasant saffron-infused syrup which had mixed with the juice, just missing his mouth. The Banker stared
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at him triumphantly. Ignoring the Banker, he grabbed fistfuls of fruits straight from the figurine’s lap, tilting his head back and squeezing the nectar into his mouth. Then, for a brief second fuelled by the Banker’s fading smile, he brought the tray over to himself and began to lap at the spilt mixture like a dog. The Banker looked at him indignantly but did not comment. Up in the dumbwaiter came yet another dish. It was relatively simple – a leg of Welsh lamb with crispy roast potatoes, parsnips, and carrots on the side. He recognised it as his own request. The lamb was from Cigydd Butchers in Aberdyfi, where his family used to holiday when he was a boy. It was one of two butchers in Britain where the lambs were killed on site, and their meat was the best he’d ever had. He thought it would be a comfort, but now, with his belly already bloated from the other courses, he looked at it with dread. The lamb, having been transported across the Channel, had lost any particular freshness it might once have had, and it barely registered on top of the lingering flavours of his previous courses. He should’ve left it where it was, an untouched memory. His trousers were beginning to feel tight now, his heart pumping away like a locomotive going up a hill, and he suddenly felt constricted in the ready-to-wear suit he’d picked for the occasion. His tie at some point had found
its way into a puddle of gravy. His twill shirt was untucked, the top button undone. To hell with it, he thought, and tore it all off with a sudden urgency – the tie, the shirt, the textured blue jacket, all of it – until he sat in his underwear, out of breath from the frantic exertion. Now, when the fat dripped from the meat and crumbs flaked off into his lap, he thought nothing of it: the charade of decency had been dropped. Like men enraged, each of them attacked their food. His knife sawed away at the lamb, and his fork intermittently screeched on his plate as he stabbed and scooped at his peas. At some point a large ceramic pot was knocked to the floor, crashing down and scattering itself in all directions. He only registered it when he felt a shard of porcelain digging into his foot under the table. The Banker was gouging out great hunks of bread and chewing them noisily. The Butcher was still, slumped back in his chair as if to say, “I’m stuffed”. The two men who remained ripped away pieces of meat and shredded them, and then they gnawed at the bones, and they sucked out the marrow, not considering for a second what they were eating. And the journalist just stared.
By Isaaq Tomkins Art by Rachel Jung
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Mr Guillaume brought Paris to London His fingers anchored him to earth with their varicoloured jewels – He told me he once found a pearl shucking oysters And had it mounted on his littlest finger. When asked “how do you like your eggs?” he replied Fabergé. And his fizzing champagne chuckle hounded the poor waiters Who brought out omelettes garnished like tsarist creations. It was impossible to be angry with him – He left the echo of his laugh in teacups up and down the city. There was no flower pinned to his lapel “All that’s for weddings and funerals,” he’d say, “And I fancy neither at the present day”. But when his heavy body rocked with laughter His ears hung like long petals And his head shook like a cowslip in a windy field – In the high flaming noon of his golden season Petals of silk slowly scattered away.
By Irina Husti-Radulet Art by Ben Beechner
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ON ASPHALT AND SATIN Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht. Be ahead of every leave-taking as if it were behind you, like the just-departing winter. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, XIII I live in Berlin and study in Oxford. Every time I come back to Oxford, it is a sojourn from the everyday and an immersion in another world. In some ways, they seem like vastly different cities. There is hardly a building older than the eighteenth century in Berlin, and hardly a building newer than the eighteenth century in the centre of Oxford. But distinct as they may be, daily life propels me through the two cities in similar ways. And as I walk, I see. The German capital, riven by history, is as reliably dubbed ugly as Oxford’s spires are extolled as exquisite. Berlin’s blue sky is cut in two by the TV Tower twinkling invitingly (or menacingly) where avenues terminate. But attention turns an eyesore into a thing of beauty.
Gaze at the concrete stem of the construction shaded by sunlight: the blank surface is wholly unornamented, yet shadows shape a form that can capture the eye. And while the mirrored globe might first attract viewers with jaunty retrofuturism, its glass and metal pyramids are also a sight worthy of reverie. In some ways, the looming Palladian weight of the Radcliffe Camera protruding above Brasenose College’s squat cloisters is no less alien, no more beautiful. Headington limestone and pre-Wende steel both catch the sun in alluring ways. I was taught that beauty resides in the Sheldonian’s harmonious façade, and amidst the pristine, remote landscapes of Gloucestershire. But the excluding nature of a frame that demarcates ‘art’ from ‘not art’, and confirms the supremacy of sanctioned places of beauty, is misleading. Sequins shed onto asphalt shine as beguilingly as those stitched onto a gown. Conventional ideas of decadence foreground costly ornamentation. Goldwork embroidery transforms a cotton dress into royal attire. A stone carver’s chisel shapes a block into an expressive face. A worked surface becomes a luxurious one because of the materials applied and the care afforded to it. But an appreciation of everyday beauty helps to shatter the monopoly that privilege and wealth hold over aesthetic
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experiences. In Everyday Aesthetics, Yuriko Saito proposes “bringing the background to the foreground”. We are encouraged to expect transcendence in rarefied places, whether natural or man-made. But what happens when we apply the principles governing art to everyday life? The unseen background of our lives is often formed by the unframed spaces we pass through - the Hellweg parking lot, the Oxford Tube, the Greifswalder Straße underpass, the Covered Market public toilets, even our lightstarved breeze-block rooms. When we attend to the unremarkable, we transform it. Take the detritus of an everyday walk. From hour to hour, street to street, our many steps send us past air conditioning units, surveillance cameras, drainpipes, fractured pavements, and even blunt plastic boxes that open up to reveal their innards of cords and wires and lights. Can the inside of a cable box be beautiful? Can the idea of everyday beauty be extended to enclose the sinuous curve of its red and white wires as they snake from plug to prong, the flashing red lights that display what is on, what is wrong? Rather than passively appreciating beauty which someone else has placed on a pedestal, how much better to discover what lies there for the taking. Recognizing and seeing everyday life as art is a way for our attention to co-author beauty - to frame, elevate, and call into being the very work we regard. We may cherish the fall of light through a bus shelter wall, even if - or precisely because - that glass is stained, that light a streetlamp’s sodium glare. Because this beauty often lacks a vocabulary for its articulation, it remains elusive. Liberating ideas of beauty from inaccessible spaces means discovering transcendence in everyday life. And when schooled to tune into everyday beauty, the eye begins to alight on previously unnoticed places. Through a Turl Street window, I spot a book propped open by a mug with a tea bag slumped over its edge, splattering a page from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Crossing the railway bridge at Dänenstraße, I observe how the coat of black on a brick wall has so thoroughly faded that the patches form a face. I turn a corner, and an iron railing paints a crisp silhouette on the sunburnt sandstone. And when I look over, the citric sharpness of a lime tree’s blossoms has sparkled the windscreens green.
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By Sylee Gore Art by Violet Trevelyan-Clark
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village fete. Bunting. The air is sticky like marmalade. The scorched grass as crunchy as a brandy snap. Light up on Winnie, seventyfour, blouse the colour of stained wallpaper, standing behind a cake stall. WINNIE: “I don’t use clotted cream.” I knew I’d have to kill her when she said that. We didn’t rub along from the start. Belinda and I. Didn’t envy her one bit, not like the others on the committee – liver-spotted sycophants – when she strutted into the village hall with her Emma Bridgewater cake tin. Skin smooth as skimmed milk. One of those bobbed haircuts that was fashionable when I was her age. Dark and glossy as a chocolate ganache, sitting on her shoulders. I
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wasn’t jealous of her. Not one bit. I sat there with my earl grey and garibaldi thinking what a selfpitying bunch of pensioners they were, swarming around her like that. Pathetic. And some of them only sixty! Sniffles. Once they’d sat down after all the excitement, adjusted hip replacements, turned hearing aids up and let blood pressures settle, I began the meeting, smoothly allocating out the savoury items (cocktail sausages, scotch eggs, cheese scones, coronation chicken, cucumber sandwiches, pork pies) like a hot knife through butter. Although we did take a vote on quiche, mind you. The cakes and traybakes have been more hotly contested in recent years, but I know how to navigate a fête meeting like the back of my Le Creuset oven mitt. Everyone knows how I run things in this parish. Cupcakes, brownies, treacle tart, lemon drizzle, carrot cake, chocolate cake and the rest were all fine to give out. Well, one or two hiccups. Mark (village alcoholic) wanted the black forest gâteau again, but I put
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my foot down. Not after the Jubilee fiasco when he set the gazebo on fire after flooding the trifle with Armagnac. Frightful behaviour. Plucks tissue from sleeve. Dabs nose lightly. There are unspoken rules to a cake stall. Every village has one. It’s like a church, but more cultish. The weighing of sugar on scales, the ritual cracking of eggs, the meniscus of vanilla extract on poised teaspoons, the pinches of salt, the incision of cake skewers, the fine mist of icing sugar, the rhythmic whipping of cream, and the licking of the spatula. It’s ceremonial. The Bake Off is my Bible. I take the sacrament of sponge and compote. I pray at the altar of Prue Leith. If baking is a religion, then I am a high priestess. Dips finger in icing. Licks. Now, the Victoria sponge is the most prestigious, quintessential, and sought-after cake on the stall. Two slices of sponge, the finest Cornish clotted cream and strawberry jam filling, topped with the thinnest sprinkling of icing sugar. It is the highest honour that can be bestowed on an amateur village baker, a task assigned only to the deftest tin-greaser, tenderest spatula-wielder and veteran committee member. Many people have died in the history of baking Victoria sponges. I should know. I’ve fended off my fair share of young, plump, pre-menopausal housewives (who think they know a thing or two) in my time. But she – she was something else. I’d caught her staring at me, trying to suss out my weak points, the pink corners of her mouth poised, twitching impatiently, scarlet fingernails drumming on the lid of her polka-dot tin – tap tap tap tap tap tap – echoing around the village hall rafters. Taps table. Until I say those holy words: “Victoria sponge.” Tapping stops. Silence. “I’d be happy to take that,” she says. The only noise in the room is Geoff’s faulty pace-maker ticking. Crumples tissue in fist. Nobody
challenges
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my
Victoria
sponge.
Nobody. “We normally start newcomers on the coffee and walnut,” I say. (No one likes making coffee and walnut cake.) Then she says in that treacly, sweet voice, “Oh, but it’s my speciality. In fact, I’ve brought one I baked this morning, for everyone to try.” What she does next boils my blood. More than Mr Kipling Battenburg. More than cream before jam on scones. She gets up, plies open her cake tin with those red nails and starts handing out slices of her abomination, not on paper plates, but napkins. Starts ripping tissue. She goes round the circle of plastic chairs, greeted with a smattering of guilty thank yous and sheepish glances in my direction. “This isn’t protocol,” I hiss. And yet she puts a napkin on my lap. There are sliced strawberries top of the sponge. A cardinal sin. Hands have been cut off for lesser abominations. The Jam? “Raspberry, Bon Maman.” Ridiculous. Nobody uses raspberry in a Victoria sponge. The filling? “It’s whipped single cream, for lightness. I don’t use clotted cream.” Tissue shreds fall to floor. That did it for me. I would have made an Eton mess of her head with Louise’s Zimmer frame right then and there if every pair of cataracted eyes in the room weren’t on me. They were all gawping at me, and – what’s worse – their napkins were empty, cake crumbs caught in moustaches, cream smeared into their wrinkly lips. They watched as I took a bite, probing it with my tongue. Springy, moist, rich sponge with just the perfect amount of filling. But there was something else there, scratching at my tongue. It couldn’t be. Is there lemon in this? “You noticed! Yes, a little lemon zest. My own little twist,” she said. “It’s… different,” I grumble, “but there can only be one sponge on the stall.” A dentured murmur of dissent rises. Belinda looks straight at me with an evil, knowing twinkle in her eyes. “However, this year, I might be prepared to make an exception and have two cakes on the stall. Just in case we run out.” The corners of her young, pink lips ripple into a grin. The bitch.
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The peal of church bells. The tormented babbling of children. Winnie begins to cut slices of cake. I insisted that we arrive here nice and early so I could get home and bake my sponge before the fete begins, have it nice and fresh. It’s a cake stall industry secret. It stops the cake from getting soggy, see, and the cream won’t crust over. Not that Belinda would have thought of that. She made hers last night. I could practically smell the compote rotting and whipped cream curdling from underneath her cake tin as we drove over this morning. She wouldn’t stop droning on and on about tempering dark chocolate as we unloaded the cakes onto the stall from the back of her Range Rover. We’re pitched next to the children’s games stalls at the far end of the boggy football pitches away from the village, so she kindly offered to courier the Tupperware over. We arrange the glorious spread of savoury nibbles and sweet treats over my floral tablecloth, leaving the central cake stand empty for my Victoria sponge. “I’ll just grab my cake then!” Belinda turns into the boot of her car, so I split her head open with the splat-a-rat mallet. Eats cake. The fête is going swimmingly and, of course, my
cake stall is the centre of attention. There’s a wonderful buzz of villagers ambling around the field and – except for the hideous screaming of the brats on the merry-go-round – I’m actually rather enjoying myself. I even allowed myself a thimble of Pimm’s earlier! Wouldn’t want to shrivel up in the sun. Winks. “Is this raspberry jam, Winnie? That’s not like you. It’s quite pulpy,” Louise asks after sampling my Victoria sponge. The weather is delightful, a warm August breeze and clear blue skies. I smile graciously back, “Well, it’s from Belinda. A few extra ingredients this year!”, “Good for you! Talking of Belinda, I haven’t seen her yet. Do you know where she is?” Red spotlight. Holds out slice. Grins. Belinda? Oh. She’s here. Blackout. Louise screams. The buzzing of flies.
By Max Morgan Art by Ben Beechner Photography by Niamh McBratney
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come home from the dark By Grace Lawrence
come home from the dark / turn the lamp on / count each second you were missing your own heart / flick the kettle on / listen to her fever / count the minutes that it takes for her to calm / it’s so easy to forget the smell of burning / the way the window blushes with your breath / i am looking inwards / navel gazing / blowing my life out of honey-warmed glass / this is reflection / refraction / corruption / how else should i remember? / it’s so much more / i am whistling daydreams into lockets / coat-pockets / immovable walls / i want to tell you that love snags the throat like lies do / like confessions / like prayers / that the restlessness of missing you / is too much to bear / if / in this lifetime you could hold me / i could profess on the ordinance of the heart / how it breaks / then breaks / and breaks / you piano hammer / you daydream / come to set my body alight with the rhythm of love / love / love /
Art by Eloise Cooke
like how heat swallows sense all through summer / like the sea devours sand / silt / men / you circle my soul like a comet / cut from the offshoots of night / yes / you / carved out of moonbeams / fig leaves / my own spare rib / come like revolution / revelation / hurried rain / i am imagining lifetimes in the blue house / two doors down / i am imagining / lifetimes / of contentment despite pain / if you want / if you need / you could come to me with your heart halfcleaved / i would mend it / what is love but string? / know that we live upon floodplains of sorrow / know that i still pray for hope to come / so come / oh revolution / revelation / save a seat so we can sit / side by side / or / come / you apparition / hang like fog / haunt the floorboards by my bed / come home from the dark / turn the lamp on / come if you must through the vents / bring everything / nothing / the bits in between / come with lightness / the night’s loveless / just come home to bed.
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ROSALÍA - MOTOMAMI - CAMALEONA By Ainhoa Santos Goicoechea Art by Hannah Gardner “¿Oye, ya has escuchado el nuevo disco de la Rosalía?,” my mother asks, shifting gears. We’re driving home from the Bilbao airport, where I had just arrived for the Easter holidays. After months away, everything looks unfamiliar - the trees, the mountains, and even the blue sky all seem oddly off-colour. But my mother’s voice grounds me: “¿El Motomami ese?” “Sí,” I reply. “¿Y qué pensaste?” I tell her I thought it was pretty good. Great, even. My mother nods - she thought I’d say that. And every music journalist she has come across seems to agree: Rosalía is innovative, a musical genius, a force to be reckoned with. But that might not be the Spanish layman’s opinion. In fact, she tells me, a lot of people hate Motomami. “¿Y eso?” I ask, although I already know the reason why. My mother rolls her eyes, pulling up next to our house. “Pues porque a una mujer española no le puede ir bien fuera de España.” We’ve had this conversation a million times. Rosalía has been a contentious figure in Spanish pop culture for a while, after all. Ever since her second album, the flamenco-pop fusion El mal querer, exploded worldwide, she has been the target of both raving praise and unadulterated hatred from all sides of the Spanish media. My mother blames this on misogyny; on the unspoken rule that a Spanish woman cannot - or should not - find success outside of Spain. But even in 2018, the Rosalía discourse was variopinto, diverse enough that even my nearly-retired, Elton John-obsessed mother took notice.
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From the very start, conversations surrounding Rosalía ranged from the serious to the absurd. On the one hand, we have the meme-worthy incidents, like Rosalía ignoring (or just failing to notice) famed director Pedro Almodovar as he tried to get her attention during a concert. These tend to make the rounds online before vanishing into the vast ocean of funny, iconic celebrity mishaps. Digging a little deeper, however, we find a strange, neurotic fear that mami is abandoning us. Take an easy example: the many rumours that Rosalía had broken her working relationships with Spanish designers like Palomo Spain or María Escoté. The Spanish media was outraged, accusing her of forgetting her roots. Was she ditching the motherland as soon as she could get Versace’s attention? Well, given the fact that Palomo Spain designed the dress for the music video of her 2019 single ‘A Palé’, and upcoming Spanish designer Pepa Salazar took charge of much of her Motomami wardrobe… no, I think not. It was my mother who introduced me to an even stranger example of the Rosalía hysteria, also while driving, as ‘Malamente’ played on my phone. “¿Oye, pero ya has visto lo que ha hecho el alcalde de Fachadolid?” Ah, yes. The Rosalía versus Óscar Puente debacle. I missed the height of the mediatic furore surrounding this bizarre exchange because, as so often happens, I was abroad at the time. But my mother summed it all up for me when I returned to Españita: one fine day, Valladolid mayor Oscar Puente opened Twitter to find a fellow vallisolterano asking why Rosalía would not be headlining a local, public festival. Puente replied, with all the indignation of a man very much wronged: “Pide 500,000 euros, me dirás tú.”
expensive” and leaving it at that? And, by the way, it was too expensive, so much so that both Rosalía and other festival organisers explained that the number Puente cited was literally wrong. And yet many still came after her to the cry of ¿Pero tú quien te crees que eres? How dare you turn your back on your people? Ask for so much? Dare to do well? Who do you think you are? Then again, I’m not about to spend my time defending a millionaire popstar. Puente’s data may be wrong, but there’s no denying that Rosalía is E de expensiva. I myself felt a shortlived kinship with Puente when I heard about the prices for her upcoming Motomami tour, which range from €41 standard seats to €413,50 VIP passes. Rosalía herself doesn’t set the prices of her shows, but it’s still fairly ghastly of her representatives to charge more for VIP tickets than both Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga combined. This is especially cutthroat in a post-pandemic world in which many have taken a big economic hit. Accusations of cultural appropriation are even weightier. The most recent criticism is directed at Rosalía’s ventures into the realm of música Latina in Motomami, where she plays with AfroCaribbean genres
“¡¿Pero pa qué hace eso?!” And I agree with my mother’s utter confusion: what Puente did was really, really strange. There’s no other way to put it. Why reply to that particular tweet? Why the part-outraged, partdismissive “me dirás tú”? Why state the exact amount of money her representatives were asking for instead of just claiming it was “too
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like reggaeton and dembow. Pitchfork gets to the heart of the debate quite succinctly when they ask: “What does it mean when a white Catalan woman working in traditionally Afro-Latinx genres attains worldwide acclaim in ways the originators – and her Black contemporaries – have not?” These conversations about Rosalía might seem new to the uninitiated, but they are not. Similar questions have been directed at her ever since the release of El mal querer – they were just coming from a different marginalised group. The Spanish Romani community, known locally as gitanos/as, are the parents of modern flamenco. They didn’t single-handedly create it, as the genre has influences deriving from Arabic, African, Jewish, Andalusian, and Indian musical traditions. Still, it remains closely tied to historically gitano experiences of poverty, loss, and endurance in the face of marginalization and even extermination. While white Spaniards have also played, sang, and danced flamenco since its inception, flamenco is not definitional of white Spanish culture in the way it is of Spanish Romani culture. So when the world’s first flamenco superstar turned out to be a white woman from Cataluña, eyebrows were raised, and questions were asked: why did the chips fall where they did? Some reacted emotionally, even aggressively, when they heard Rosalía use the Romani caló dialect and dance while dressed like a gitana, long nails in the air. My mother and I are not gitanas, and only pseudo-Latinas. Sometimes, we struggle to understand this aspect of the Rosalía discourse. “A mi me parece bastante chorrada,” she says, rolling her eyes, at a red stoplight. “Si lo hace bien, ¿qué más dará lo demás?” And she does have a point because, dammit, Rosalía is good. Really good. She has dedicated more than half her life to studying flamenco, and it shows. Her voice is gorgeous and malleable like clay. Beyond that, she is an absolute popstar: she sings, she dances, she produces. Motomami in particular is astounding in its mixing of genres, styles, and moods, a creative cacophony that
still manages to produce a cohesive whole. In it, Rosalía sings about metamorphosis, about never ever staying the same. Indeed, as a performer, Rosalía has the uncanny ability to play a character so well that she almost transforms into them. She becomes a conduit for the song, or,“a channel [for its] soul,” as she put it for the New York Times. “You’re there more than ever, and super awake, but at the same time you’re gone.” It’s a lovely thought, I think. Spiritual. But perhaps it’s this very talent that protects Rosalía from the scrutiny a less chameleonic artist would have to face. When she sings on a stage, you forget yourself. She envelops you in music. In pure art and message. Rosalía is gone… but she’s not really gone, is she? It bears mentioning that it’s not all hate from gitanos. Alba Flores, gitana flamenco star Lola Flores’ granddaughter, has defended Rosalía like my mother has: by praising her voice. “Es intolerable el acoso y derribo a una muchacha que canta tan bonito,” she said. She also pointed out that gitano contributions to Spanish culture are finally being acknowledged in the mainstream thanks, in large part, to this Rosalíarelated outrage. The artist herself has addressed the debate by pointing to her studies. She has been obsessed with flamenco since Camarón de la Isla blew her mind at age thirteen, and her instructor at the prestigious Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya has often praised her work ethic and perfect pitch. Rosalía has also espoused what could be called a ‘colourblind’ approach to art. In her eyes, genre does not exist in modern music, where everything is already mixed in with everything else. Rosalía has even stated that she never set out to write flamenco in El mal querer, but that her goal was simply to make pop. I do not doubt her honesty when she says this, but it also doesn’t excuse the faults within the final product. At the end of the day, I think I agree with the stance of gitana feminist association Gitanas Feministas por la Diversidad: while they claim to have nothing against Rosalía as a person, her music runs the risk of being desgitanizante, of whitewashing flamenco – “Y eso a España le gusta.”
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Indeed, the Spanish mainstream may hate Rosalía, but they love that she’s white. The utter glee that some Spanish newspapers take in defending her, smugly pointing out that other white musicians have historically sang flamenco, is fairly obscene. It’s as if they don’t realise that the point is not to gatekeep flamenco from white people, but to bring our attention to a simple fact: we needed a white singer to make flamenco ‘cool’. Yes, Rosalía has talent, she has duende. She has dedicated her life to flamenco, and I’d even go so far as to call her one of the most successfully innovative artists of our time. But that doesn’t absolve her from an industry that is ultimately profiting from taking the gitano out of flamenco. Even if she is just experimenting, innocently mixing flamenco and trap and pop, it doesn’t make her music apolitical. Yet I still dance to Rosalía. I stream her albums. I buy expensive tickets to her expensive shows, and I get excited about it. Part of me wants to justify this by pointing to the system and blaming it: just like expensive tickets are the result of a capitalist problem, Rosalía’s success over that of gitano and Latino musicians is the result of a white supremacist problem, one large enough that my questionable apathy in this particular case can pass as rational pessimism. Another favourite justification of mine is one my mother also rushes to quite often: pues mejor que esté que que no. After all, if Rosalía weren’t here to make an international push for cross-genre flamenco, we wouldn’t be talking about gitano history and gitano artists right now, and isn’t that a good thing? A net positive, even? There’s even the anti-neoliberal response: at the end of the day, what would really change if Rosalía weren’t white? While a gitana flamenco superstar, a true hyperpop neo-Lola Flores, might be good for representation’s sake, the success of one gitana would change the material reality of Romani people in Spain just as much as Obama being president changed the material reality of black people in the United States: not all that much. But of course, all of these justifications are faulty to say the least. If I really wanted to, I could try to stand up to the industry by boycotting Rosalía and her music. It is also hard to quantify how much exposure Rosalía is giving flamenco, as it’s impossible to know how many of her listeners will actually go out and support gitano
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artists. Finally, the empowerment that comes from representation is nothing to scoff at. Plus, it’s unfair (not to mention unrealistic) to put the weight of ending racism on the shoulders of just one imaginary gitana. So I’ll be honest: I listen to Rosalía porque el arte me puede. Because her music moves me. Because I am fascinated by her artistic vision, and her star image, and what that reveals about the country that raised me. Because perhaps I see myself in her a little: a woman, an artist, an overachieving expat who people never expect to return home. But then I do. And when I do, my mom and I talk about Rosalía. If you have read this piece and want to expand your musical horizons, I have made this playlist to get you started:
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“At daybreak, I pace idly in the courtyard with a silk fan. Cold autumn is at hand, and I know the fan will soon be discarded. A crow flits by and secures its position on the palace roof. The croaking bird is no match for my complexion, smooth as jade. Yet why is it able to return bathed in the sunlight from Zhao Yang Palace, from my lord’s gilded side? He slumbers with his new concubine, while I am exiled to the most secluded corner of the harem – already cast aside.”1 The speaker is Ban Jieyu, a concubine of the Han Dynasty who fell out of favour after being embroiled in a vicious harem power struggle with sisters Zhao Fei Yan and Zhao He De. Here, she is an arresting picture of boudoir sorrow. The real Ban Jieyu, however, is lost. In the Chinese poetic canon, she survives through a tradition of literary allusions which frequently evoke her as the paradigm of a jilted woman. The performer is Wang Changling, a Tang Dynasty poet. Far from the first man to affect the persona of a grieving woman in a boudoir complaint, he belonged to a group of powerful male literati in the Tang Imperial Court. Together, they penned more than five hundred boudoir complaints, many of which have been preserved to this today. Under the brushstrokes of these men, women mourn both in their private boudoir and in the harem: lovelorn concubines grieve their imprisonment or an emperor’s disfavour, and newly-married girls weep over their estrangement from a merchant husband.
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According to Lu Xun: “The most long standing, eternal and pervasive art form in Chinese history is that of men disguising themselves as women.” What scholars have been struggling to explain for centuries is why.
Frost forms upon the jade stairwell, the dampness of the night pervades my silken socks.2 The literal meaning of ‘boudoir’ in French is ‘pouting room’ or ‘sulking room’, and the women in these complaints seem to be solely capable of experiencing this singular emotion, frozen permanently in one frame. The problematic ‘male gaze’ supplies an uncomplicated solution to this portrayal of unwaveringly mournful women.
Only to let down the crystal curtain, And gaze at the autumn moon through the veil.3 Scholarship on boudoir complaints tends to focus on the power imbalance between the educated male literati, and the women of the boudoir, as Robertson notes.4 The scale is tilted between
Wang Changling. Five Autumn Poems of Changxin. Part 3. ed. Yin Cao. (Beijing, CN: Zhong Guo Hua Bao Chu Ban She, 2011). 2 Li Bai. Yu Jie Yuan. ed. Yin Cao. (Beijing, CN: Zhong Guo Hua Bao Chu Ban She, 2011). 1
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By Zhao Changxian Art by Faye Song
the artist and his muse, between the magistrates, politicians, and housewives. Perhaps we should denounce the male fascination with the boudoir and the vulnerability of a woman’s body. Perhaps this voyeuristic male spectatorship sexualised, idealised and repressed women into a submissive poetic object. Or maybe the appeal of a feminine voice is more complicated than that, and potentially even sympathetic.
In the Jihai year of Chunxi I am to travel from Hubei to Hunan by water, on a pavilion on a hill in the company of Officer Wang Zhengzhi I this compose. 5 Demoted to the position of the secondary ambassador of transport of Hunan Province, Xin Qiji was given a consolatory send-off by his friends. He envisioned himself as a palace woman in the solitude of her boudoir, lamenting the remnant of fleeting spring. He felt a wave of sympathy for women like Ban Jieyu and was similarly discontented with his own fate. He wanted nothing more than to be at the epicentre of the Imperial Court, to command armies, and Ibid Robertson, Maureen. “Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China.” Late Imperial China, Vol. 3, no. 1. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, June, 1992). p. 63–110. 5 Xin Qiji. “Lyrics to the Melody of Fishing with Bare Hands” trans. Betty Tseng. Jiaxuan Chang Duan Ju: 12 Juan. (Shanghai, CN: Shanghai Shu Hua She, 1974). 3 4
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to dictate law and policy. But instead, he was an exile.
The favour of the emperor is akin to the rapid stream rushing Eastward, In gaining favour I mourn its inevitable loss.6 Xin Qiji did not merely gaze at and judge women. Instead, by assuming a feminine persona and evoking historical examples of jilted concubines, he and other male poets transformed themselves into the disenfranchised objects that they themselves disempowered with the invasive male gaze. Under the guise of love poetry, boudoir complaints harbour a compelling agenda – these male poets are not writing about women, or truly rendering themselves effeminate. Within the boudoir allegory, Xin Qiji was writing about his own unjust plight, bemoaning his failures at the game of political intrigue. His political rivals are assigned the roles of other vying concubines, who beguile the emperor with their beauty and wiles. After all, what is the difference between a spurned wife and an exiled courier, both being incapable of winning over the heart of an obstinate ruler? The shared emotion is that of inexorable sorrow and repressed resentment, the essential ingredients of a complaint. The poetic force of these complaints does not, however, stop at sympathy. Through their art, men assail the imperial power behind all grievances of the boudoir. While wandering around the Li Shangyin. “Gong Ci” Quang Tang Shi. ed. Yin Cao. (Beijing, CN: Zhou Guo Hua Bao Chu Ban She, 2011). 6
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Terrace of the Bronze Swallow, poet Wang Jian hears the telltale strains of a revel, he parts the beaded curtains to reveal the phantoms of dancing concubines and palace maidens.“Why should the living suffer for the ghosts of the past?” he asks, as “the cycle of seasons have not ceased after the old emperor’s passing, and the abandoned palace is evergreen.”7 As a member of the Song Dynasty literati remarks in surprise, “Tang poetry reveals much and hides nothing, and even boldly exposes affairs of the harem which any outsider would be condemned to even utter a single word of.”8 The boudoir persona of men thus transcends allegory to emerge as an evocative weapon of socio-political expression. History, however, records another dynamic between an emperor and his subject. During the Spring and Autumn period, a lord of Chu was amusing himself, drifting down the river on a raft, when an oarsman from Yue sang to him in a tongue he did not understand:
My heart pounds to make acquaintance with a prince. There are trees in the mountains and branches on the tree, Oh but you don’t how much my heart delights for thee.9 Song of the Yue was one of the first recorded love poems in Chinese history, composed by a male peasant to the foreign prince. It was ancient China’s version of homoerotic verse – direct, extemporaneous, and exuberant. Qu Yuan, a century later, created a boudoir voice a world apart from the liberating Song of the Yue. Wang Jian. “Tong Que Tai” Xin Tang Shu Yi Wen Zhi. ed. Xiu Ouyang. (Hunan, CN: Yue Lu Shu She, 2009). 8 Hong Mai. Rong Zhai Sui Bi (Beijing, CN: Shang Wu Yin Shu Guan, 2019). 9 Liu Xiang. “Song of the Yue” Chu Ci. Beijing, CN: Shang Wu Yin Shu Guan, 2018). 7
He plunged himself in the Miluo River in 269 BC after penning Encountering Sorrows. His native state of Chu was falling apart before his eyes. The King of Chu, a master to whom Qu Yuan had sworn his unequivocal devotion, shunned his counsel. The beloved poet was mourned by peasants who wrapped up rice and meat into bamboo parcels and fed them to the flesh-eating fish in the Miluo River, praying that they would feed on these and keep his body intact.
All your ladies at court were jealous of my delicate beauty; They chattered spitefully, saying I loved wantonness.10 The image of Qu Yuan as the prototype of patriotism and altruism became deeply ingrained in the modern Chinese consciousness. But, simultaneously, a more marginalised, scandalous narrative continues to fascinate: the exemplary statesman was nothing more than a male favourite of the King. Whatever political allegory there may be in Encountering Sorrows commingles with the vulnerability of a romantic complaint, and it is near impossible to discern where the boudoir performance ends and truth begins.
There once was a time at dusk when he promised himself to me; But then he repented and was of another mind. I do not care about this separation, But it grieves me to find the Fair Lord so inconstant.11 Qu Yuan was the first influential literati to write with a woman’s voice. His poetic legacy passed Qu Yuan. “Encountering Sorrows” trans. David Hawkes. Chu Ci. (Beijing, Shang Wu Yin Shu Guan, 2018). 11 Ibid. 10
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down from the Warring States period to almost a millennium after his time, imitated by poets of Tang and Song Dynasties, and beyond. He created a specific artistic standard for Chinese poetry: the reticence of a boudoir tragedy. Unlike in Greek tragedy, there is no anagnorisis or cathartic release in this Chinese art. Instead, its pinnacle springs from the withdrawn expression of sorrow and affliction. In contrast to the Chu King’s cruelty to Qu Yuan, the prince responded amiably, even suggestively, to the boatman. He first embraced the peasant, and then wrapped around him the embroidered quilts from his own bed. Between the uninhibited joy in Song of the Yue and the feminine complaint in Encountering Sorrows, the homoerotic intrigue persists: if indeed Qu Yuan was a jilted male favourite in an age where men freely professed love to other men, why would he willingly submit to the constraints of the boudoir?
Poetry can entertain, can be admired, can possess social functions, and it can be in the form of a complaint.12 Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. By the Tang Dynasty, the era where boudoir complaints were the most prevalent, the practice amongst royals of harbouring male favourites had become illicit. Emperor Tai Zong ruled with the fundamental teachings of Confucianism and other philosophical schools of thought. These principles became the official pillar of governance, and for the first time since the Han Dynasty, an emphasis was placed on educating literati wellversed in poetic arts and the Confucian doctrine. In The Analects, Confucius comments that poetry should provide “amusement but not decadence, sorrow but not deep grief, and resentment but not wrath.” For centuries, this artistic principle of
restraint has guided male poets as they air out their sorrows through complaints. All forms of mournful Chinese art display Confucius’ aesthetic ideal to a certain degree, including music. Boudoir complaints are sometimes accompanied by the guqin, a sevenstringed zither. The sound of the guqin is muted and played with as little movement as possible. A player presses on the strings tightly after a note and shifts across the instrument, altering the note as he goes along, but extending it as long as possible. It produces a lingering, airy quality. Real music is believed to lie in the notes beyond the strings, or in the moments preceding absolute silence.
I see the final days of spring entrapped in the narrow courtyard, the heavy curtain is not rolled up, and heavier shadows flit across my boudoir I lean against the tower pavilion, and in silence play with my seven-stringed zither.13 Just as silence is the key to such music, restraint and constriction is the primary avenue of creative expression. Men sought the inhibited, reticent space of the boudoir not solely because of their wish to write about the women themselves, but also the artistry of feminine reticence, which in turn aligned with their own philosophical and poetic ideal. In the boudoir, there is no direct articulation of sorrow, or violent raging. Instead, there is complaint without ever quickening to fury, discontent without seeking active rebellion, and emotional release without culmination, all giving rise to a silent, curtailed outcry.
Li Qingzhao. “Lyric to the melody of washing garments by a running creek” Shu Yu Ci. (Jinan, CH: Qi Lu Shu She, 2009). 13
Confucius. “Yang Huo” The Analects. (Xian, CH: Xi Bei Da Xue Chu Ban She, 2016). 12
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Parodying the Political
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“Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value,” argued Oscar Wilde in his 1891 essay, The Soul of the Man Under Socialism, which advocated a trailblazing vision of social and artistic equality. His libertarian, socialist philosophy argued for the establishment of a society which frees its citizens from degrading wage labour, redistributing wealth to enable commitment to individual creation. However, Wilde’s ideals bore little relevance to the everyday lives of underpaid labourers or anyone outside his upper-class milieu. His advocacy for aestheticism didn’t advance radical political change. Rather, his embrace of materialism threatened to undermine his status as a radical. Today, this act of aestheticizing the political is everywhere. This can be seen in commercials depicting Black Lives Matter marches, corporations who display rainbow merchandise during Pride Month, or colourful Instagram infographics neatly breaking down the destruction of abortion rights in America. Glamourised versions of politics have also begun to infiltrate contemporary literature. Several of the most talked-about books of the past few years, all by the prominent millennial novelist, Sally Rooney, perpetuate this fallacy of invoking global politics while glossing over their real-life consequences in favour of sparkling descriptions of curated interiors and Italian villas. Her novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You all advance Wilde’s mission of aestheticizing the political while failing to advocate for structural change. Notably, Rooney’s public commitment to leftwing ideals has detracted from widespread criticism of her novels’ political failings. A selfdescribed Marxist to Wilde’s undefined socialist,
she presents modern issues in fleeting mentions, creating the illusion of engaging with political discourse while foregrounding conventional romantic plotlines. This dynamic only reinforces the aestheticization of political issues, undermining the radical beliefs the characters claim to hold. This offers little possibility for the queer or feminist liberation Rooney supposedly advocates for. Rooney does, however, clearly signpost the identity politics of her characters early in her novels. “I’m gay,” proclaims Bobbi, the best friend of protagonist Frances, early in Conversations with Friends, “And Frances is a communist.” Unfortunately, these identities are never fully developed - or even mentioned, except in passing. Although Frances and Bobbi dated during their school days, this former romantic dynamic is glossed over after being initially established. Instead, she foregrounds explicit descriptions of heterosexual sex. Rooney fails her queer characters by stating their sexual orientation without ever fleshing out same-sex relationships. Queer relationships are almost entirely absent from her novels, perhaps suggesting that only heterosexual relationships have the potential to be glamourised for widespread audience appeal. Though Bobbi was Frances’s first and only relationship prior to her romance with Nick, the first and only other person she had sex with, their former romantic dynamic has no impact on the depiction of their friendship. Instead, Rooney devotes the plot to Frances’s relationship with Nick, notably erasing any enactment of Frances’s bisexuality despite it being a key component of her relationship with Bobbi. Similarly, Alice and Felix of Beautiful World, Where Are You both identify as bisexual, but this never manifests in their relationship apart from a brief discussion and a throwaway scene
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where Felix receives a dating app message from a man. The politics of identifying as queer in contemporary Ireland, both within Dublin’s urban millennial milieu and the rural village where Alice and Felix live, is mentioned only to then be ignored. Rooney is willing to raise provocative questions about the commodified nature of love, but she is unwilling to actually depict them in queer relationships. Her failure to portray gay romance indicates that she may want her novel’s romantic plotlines to remain easily digestible and marketable to a heterosexual audience. One can hardly imagine Conversations with Friends being as wildly successful if it has focused on Frances and Bobbi’s relationship, suggesting that queer revolution is far from the horizons of her characters. For all its political virtue signalling, the novel’s politics are far from Marxist. This would be excusable if Rooney’s characters didn’t describe themselves as overtly political. Early in the novel, Frances and Bobbi discuss “what Bobbi disparagingly called ‘pay gap feminism,’” but the conversation itself goes unrecorded – unfortunately so, as it might illuminate the depth of their hypocrisy toward labour. As Lauren Oyler observes in Bookforum, the financial problems of Rooney’s characters are “solved, or at least eased, by convenient contrivances.” Bobbi doesn’t need to work because of her wealthy parents, and Frances rejects the ideological concept of having a job. She lives rent-free in her uncle’s apartment, works an unpaid internship, and when her father forgets to pay her allowance and she appears to hover on the verge of financial instability, her wealthy older lover swoops in to bail her out. For a supposed communist, Frances’s fictional politics are superficial and detached from the reality of labour under capitalism. “I hadn’t been kidding about not wanting a job,” Frances reflects. “I didn’t want one. I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything.” She fails to recognize that her communist beliefs are
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enabled by the fact that she has never had to earn her own living. When her fellow intern tells her, “This is how privilege gets perpetuated… Rich assholes like us taking unpaid internships and getting jobs off the back of them,” Frances replies, “I’m never going to get a job.” The necessity of working to survive never seems to occur to her. Rather, her worst fear is that Bobbi “would come into the sandwich shop where I worked and see that I had a job.” Rooney describes her second novel Normal People as a “Marxist love story.” The reality, however, is disappointing. Normal People is politically complacent at best, despite depicting a tormented cross-class relationship between wealthy Marianne and her housekeeper’s son Connell. Connell and Marianne read The Communist Manifesto and attend a protest against Israel during the 2014 Gaza War, but that is about as far as their political activism extends. When Connell tells Marianne that he was late to coffee because there was a protest about “the household tax or something,” Marianne flippantly replies, “Well, best of luck to them. May the revolution be swift and brutal.” Later, Marianne, who has never held a job because of her family’s wealth, asks her friend Joanna “if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.” It’s the kind of question only an extremely privileged character could unself-consciously ask - one that clashes with Rooney’s own socioeconomic worldview. While other people must work to survive, Marianne is free to contemplate the alienating social construct of “money” while roaming around her family’s villa in Italy. Rooney’s satirical intent, however, may not at first be obvious in favour of her descriptions of lush landscapes, expensive interiors, and lavish lifestyles. While Rooney insists upon the mantra that money does not equal happiness, the backdrops of these scenes are still gilded with wealth, making for leisurely if not politically provocative reading. Like Wilde’s own superficial advocacy for socialism, it is easy to miss the political message in favour of prodigious displays of wealth.
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covers and the wide variety of Sally Rooney tote bags, have only fulfilled Rooney’s fears.
The failure of Rooney’s personal Marxist politics in novels quickly becomes frustrating when compared to her public political stance. “Everyone’s on it now,” Eileen says in Beautiful World, Where Are You. “When I first started going around talking about Marxism, people laughed at me. Now it’s everyone’s thing. And to all these new people trying to make communism cool, I would just like to say, welcome aboard, comrades.” One could be forgiven for surmising that Rooney herself appears to have jumped on the Marxism trend, using the veneer of literature to signpost her characters’ political ideologies without ever fully developing the realities of survival under capitalism. “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse,” Eileen writes to Alice in Beautiful World, Where Are You, yet the rest of the novel proceeds to do just that by miring the reader in her relationship problems. The paradox of Rooney’s politics is exposed in her desire to write a Marxist novel without a real depiction of class struggle that could alienate her mainstream audience. “I’m very sceptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities,” she has admitted, “like accessories that people can fill their homes with, like beautiful items you can fill your shelves with and therefore become a sort of book person.” The explosive popularity of the Normal People television series, along with the commodification of her books’ colourful
Like it or not, her books have themselves become cultural commodities that undermine any political undertones they might contain. Even a novel overflowing with communist invective, Rooney suggests, would be politically stymied in contemporary literary culture, destroying any of its radicalism – an adept summary of an author whose novels have appeared on GQ’s ‘Failsafe Gifts for Her’ Christmas list. Like Wilde, her writing attempts to aestheticize the political, but her embrace of wealth only undermines her political posturing. While Rooney’s novels recognise the political structures of our society, they only perpetuate them instead of challenging them. When Connell attends a literary reading at university, he levels a criticism that “[l]iterature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.” Yet in her novels, Rooney falls prey to exactly this.
By Eliza Browning Art by Kanengo Diallo
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ACADEMICS IN DOG COLLARS CHAPLAINCY IN CRISIS CW: mention of sexual assault
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The University of Oxford is strange. Its structures are antiquated, its reputation disproportionate, and its influence unparalleled. For many prospective students, this is in large part the appeal of attending the University. And yet the preservation of such archaism for the sake of a conservative aesthetic leaves these institutions essentially divorced from their original realities and in need of ‘catch-up’ reforms as the social context changes. The result? A crisis is currently underway in what was once seen to be an undeniable cornerstone of the Oxford collegiate experience. Embroiled in several prominent scandals, the Anglican Church’s relationship with the university is currently being tested. The allegations against, and later dismissal of, the Dean of Christ Church is the most news-worthy example at present. Nowhere are these strained relations more obvious, however, than where the secular and the spiritual most deeply intersect – the chaplaincy. The chaplain, effectively installed as the original HR department, the mediator between student and college community just as much as between layperson and God, holds an office that is simultaneously concerned with wellbeing and with order. These ideals, at times of rapid social development, are clearly contradictory. Without full reform to attune itself to a contemporary context, an institution such as the chaplaincy is almost bound to conflict with the new political demands of a changing society – whether expressed in the increasing visibility of sexual assault, large-scale efforts to expose institutional
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racism, or the decline of spirituality more broadly. At Oxford, the sharp demographic turnaround within the student body, with state school entries jumping from as low as 45% in 1970 to almost 70% in recent years, and women now constituting 55% of those admitted, has had a particular impact on these age-old institutions. That the chaplain is a less familiar figure to those from non-publicly educated backgrounds ought to be self-evident. This is perhaps the most significant factor in the waning camaraderie between the officeholder and the student, as their role as a community leader and friendly face is undermined by their archaic and often alienating association with a class system that is far beyond its sell-by date. Equally estranged from the cultural homogeneity of the university in the past, although this estrangement is occurring on a significantly longer timeline, are the moves towards secularism and the inclusion of a more diverse set of cultural backgrounds within the student body, particularly of non-Anglican denominations and faiths. Actual practice is thus almost impossible to identify as the successor of a system where, only a hundred years ago, students were chastised for non-attendance of religious services such as Evensong. Beyond Oxford, changes in society and wider culture demand changes in the role of the university. The more fervently formalised and medicalised approach to mental health issues at the university, as evidenced by the unprecedented rates of diagnoses, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and therapeutic referrals, has the old-fashioned ‘all in this together’ approach to welfare, but strangely combined with an individualised bodycentred stance on health. Declining church attendance, meanwhile, makes the office’s more spiritual obligations, including leading chapel services, a far less demanding priority, compared to the other responsibilities piled onto them. The chaplain is thus even further removed from the actual collegiate experience. Anecdotal
experiences suggest that these factors may well operate in a feedback loop. The reduction of ecclesiastical responsibilities leads to an increased preoccupation with social welfare to a degree that the office does not have the capacity to facilitate, at least in a professional sense. The result is an institution alienated from its original function yet also distanced from the everyday affairs and needs of the corpus it is meant to represent. In terms of both the composition and ideological attitude of the student body, and society more broadly, then, the reality of Oxford is unquestionably removed from the contexts in which it was originally spawned. The tenacity of the chaplaincy in light of these changes, while remarkable, speaks to both the deep conservatism to which the university is tethered, and the real consequences at the level of the individual that these conflicts produce.
“The result is an institution alienated from its original function while simultaneously alienated from the everyday affairs and needs of the corpus it was meant to represent” Recent negotiations between students and higherups have led to the rejection of Oxford traditions perceived as exclusionary, and efforts to produce a safer environment have resulted in the explicit outlawing of student-tutor relationships. However, the contrast between the relatively reformed structure of certain colleges and the dysfunctional intervention of their chaplains only serves to further emphasise the conflict’s institutional nature. Having to resort to the chaplaincy for welfare resolution was not, the subject of one incident asserts, normal procedure, and was a result of a temporary vacancy in their college’s alternative welfare provisions. After a member of their cohort sexually assaulted them, the interviewee turned to senior tutors at their college for support. Although they were informed that no
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legal process of exclusion could occur owing to a lack of “formal evidence,” they were reassured by the deliberate actions which college undertook in protecting their well-being and that of others in their cohort. When concerns re-emerged for the victim the following year, however, they were urged by college to attend a welfare session with the chaplain. Their conversation with the chaplain, they claim, beyond being simply inappropriate, was at times actively offensive. They were accused of displaying a lack of compassion for the now socially ostracised perpetrator, and told that they ought to take a degree of responsibility for their inebriated state at the time of the incident. This conversation culminated in what they perceived to be an invalidating and infantilising set of recommendations, including suggesting their welfare might improve were they to wake up earlier and being given cartoon books on dealing with feeling down. The office of the chaplain, having intended to relieve welfare issues, had in fact exacerbated them. Prompted by these concerns, accusations of mismanagement and irresponsibility by chaplains across the university have been brought to my attention. One such account was relayed to me by the student involved who suggests that their chaplain made classist and racially insensitive comments during disciplinary procedures while still ostensibly operating in a welfare capacity. After having expressed discomfort at the use of racial slurs by one of their peers and the ensuing emotional problems that they faced, this student was informed that they need not take the problem too seriously. They were then pressured to rusticate, owing not to their mental health issues, but rather to their unfamiliarity with the content of their course compared to their more culturally privileged classmates. The failures here again point to a confusion in the exact definition of the chaplaincy’s role, resulting from its alienation both from its original function and from the nature of contemporary society. Is it perhaps this conflation of roles, then, which in part serves
to undermine the chaplain’s role at college? This was certainly the position taken by one college’s MCR, which recently voted in support of separating the spiritual and welfare dimensions of the chaplain’s office entirely. The decision, I was told, came as a result of both the actual failings of the office in dealing with sensitive cases, and the confusion that postgraduates felt towards the office’s responsibilities as a result. These issues were perceived to be at root a consequence of the ambiguous, dangerous even, limits of the chaplaincy’s jurisdiction. That the welfare role of the chaplain is untenable in its current form appears a reasonable conclusion, then. The need for reform of the office’s spiritual obligations is equally palpable. At another Oxford college, frustrations were expressed to me by an organ scholar regarding the apparent ambivalence of his chaplain to the proper operation of the chapel and the neglect of his role as active leader of the assembly. These concerns eventually led the organ scholar to depart from his position, having had his proposals to improve the chapel’s musical programme by broadening the cultural and musical appeal of its services shot down by college. His departure saw service attendance dwindle to effectively zero, with the chaplain not having continued the student’s fervent efforts at promotion. The roots of these issues lie, he told me, in the prevailing notion that chaplains ought to
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Art by Aryan Goenka
be academics who happen to be ordained, rather than clerics who also happen to be academics – that is to say, academics in dog collars. This produces a situation in which services are held and promoted only out of contractual obligation rather than genuine commitment or appreciation of Anglican custom, and the chapel becomes an exclusive dining club for the choir. This is not only a negligence of the duties of a chaplain to their assembly but to the chapel spaces themselves, gorgeous buildings whose use is restricted to
“...the chaplaincy is in crisis not because it has changed, but precisely because it hasn’t.” sparse services on Sunday evenings, rather than the lively setting for concerts and lectures that they have the potential to become. These ought to be the active duties of the chaplain and yet they appear to have fallen by the wayside, with many, he alleges, not recognising the dramatic shifts in the need for promotion of services after decades in the position. The chaplaincy is failing to function in both of its stated goals at present. No longer the familiar face of collegiate cohesion, nor the advocate and perpetuator of student spirituality, the chaplaincy is in crisis not because it has changed, but precisely because it has failed to. Continuity is an entrenched value at places like Oxford, where, for many, the conservative sheen constitutes its appeal. When that conservatism clashes with irreconcilable social change, when it begins to have a real and pernicious impact on people’s lives, while straying simultaneously from its dictated function, this continuity exposes itself as unsustainable. The University of Oxford originated as an ecclesiastical centre for secular study by
clerics as far back as the eleventh century, and the crises it has faced over time – including the conflict between town and gown resulting in the University’s formal founding in the 13th century, and the Reformation and civil wars in the 16th and 17th centuries which eroded its effective independence from the state – evidence an institution consistently arriving at a certain boiling point before it finally embraces reform. Whether this boiling point in the office of chaplain has been breached is yet unclear, but its days as presently formulated appear numbered. The Archdeacon of Oxford, the Venerable Jonathan Chaffey, was unresponsive when contacted about the future he envisions for the role. It’s perhaps unsurprising that those seams underpinning the university are once again coming loose. After all, why should we expect an 800-year-old institution to be perfectly attuned to the demands of a 21st century student body? The crisis in the chaplaincy nonetheless has a real, material impact, neglecting the office’s spiritual obligations, and operating in an actively detrimental fashion to the collegiate welfare it is expected to promote. There is evidence here of challenges beyond simply the maintenance of an institution, but also of a need for radical transformations in the way in which the chaplaincy’s traditional roles are approached.
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each canvas. But that unimposing little corner of the Prado reawakened me. Bosch’s work proved the enduring power of complicated, unphotogenic art, in a landscape dominated by performative influencers and wealthy auctioneers.
I have always called myself an atheist, but this spring I found myself on a pilgrimage. Desperate for cultural enrichment on my short holiday in Madrid, I stood in front of the neat white steps of the Prado. My friends and I, vaguely hungover, flinched at the packs of European schoolchildren queuing behind us. I had dragged them out of bed that March afternoon for one reason only: tucked away in the unassuming Flemish Painters section, between earnest religious paintings and dour Protestant portraits, was ‘The Bosch Room’. Until my encounter with Bosch’s work, I had been losing faith in the gallery scene. Every exhibition I saw seemed tailor-made for social media. The powerful artworks of Yayoi Kusama shown at the Tate Modern, which confronted her deeply personal struggles with mental health, were reduced to artsy posts on Instagram. The few galleries that did not cater to this emerging crowd doubled down on their elitist policies. No photos, no noise, and absolutely no critique of the artwork. Little price tags on the corners of
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Little is really known about Hieronymus Bosch. All we can say for certain is that at some point between the 15th and 16th centuries, this lone man produced the most sprawling, decadently detailed artworks of his time. Oft imitated to no avail, his works have always held a strange allure to those inside and outside the art world. His writhing figures and unidentifiable demons have led some convicted theorists to curious conclusions. Wilhelm Fraenger1 drew dubious connections between Bosch and a contemporary Adamite sex cult. Others have insisted his creative spirit resulted from an obscure medieval hallucinogen. What is truly undoubtable is his bizarre, surreal imagination. Bosch’s triptychs brim with Christian guilt, the emptiness of Eden, and the fire and brimstone of Hell, never too distant. His subjects tirelessly engage in all seven of the deadly sins. Surrounded by the strict authority of the church in the Netherlands, Bosch’s imagination was densely populated by devils, angels, and the fallen man. His paintings were commissioned by wealthy churchmen, such as the imposingly
1 Wilhelm Fraenger: The Millenium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser, Chicago 1951, London 1952.
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titled Henry III of Nassau-Breda. But make no mistake, his works are not puritan. Simple doctrine is not why Bosch’s paintings captivated generations pagan and religious alike. In his oils, you see not only moralistic myth, but also raw human chaos. ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ is Bosch’s most iconic work. Early Renaissance art critics such as Carel van Mander 2 dismissed his masterpiece as mere fanciful doodles, like the creatures scribbled in the corner of a bored monk’s manuscript. The warped perspectives and fantastical demons that filled his panels did not fit into their notion of ‘proper’ art, which was concerned with accurately and methodically recreating the human form. Yet, regardless of Bosch’s disinterest in anatomical accuracy, the terrifying spirit that haunts his work is undeniable. In the Prado, I came face-to-face with Bosch against the backdrop of gloomy silence. His works were flanked by suited security guards, and kept in carefully climate-controlled conditions. The walls were painted a polite shade of dark grey, and a velvet rope ensured spectators couldn’t get too close. Threading our way around the other tourists, we came to Bosch’s magnum opus. Hunched over a book’s A4 reproduction, I had studiously read about ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. But to see its frenzy in person was almost revelatory. I pressed up against the first of the three panels. The most reassuringly traditional of the three, the scene depicted an archetypal garden of Eden. Adam and Eve caught my eye first. Both gazed devoutly at a sumptuously robed God, pale-faced. But as I examined the image further, Bosch’s signature strangeness bled through. In the centre, a pink tower of fantastic, phallic geometry rose from a clear blue lake.
Three-headed birds and finned unicorns poked their heads out from a dark, cavernous pool at the bottom right of the panel. Chaos lurked everywhere and rewarded keen inspectors of the canvas. Bosch had challenged the familiar pastoral I expected from such religious works. He instead presented me with hypnotic, disturbing beauty within an undeniably Christian frame. It was clear that the crowds of the Prado gallery were most drawn to the central panel. At one point, a whole tour group pooled around it, shattering the tomb-like calm of the small room. Just like me, they found Bosch’s style transfixing. People peered intently, examining each microscopic detail. Despite its age, the painting was visceral and immediate, confrontational and uncomfortable. The variety of the central panel was overwhelming. At a quick glance, its garden landscape was not too different to the Eden beside it. Yet the colours were far more lurid, the garden filled to bursting with naked bodies. The masses writhed over each other in drunken revelry, decadent fruits only intensifying their fallen lust. They lay on the grass and swam through the flowing rivers. Some even rode winged beasts through the sky. It would be easy for us to assume that the panel is a progressive celebration of sexual freedom, as Norman O. Brown theorised in the 1960s . But such anachronistic views fail to recognise the truth of the work. An artist of contradictions, Bosch revelled in the unabashed lust of the landscape whilst simultaneously condemning it. I realised that behind the glorious decadence lay a degenerative hue. The human figures, spooled into hollow fruits and glass bubbles, were trapped by their own desires. An embracing couple was clamped inside a mussel shell with only their feet showing. I spotted sly little demons spread across the painting, their strange, webbed fins and long, snaking tails outstretched with glee –
Carel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustriouws Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. Hessel Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore, Doornspijk 1906. 2
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pinpricks of the hellish horror that was soon to come to these sinners. It was a desperate push and pull of temptation and flagellation.
curators must learn to adapt, and irrecoverably change their galleries to survive this new age of art consumption.
I quickly snapped a photo of it on my phone. Despite Bosch’s own warnings, the hypnotic allure of that infamous triptych urged me on. I had now committed my own decadent little sin.
The so-called Van Gogh ‘Immersive Experiences’ that have spread across Europe perhaps offer a premonition of what is to come. For the eye-watering price of nineteen pounds per head, you can walk through a few darkened rooms illuminated by JPEGs of the titular artist’s sunflowers and starry nights projected onto big black blocks. Not one of the artist’s actual paintings is in sight. The experience is akin to listening to a greatest hits album comprised exclusively of royalty-free covers. Judging by the number of times I have seen this installation on social media, it seems to have been a success. This is no doubt a symptom of the ongoing crisis in the art world, another attempt at popular appeal which ends up compromising the very integrity of the art. Whilst the experience may provide an alternative for those unable to see the original paintings, it is by no means accessible. In fact, its entry price is far higher than most galleries. Geared towards influencer culture and replicating the ‘aesthetic’ of Van Gogh rather than examining his true artistry, the ‘Immersive Experiences’ encapsulate the steps many galleries must take to endure in the modern age.
A security guard approached me. ‘No photos.’ Her warning rang out flatly. It was clear she expected to repeat this command many more times that afternoon. Again, the strange stiffness of the Prado came back to besiege me. Its marble interior was a mausoleum, brought into the 21st century by the gift shop attached near the exit. Its postcards condensed sprawling works of art into small, A6 frames. A man like Bosch would have no doubt sold his work to a church, to be displayed as the centrepiece on the altar, below the wide-arched roof. During the summer, the light would shine through the stained-glass windows, illuminating it as worshippers strained to see it from their seats. Why do we now display such religiously charged work in such a sanitised setting? It is easy to forget today that art museums did not always exist. Masterpieces were instead parts of everyday life, found at the local church or in grand government buildings. But now, such strange and provocative works as Bosch’s triptych are stuffed into one unwieldy building with over two thousand other paintings, not to mention all the pieces hidden away in the museum archives, restricted from the general public. But is the alternative any preferable? Take the terrifyingly wealthy David Nahmad as an example: a billionaire art dealer who uses his private collection of Picassos as interior decor. The viewing and upkeep of art is undoubtably a great game of privilege. Yet the current state of museums does not provide much hope. Caught between a desire to pander to Instagram influencers or hold onto the stiff status quo,
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I doubt a ‘Bosch Experience’ would hold quite the same popular appeal. The final right panel of his most iconic triptych teases a reaction of overwhelming horror from the viewer. In the Prado, my eye was drawn to the dark red hellscape. Buildings burned in the background. The foreground contained a cruel parody of the central panel as naked and vulnerable human figures lay writhing, subjected to innumerable torments. Like some twisted nightmare, the logic of earth was turned upon its head as the rabbit skewered its hunter prey. Demons of various mutations were gleeful in their torture. A sow in a
Norman O.Brown: Love’s Body, New York 1966.
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nun’s habit, a human birdcage, and an oversized knife were only a few of the many Hellish absurdities Bosch crammed the panel with. To call it surreal would be an understatement. If you saw it in isolation, you might suppose the central panel was celebration of human sexuality. But combined with this final hell, Bosch’s true meaning becomes clear. Sin was only matched by its grotesque punishment. Even the grey walls and stern guards of the Prado could not dull its impact. The triptych reawakened my fascination for the weird, the macabre, the complicated side of human nature. Even as an atheist unconcerned with religious virtue, the dynamic of morality and hedonism was surprisingly universal. Contrary to the regal portraits that filled the rest of the Prado, Bosch’s works proved to me that in the Middle Ages, people grappled with the same dilemmas we face today. Bosch dared to confront the viewer with their own flawed and fallen nature.
As my friends and I walked out of the gallery that afternoon, I began to reconsider what art had become in the modern era, and my own complicity in it. I must confess, before I entered the Prado, I had intended to repeat this narcissistic cycle by taking a photo with Bosch’s famous triptych. But now I repent. If we gallerygoers continue to treat art museums as nothing more than playgrounds, galleries will no longer be compelled to challenge us. In this new world of performative consumption, it is left up to curators to carve a new path which combines accessibility and artistry to engage the public, a path that ensures masterpieces like Bosch’s do not fall into private hands.
By Thalia Roychowdhury Art by Natalie Hytiroglou
What happens to works like Bosch’s, not palatable enough for an Instagram feed? Too detailed and complex to be printed on a t-shirt? Are they doomed to be kept sterile in a dusty gallery and silently contemplated? Works like Bosch’s triptych lie in an uncomfortable middle ground. For, try as they might, the Prado’s gift shop postcards can never really capture the hypnotic degeneration depicted in art like Bosch’s.
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But if I had that kind of money, let me tell you – I’d burn it. A new Dior gown every morning. A different pool boy every afternoon. You bourgeois folk and your mid-century shite – you’ll never get it, sucking marrow from warm bones all light and delicate. Me, I’d gorge. Retch and Retch and Oh God, Oh Christ, Oh no! Not Cabernet and teeth on the new marble tiles! Well, tough luck. Was born slick and red and I’ll die slick and red. If I get my hands on something shiny, I’ll stick it into every last orifice I can find. No more threadbare blankets or wellingtons, no pale cowards for me. I’d have statues made in my likeness, enough milk-eyed monuments to form a vast white sea. If I had that kind of money, let me tell you – I’d fuck the guillotine.
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By Em Power Art by Rachel Jung
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By Clemmie Read Art by Betsy McGrath “It is quite consummate, is it not!” cries the Aesthetic Bridegroom of his new teapot, in a Punch cartoon of 1880. “It is, indeed!” replies his Intense Bride. “Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!” Let us surround ourselves with beautiful things, and let those selves live up to them. The hope to live up to the beauty of one’s objects is a recurring cry of the fin-de-siècle Decadents. Like the movement itself, it teeters between the satire of Aestheticism, the overarching movement which prized aesthetic value above all else and, paradoxically, a sincere preoccupation with self-styling in that very manner. Even though Stephen Greenblatt’s literary historicism roots the concept of ‘self-fashioning’ in the literature of the Renaissance court, nowhere is this ambition more apparent than in Aestheticism. For the aesthete, the self is not only constructed but stylistically and materially displayed – like a Victorian chatelaine’s drawing room, it is an expression of personal taste calculated to win the approval of society. When this hedonistic obsession with the arts was pejoratively labelled
as Decadence and then championed as such, construction of the self became intensely counter-intuitive. “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” lamented Oscar Wilde while a budding aesthete at Oxford, characteristically somewhere between satire and insistent sincerity. Blue china might indeed prove hard to live up to in real life. This fixation on materiality, after all, was originally fictional: it belonged not to the real practice of the Aesthetic movement, but to Punch’s fictional parodies of Decadent ‘chinamania’. Is it possible to associate a movement centred around self-indulgence and social decay with the ambitions of self-fashioning? The latter’s fixation upon artificial construction is evidently aligned with the aesthete’s own fixation upon artistic construction, but their attitudes to social life seem polarised. Self-fashioning may not have the same fixation on moral selfimprovement as earlier High Victorianism, but it belongs originally to the ambitious courtier of the early modern state, where self-styling
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1. Pierre Bourdieu, State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 318. 1 2
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is never far from social self-advancement. It is far, apparently, from pointless self-indulgence. There is a paradoxical incompatibility in selfindulgence and social self-advancement parallel to the paradox in the Decadent conception of the arts: we fall between a desire to transcend the everyday social world through beauty, and an intense fixation on the consumption of the material artefact, a consumption which is meant to support their ideal of removal from society. But if we re-read the self-professed Decadent as only superficially removed from society, while actually preoccupied with the perception of their constructed self, this mode of self-indulgence to the point of decay becomes not only compatible with, but a critical mode of, socioeconomically motivated self-fashioning. The dilettante artist of another Punch cartoon cries: “Art is for the Few, Father, and the higher the Art, of course the fewer the Few. The highest art of all is for One. That Art is mine. That One is – Myself.” The more one conflates artistic appreciation with exclusivity, the smaller one’s audience becomes, until, eventually, only one’s consummately tasteful self remains. The general mood of the aesthete is ennui, boredom with society and desire to be alone with oneself. Yet their preoccupation with exclusivity – what Punch dubs ‘few[ness]’ – belongs not to artistic isolation but to class consciousness. Decadent self-fashioning is chiefly an expression of refinement of artistic appreciation which is in turn an expression of cultural capital. According to Pierre Bourdieu, this is only a “better concealed” form of economic capital, the visual expression of the aristocratic habitus. This is perhaps clearest in the styling of both Wilde’s Dorian Gray and fellow literary aesthetes like J. K. Huysman’s Jean Des Esseintes as manic collectors. In collecting, the aesthete explicitly displays cultural and economic capital by wielding the funds to purchase art as well as the education to appreciate it. Choices like these act as aesthetic symbols: an expression of taste operates as a kind of metonym for character, a choice in clothing a symbol of essential refinement or essential vulgarity. Here, selffashioning approaches a kind of symbolic literary
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characterisation. Stephen Greenblatt’s conception of early modern self-fashioning is based on the potential for social mobility in Renaissance England: by acquiring educational capital, an individual might be able to ascend the social ranks. But for the Decadents, this aesthetic self-fashioning tends towards shutting the green baize door rather than opening it. As Bourdieu notes, those who aspire towards the ostensible ideal of taste will follow its rules religiously, but the person “sure of his cultural identity,” who is secure in endowed capital, “can play with the rules of the cultural game” with performed insouciance towards the rules of taste. Therein lies the tragedy of Punch’s resident parvenu, Swellington, who “collects Blue China, because it’s the thing to do” in the hopes of being introduced to “two or three Cabinet Ministers” in the process. But he only meets a laundry list of aspiring decadents like himself: Messrs. “Robinson, Smith, Jones, Brown, Perkins, Blenkinsop, and Parker, who all collect Blue China.” The apparent attainment of cultural capital is proven false, and successful self-fashioning is revealed to be the privilege of a select few. Swellington collects blue china years before Wilde makes his own claim, which consciously
builds on these parodies. All of Punch’s comic dandies were parodically alien, pejoratively unEnglish, un-manly, un-gentlemanly, and Wilde and his contemporaries plagiarised this into a self-modelled figure constructed round the effeminate, Francophilic, and sensuous. They were intoxicating, in part because they were alien, in part because their identity had all the appeal of artistic construction. A human being is a kind of cultural artefact: our behaviours are conditioned by our culture and our conscious responds to its demands. When Wilde promoted Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride on a tour in the United States, the general understanding was that he was the model for the poet Bunthorne. During the tour, however, Wilde in turn modelled himself on the character to appeal to the crowds. Matthew Arnold, in demarcating the ‘man of culture’ from the ‘philistine’ (who made up, in his terms, most of the Victorian populace), essentially pinpoints aesthetes like Wilde as conscious of their status as cultural product, people involved in their own production. Yet to construct an identity as an artefact soon becomes self-defeating. The lyric persona of the aesthete, the aesthetic ‘I’, belongs to comic narrative verse. This is a personality which comes with a set genre and with no real
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, M. A.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 124-125. 4 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1869), p. xxx. 3
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psychological depth. For Wilde’s manipulative Lord Henry Wotton, the young protagonist Dorian Gray is a boy who “could be fashioned into a marvellous type” because he has “the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for us.” The quality he prizes aesthetically, in both boyhood and marble, is tractability – just as marble can be sculpted into shape, so too can an individual’s identity be moulded in their adolescence. The form of the human youth is prized partly because it carries the potential of so much change ahead; where this form is captured in marble, it is dehumanised entirely. Whether a block of material or a literary character, something that can be fashioned is invariably lifeless, devoid of agency. The human is reduced to material alone, or to an impersonal chisel crafting a false identity. If the self splits into the pragmatic fashioning agent and the artificial marble façade, can either qualify as a real human being? As Max Beerbohm celebrates with irony in his Defence of Cosmetics, the lead tracings in cosmetics have been eradicated by this period and “[a]rtifice will claim not another victim from among her worshippers.” But the suggestion that self-fashioning tends towards decay is clearly there: artifice in life begets hollowness and death, and the death of art, too. Artistic creation cannot be infinitely self-productive. Decadent artworks represented a world that was already inherently aestheticized, and art must eventually have fuel outside itself. In isolation, it is even lethal: when Huysman’s Des Esseintes studs his tortoise’s shell with gemstones, the tortoise dies under the sheer weight. Neither wealth nor beauty can compensate for life.
Diary of A Nobody, the comic diary of a middleclass man deluded into thinking he might be “Somebody”. He fashions himself as hedonistic upon occasion. He drinks copious champagne at the Lord Mayor’s Ball (to which he is very excited to be invited) and collapses because his constitution is untrained. At another muchanticipated ball, he helps his party to claret, champagne, ices, and cigars, only to be charged for a sum he cannot afford. Or, outside of (total) satire, Beerbohm observes the “countless gentlemen who walk about town in the time of its desertion from August to October, artificially bronzed, as though they were fresh from the moors or from the Solent. This, I conceive, is done for purely social reasons.” These men attempt to self-fashion as Decadent because if one is visibly self-indulgent, visibly of such high status, one can squander one’s time and money as one likes. But to rise in society by performing a decline in lifestyle is a substantial risk indeed. And the truly accepted arbiters of artistic rights and wrongs, the puncturing pen of Beerbohm or Punch magazine, prove that the risk is not worth taking. In the eyes of society, to emulate indulgence and decline without the means to do so is not to self-fashion, not to self-advance. It is only to indulge and decline.
It is wealth, as much as beauty, which forms the unmistakeable foundation of the movement, and which inevitably dooms the socially aspirational to failure. Decadence in the broader sense of degeneracy and debauchery belongs only to those who can afford to be decadent financially. For every successful individual dandy there are failing legions of Swellington Spiffs, bourgeois social climbers, hoping to achieve the prerequisites of social Decadence, the real status and capital, by imitating its expressions. Consider George and Weedon Grossmith’s
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By M
ee sh aW
illia ms
Ar t
by
ng u J on w Do
Eucharist The profound blue of Mary’s shawl sweeps under the horizon just as the glass joins start looking like ant trails. Candles pretend to die, momentarily, as I stumble into the Psalm’s first verse. Then the songs are folded. The pastor reads “release them” from a book that says relieve them, and the organist responds – his feet feeling for a holy shape in the wood.
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Chalked up in white, his plans ran all in Cool blueprints: our house was just too staid. Then lines curved under my tools, sweetly Etched into edges that became snake-like. Right-angles baulked. We hooked fingers in Mingling Cs and recut hard doorframes Into shapes more sinuous. But then, Behind smudges of my springtime paint, I spied his jutting shoulder all at odds With the architecture. Chiselled straight Save the cleft impression of new arches, Heavy with the ironing of boy into man, His damage would have made you surge. From double curves bleeds pure decoration, The bones bleed rather than the flesh. Thin-lipped, He smiled an apology and I learned To take that curve as gospel, to spoon His toast with jammy concentric circles for weeks. Plaster set. The house rose in bricked borders. My silent service hung around his dingy, Hard plateaus, until he laughed just Wrong and I slipped a thin knife under his Shoulder blade. His animal yelp was sweet. It sank to the dip of the radio, while His body slumped through the same motions. Skin rose hot purple. Blood spooled out lurid, Tracing his dimples like a shroud. And then, Flattened into a graph of a man, he became Of use. I carved from him marble and copper, The final touches to a house now complete. I like it. Walk through and notice His foot plumped as a doorstop, His ribcage lining the cutlery drawer. Now admire how his teeth dot the balustrade As pearls, their lines of beauty turning endlessly.
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By Gabriel Blackwell Art by Oliver Roberts and Natalie Hytiroglou
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CW: mentions of sexual abuse and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Acts). These acts, purporting to violence. Many so-called feminists argue in the same breath that sex workers are victims of exploitation, and propagators of the patriarchy. These feminists are SWERFs: Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists. They reject the argument that sex work is work, resist calls for its decriminalisation, and ignore and belittle sex workers’ own accounts, saying sex workers must either be delusional or must have been coerced into thinking that they are not being exploited. Though SWERFs predate the internet, the internet has changed both the nature of sex work and the ensuing debate around it. In this investigation, I spoke with two representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), a grassroots organisation campaigning to decriminalise sex work. SWERFs argue that their views protect women, positing that sex work is a consequence of a patriarchal society. They claim sex work is a direct and personal threat to them as women. Thinking of sex workers only as a symbol of women under the patriarchy causes them to overlook the humanity of sex workers. They forget that they are talking and theorising about real people. I started researching for this article with the incorrect assumption that these SWERF-y views were in some way new: a symptom of the epidemic of internet hatred. It soon became apparent that this was not the case. Feminists like Andrea Dworkin have been making these arguments for years. In 1993 Dworkin argued, in her lecture Prostitution and Male Supremacy, that “prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman’s body.” This is an idea still repeated by SWERFs online. Although it is clear these ideas and their effects have been around for decades, the internet has impacted the scope and form of their effect. Pre-internet, legislative authority was bound by borders. Now online, legislation can be felt globally. In 2018 the US passed SESTA FOSTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers and
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prevent sex traffickers from operating via the internet, instead prevented sex workers from advertising and screening clients, a process crucial to their safety. As many of the websites impacted by the legislation were based outside the US, it affected sex workers all over the world. The internet has also facilitated the harassment and doxxing of sex workers. As a result they must now consider both their online and physical safety. Anti-sex work views have been weaponised by SWERFs online, realised into harmful legislation, and championed by the far right. These arguments are not mere rhetorical tricks from one side of a culture war – they encourage real harm to real people. National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a charity that works with sex workers, surveyed 162 sex workers: 57% said they had been subject to online harassment. They not only named clients but also “Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists (SWERFs), police, judges, politicians, so-called welfare workers” as victimisers and individuals who are potentially detrimental to sex workers’ safety. A spokesperson for the ECP commented that “dehumanising language” used by SWERFs online claws at the self-confidence and “mental health of sex workers posting online”. Leaving the online sphere is not an option. While someone like Julie Bindel, Times columnist and prominent SWERF, can delete Twitter without much effect on her career and life, sex workers do not have this privilege. They use social media for advertising and screening clients, and to communicate with other sex workers for advice and support. Beyond the Gaze, a survey of 641 sex workers, found that 34% said they used Twitter for this purpose. One sex worker told the surveyors: “I am actually part of a private Facebook group [...] although people do put warnings in, it’s more of like a support group.” These discussions and groups are sometimes infiltrated by SWERFs, continuing their witch-hunt. The stigma against sex workers that SWERFs have helped create has made it even more difficult for sex workers to access critical mental health services. The NUM
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survey reported: “various situations of sex workers being actively excluded from mental health provisions if they refused to give up sex work altogether.” A respondent said they “would be too afraid to talk to a mental health service as [they] wouldn’t want [their] profession in sex work to be kept on file and used against [them].” One Twitter user wrote that, after telling her therapist she’d returned to sex work, her therapist replied that “she felt uncomfortable that [the Twitter user] will pay her from sex work earnings” and that they “spoke about whether to suspend sessions until [she’d] left.” ‘Feminist’ anti-sex-work arguments have been adopted by the far-right as well. The pearl-clutching conservative response to sex work as “sinful” and the labelling of sex workers as “loose women” is now unfashionable. In their place, they have coopted superficially feminist arguments. In 2019 the Conservative Party published a report concluding that “the most effective way to safeguard sexual consent while reducing the market for prostitution […] is to legislate to make paying for sexual services an offence.” It stated that it is “accurate to characterise our system as allowing for the purchase of sexual consent, and [the commission] believes that this undermines the principle of sexual consent itself.” The idea of purchased consent is one circulated by anti-sex work feminists, and the Nordic model is a favourite “solution” amongst SWERFs. A dominatrix on Twitter wrote: “I HATE these Marxist types that participate in SWERF, TERF, and respectability politics. All of these signs are just dog whistles for being closeted bigots. They are no better than farright types at the end of the day. And they have quite a lot in common.” The ideologies of anti-sex worker feminists have been systematically realised in legislation. This legislation has had devastating effects on sex workers. In advocating and fighting for the realisation of this legislation, anti-sex work feminists are responsible for bringing about this harm. Criminalising legislation exposes sex workers to abuse by police. Amnesty International reported a sex worker telling them that “every night [they are] taken into an
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alley [by police] and given the choice between having sex or going to jail,” an experience that represents the experience of many others who spoke. Amnesty International also said that an “advocate for LGBT youth” had told them “the vast majority of young people she works with have been asked to perform sexual acts on police officers […] who suspect [the young people] are involved in sex work.” A 2002 study of sex workers in Chicago found that 24% of the reported rapes against sex workers, 30% of those against ‘exotic dancers’, and 20% of other sexual abuses were perpetrated by police officers. An ex-police officer who worked in Charing Cross station said that officers “would often arrest the prostitutes and take them back to the station [for sex].” Advocating for legislation further criminalising sex work supports this systematic abuse. At a panel on sex work one ECP spokesperson said that feminists who advocate for carceral approaches to sex work see police as a solution, whereas sex workers see them as rapists. Criminalisation also hinders sex workers from finding other work. SWERFs claim they want nobody to be forced into sex work, yet their solutions have helped create a situation where sex workers are excluded from other forms of work. The ECP representatives said that on a DBS check, sex-work related charges appear in the same category as rape. This makes getting any other job difficult. Migrant sex workers in particular are vulnerable to criminalisation of sex work. The ECP spokespeople said that “trafficking raids are just immigration raids in disguise.” It is difficult to see how the state can see these women as victims of awful abuse while simultaneously punishing them. In the NUM survey, one woman reported reaching out to the state for help: “Instead of helping me, they gave me a paper saying I had to leave the UK.” The ECP spokesperson commented that these issues had only been worsened after the decision to leave the European Union: “migrant sex workers are being screwed over by Brexit.”
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Along with the effect of legislation, the stigma encouraged by SWERFs leads to financial discrimination against sex workers. The ECP spokesperson said it is difficult for sex workers to get mortgages. When sex workers are under investigation by the police, their bank accounts are frozen. Further, banks often have “morality clauses” which preclude sex workers from getting loans and accounts. In the discussion of sex work online and in the academic sphere, there is a gulf between what is at stake for anti-sex work feminists and sex workers. The SWERF agenda would subject sex workers to working in ever-darker corners, with no ability to report harassment and assault, and remaining at constant risk of deportation. Decriminalisation of sex work, on the other hand, would foster a safer environment for sex workers, who would be able to report incidents more readily, and be more protected from the police force – SWERFs could just find a new passion project. These ideas are not only propagated on social media, they are also firmly rooted in a journalistic and academic tradition. One of the ECP spokespeople said that an influential group of women in journalism had banded together against sex work, encouraging newer journalists to write anti-sex work articles to be welcomed in, fostering a pattern of anti-sex work journalism. Student journalists add to the onslaught by cutting their teeth on antiprostitution articles – just controversial enough to grasp your attention, but not controversial enough to get you cancelled. Even objective journalists can get it wrong. The ECP recounted one sex worker who was evicted after her front door was shown in a documentary she was interviewed for. Equally, academics who claim to support sex workers are not always helpful, as their solutions are not practically implementable and do little to make sex workers safer. An academic once interviewed sex workers about vigilante attacks, collected honest accounts of sex workers fearing for their safety, and then wrote a paper about urban spaces. NUM reported “respondents detail the oppression of being ‘spoken-over’”,
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of not being listened to, particularly by those in positions of power: “Politicians claim to know what’s best for us. Journalists spread lies about us. None of them talk to us, and when we try to talk, we get told we’re not exploited enough if they can hear us, or else we’re so blinded by our exploitation that we can’t realise the truth of our own oppression.” In Dworkin’s lecture she says: “when men use women in prostitution, they are expressing a pure hatred for the female body.” This is a complete failure to consider sex workers as a people, reducing them to symbols. If you find yourself deviating from the idea that sex workers are people, you have taken a wrong turn. One of the ECP representatives pointed out how unhelpful it is to use arguments about morality when deciding what should be evidence-based policy. This idea is perhaps one that we should keep in mind when we discuss sex work: the discussion should not be about what you want to happen to your body, nor should it be about sex workers as a symbol of oppression. It should instead be about what we are told by sex workers and rooted in the empirical evidence found by sex worker organisations. NSWP, an organisation that advocates for the health and human rights of sex workers’, published a handout about talking about sex work: “the way we talk about sex work is anything but neutral – it communicates meaning and influences how people understand it and create policy about it. The words we use when speaking about sex work – whether in media or legal arguments, with our friends or in discussion with a stranger – matter.” When discussing sex work we have a tangible effect on real lives. In supporting anti-sex work positions, you are not just taking a radical stance, engaging in an interesting political discussion or furthering your career; you are advocating real harm to real people.
Photography by Niamh McBratney
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God Pities the Nursery Children
ןגה ידלי לע םחרמ םיהולא God pities the nursery children, He pities school children even less םילודג As for the big ones, He will pity no moreHe’ll let them fend for themselves. Sometimes, they crawl on all-fours In scorching sands to reach The pick-up point And they swallow blood. Perhaps He grants lovers his mercy, His attention, his salvation, As an oak shades the restful On a public bench Perhaps to them we will give Our last tokens of grace Handed down to us byאמא mum, So that together they may protect us On this, and other days A Translation of Yehudah Amichai’s ‘God Pities the Nursery Children’ from Hebrew.
By Ore Gazit Art by Aryan Goenka
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Sunday morning, 11am. OSPL offices. On the horizon, a convoy of mullets saunter out of the office and across Folly Bridge. The Isis SET enter. For the fifth consecutive week, a GCSE English Language guide has been left on the floor by the Cherwell editors. Cast list. All enter with tote bags. KIANA: walking with purpose, wearing Docs for dramatic effect. Hasn’t slept in days and will let the team know. She’s spent the whole night in MOB library, don’t you know? ANANYA: visibly less stressed than everyone else, particularly Kiana. This meeting has to finish on time. She has a welfare tea, a meeting at the Union, a formal at Corpus, and a Tortoise Fair to attend. FÓDHLA: flustered, fringe askew, cheeks aglow. She has a choral song-book tucked under her arm. SUSIE: ponytail swinging as she bounces in. Organic vegetables spill from her bag. She’s already been to two hot yoga classes. Maybe she should do more with her morning. MILLIE: coat and woollen scarf clad, even in the height of Summer. Her blue mascara and copy of Beckett makes her far too cool for this crowd. ANDREW: location undisclosed. KIANA: Salve … sorry. Did I mention I was doing a play? It’s in Latin. Obviously. ANANYA: English please, Kiana. [Turns to
everyone else.] Okay, let’s get started. I didn’t walk 1.5 miles in 5 minutes for nothing. FÓDHLA: [furiously typing, Eventbrite codes streaming from her fingers] Where’s Andrew? [Notification sound pings] SUSIE: Oh! That must be the Trello. [clicks into another window] Or is it the Slack [clicks again, visibly confused], Messenger? MILLIE: Let’s just start the weekly round-up. Two Creative Team members showed up to the last meeting – that’s progress, people! [40 minutes later] ANDREW: [enters. Sits down, silently, earrings jangling]. KIANA: And where have you been? This is truly unacceptable behaviour. ANANYA: And why are you dressed in a suit? Are you going somewhere after this? ANDREW: Oh, no. This is from last night, I just haven’t gone home. KIANA: [stiffens in fury]. Right. MILLIE: I read the news about your college in the OxStu. The article was unusually well written. Are you worried about Benet’s closing? ANDREW: [face blank] What’s Benet’s? [Fades to black.]
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Photography by Faye Song
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Art by Florence McKechnie
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Editors-in-Chief Ananya Basu Kiana Rezakhanlou Deputy Editors Susie Castledine Fódhla Duggan-Dennehy Andrew Wang Millie Dean-Lewis Creative and Media Faye Song* Natalie Hytiroglou* Oliver Roberts Rachel Jung Kanengo Diallo Niamh McBratney Dowon Jung Hannah Gardner Ben Beechener Betsy McGrath Violet Trevelyan-Clark Eloise Cooke Aryan Goenka Magazine Non-Fiction Georgina Walker* Shao-Yi Wong* Sam Moore Rachel Rees Sophie Lord Antara Singh Anneka Pink Investigations Lay Mohan* Olivia Burgess* Nia Large Efan Owen Wyatt Radzin Jessica Tabraham
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Magazine Fiction Sze Ann Pang* Edith Critchley* Grace Lawrence George Adams Isaaq Tomkins Helen Edwards Caitlin Wilson Coco Cottam Online Non-Fiction Mia Wu* Margaret Tilley* Beth Barnes Susan Li Natasha Gargan Sophie Baptista Tara Sallaba Sasha Howells Online Fiction Veronica Fu* Yii-Jen Deng* Gabriel Blackwell Zoe Davis Caitlin Gillet Eliza Browning Perpetua Haydn-Taylor Marketing and Events Sara Hashmi* Maria Beatriz Rilo Sanchez Vedika Rastogi Imaan Haider Megan Meredith-Rodriguez
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TRINITY TERM ‘22 OXFORD
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The Isis
Trinity 2022
DECADENCE