Katrina's Playlist

by Katrina Joy Funk

Happy June music-lovers!

I hope you’re all enjoying spending time outside, lying in the grass, listening to your favorite summer tunes on a portable speaker while competing for musical superiority with the group of friends blasting their music just a few feet away. One of the perks of living on an international campus is that you’re exposed to music from all over the world. Even if you don’t know exactly what the singer is saying, certain songs just resonate on an emotional and physical level. Maybe you do your best to learn the words, pulling up a questionably translated version on Google Translate, or maybe you’re content to fake it, singing along by making sounds that are just similar enough to the words. I’ve always felt that the French language lends itself very well to songs, and during the break between Spring and Summer semester, I found myself in Brittany, France.

The week before I left for France, I had been completely absorbed in a new podcast I’d discovered called You Must Remember This (this is my unofcial plug for this podcast, I tell literally everyone I know about it, so give it a listen). It gives fascinating and insanely in-depth accounts of the forgotten histories of Hollywood’s frst century. This podcast covers everything from the Mason Murders to MTV. Anway, all this to say I had recently fnished a YMRT series on the life of Jean Seberg, an American actress who became an icon of French ‘New Wave’ cinema during the 1950s and ‘60s. Needless to say, after listening, though my body may have been in Utrecht, my head was in 1960s Paris.

Society as a whole longs for the past because it’s something just out of our reach, something we can romanticize but never truly experience.

In the French countryside, I kept up a steady stream of 1960s and ‘70s French chanson music whenever I had the aux. The dulcet tones of Jaques Brel and Christophe rang out, carried on the early evening breeze. Recently, I’ve seen somewhat of a resurgence of retro French songs, repurposed and praised for their auras of nostalgia, sophistication, and romance (we’ve all seen the TikToks showing a hunt

Settling it over a cup of tea

by Pieter Dolmans

Let me preface this with something a lot of people (but not everyone) knows, since I get nervous talking about it: I’m a trans girl… or at least something like that. This makes my part in the DramaCo play A Midsummer Night’s Dream extra interesting. It is the part of Francis Flute, a male actor who plays the role of a girl named Thisbe in the play Pyramus and Thisbe, which is performed within the play. Are you still following? In short, I’m a trans woman, pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman.

So much of gender is just personality traits that we happened to have shoved into categories, and all those personality traits can still exist without being forced on people by assigning them genders.

The point of this ‘play within the play’ is that it’s performed quite badly, leading to several funny moments. One of the comedic elements, as was explained to me during the rehearsal process, was Flute trying to play a woman but being too masculine to pull it of. I had trouble with this at frst. As someone who experiences a lot of gender dysphoria because of not being ‘convincing’ as a woman (because my ever-so-nebulously undefned ‘masculine’ traits are showing), such a situation did not strike me as particularly amusing. But I think I’ve found a way to make it work. for the best croissant in Paris or an aesthetic shot of a train arriving at a metro station set to a version Aline). It’s easy to see the appeal. I think society as a whole, both consciously and subconsciously, longs for the past – styles and music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s are seemingly perineally en vogue. Perhaps because it was a simpler time, but perhaps because it’s something just out of our reach, something we can romanticize but never truly experience. So as I did during the brief time I was lucky enough to spend in France, starting my day with a croissant, a cofee, and a crooning of Françoise Hardy, I encourage you to romanticize your daily activities, whatever that looks like. And a soundtrack always helps.

I had to stop picturing Flute as a man and Thisbe as a woman. I fgured there must have been some set of traits behind that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ that was the driving force behind the joke, and that it should be possible to isolate those traits from their gendered associations. To me, it seems that the joke is based on nothing more than the contrast of the elegance of Thisbe being portrayed by the blunt and clumsy Flute. Nothing male or female about it. What helped with this was the alien setting of the play, half Ancient Greece, half fairy tale, making it easier to imagine that the problems of our daily lives, like the patriarchy, gender roles, and the inevitable heat death of the universe, don’t exist there.

Recommended listening:

Le Sud by Nino Ferrer

Et si Tu N'existais Pas by Joe Dassin

Aline by Christophe (the version by Jarvis Cocker is also great)

Capri C’est Fini by Hervé Vilard

Tous les Garçons et les Filles by Françoise Hardy

This made me think of gender abolitionism, the idea that it is not just gender-based discrimination, but gender in general that society should be rid of. A new question came to mind: in such a world without gender, could the Flute-playing-Thisbe joke still exist? Although the basis of the joke would be removed, I still think that the answer is yes. Because the characters of Flute and Thisbe can be stripped of their gender and yet remain the same just by describing them with the adjectives clumsy and elegant, respectively. So much of gender is just personality traits that we happened to have shoved into categories, and all those personality traits can still exist without being forced on people by assigning them genders.

So the fnal question I came to was: if the function of gender is removed, then what about the words ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’? If no gender is assigned at birth, and gender isn’t being constantly reafrmed, do those words need to be gendered? Could they exist in a genderless world? I’m really not sure of the answer, but as a trans girl who gets envious of women who present masculine, I have a personal stake in believing they can.