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upfront

editor's note contents

upfront features 3 • tu sí puedes

Isabella Martinez 4 • portraits of providence

Anna Harvey

Yidi wasn’t here this week, but she got a job so hooray!

lifestyle 5 • the cheerleader effect

Chantal Marauta 5 • white

Saanya Jain 8 • college caricatures Eveline Liu

arts & culture 6 • defend it like beckham Emile Bautista 6 • page and screen Ameer Malik 7 • woman of steel

Jennifer Osbourne

staff

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu

Please send your photos to alicia_devos@brown. edu!

Features Editors Saanya Jain Claribel Wu

Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Ryan Walsh

Lifestyle Editor Alicia DeVos

Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin

Creative Director Grace Yoon

Managing Editor of Lifestyle Rebecca Ellis

Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos

Arts & Culture Editors Joshua Lu Anne-Marie Kommers

Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb

Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Anne Cheng Pia Ceres Sarah Cooke James Feinberg Anna Harvey Katherine Luo Jennifer Osborne Lindsey Owen Rica Maestas Ameer Malik

Chantal Marauta Isabella Martinez Randi Richardson Spencer Roth-Rose Ananya Shah Celina Sun Alex Walsh Joshua Wartel Annabelle Woodward Xuran You Staff Illustrators Clarisse Angkasa Alice Cao Tom Coute Socorro FernandezGarcia

Ruth Han Diana Hong Jenice Kim Kay Liang Doris Liou Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Tymani Ratchford Natasha Sharpe Maggie Tseng Claribel Wu Yidi Wu Stephanie Zhou

Cover Clarisse Angkasa

features

3

tu sí puedes (un)safe on the streets

ISABELLA MARTINEZ staff writer illustrator CLARIBEL WU

Before I came to Brown, my dad taught me how to flip a grown man over my shoulder.

He’s an advanced black belt in Karate and taught me how to properly throw a punch before I was ten, and how to do a solid kick when I was in my teens. But, as I accepted Brown’s offer of admission and prepared to move across the country, he was worried about my safety. I was moving to Providence, RI, not to Caracas, Venezuela where my parents grew up and my uncle was robbed at gunpoint while holding my two year old cousin.

Yet, the prospect of me being far from my family was terrifying for my dad.

He taught me how to flip a grown man over my shoulder on a beach. I got it on my second try and my dad tumbled onto the damp sand. My mom told us to stop or someone would think something was wrong. I have thought long and hard about whether I can do it while wearing a backpack. If I were scared enough, I think the answer would be yes.

Why is it that, even on a school campus, women still need to be afraid?

I do not mean for “afraid” to describe a state of paralyzing terror. Rather, that silent warning bell that makes us cross the street to see if the person behind us is really following us, or when we call safewalk rather than make the three-block trek from Keeney to Perkins on our own in the dark.

I have been followed by a car on Brown’s campus four times. After the third, I was so scared to walk around by myself after dark that I would refuse to do things unless I knew someone would be willing to walk me home. At the time, I lived in Perkins, which felt so far off-campus for a sophomore student used to living on main campus. I often just refused to join my friends if they contacted me after dark. We are a campus that is monitored by both a police force and private security. If I, a young woman, cannot walk alone in the dark for fear that I will find myself alone and

cornered here, then I can scarcely imagine the reality faced by young girls and women in cities with fewer street-lamps and more crime.

At the end of sophomore year, my faith in humanity was restored quite a bit when, upon hearing that I wouldn’t be joining a birthday celebration because I was afraid of walking by myself in the dark and safe-walk was, some reason, not working that day, about half of the party (that’s ten people) came to get me from my dorm room. Not only did the antics of this large group make me start laughing the second I saw them, it was wonderful to know that I had people I could rely on.

People who talk about how men and women are now equal–who point to 1920 and say that inequality disappeared with the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution–do not understand the inherent difficulty of being a woman. They do not understand the feeling of hesitation before you leave the house because

the shirt you are wearing dips just a bit too low, of wearing a sports bra instead of a push-up so that people won’t call to you on the streets. They don’t understand why you ask male friends to put their arms around you while you walk down a street where the light has gone out and you can hear voices slurred from drink when all the other streets are under construction and and it’s starting to rain.

In the face of this ever present fear, hope keeps me going. Determination, faith, hard work, confidence and sheer stubbornness – that is how girls become engineers and CEOs and presidents. My mom used to tell me, whenever I was particularly discouraged by anything from tying my shoes when I was two to when I was on the phone complaining about multivariable calculus as a freshman in college: “Tu sí puedes.”

“Yes, you can.”

4 features

portraits of providence meditations on transition while walking to whole foods

ANNA HARVEY staff writer

illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA

The streets are different here. It isn’t surprising, really, that the creative capital of New England would contrast with a midwestern college town half its size, but it’s most apparent in the streets.

They bulge, wind, climb, crack. I trip a lot here. Tree roots swell under cobblestones and make the sidewalks twist. I like to imagine what the city looked like when these trees were first planted, who else stumbled on these streets, as if with each failed step I’m falling over history?

I’m on my way to the Whole Foods, the one on North Main this time, which might even be bigger than the one back home. I need peanut butter, oats, whatever fruit is on sale. I make my breakfast here the way I do at home although I use an electric tea kettle instead of a stove and I eat less than three feet from my bed. I also drink instant coffee now. It’s the ritual I like, almost more than the food itself—if I can start my day with a bit of consistency, maybe I can convince myself I’ll find some kind of stability here. I can root myself to the new through breakfasts, bad coffee, and soon, a life full of people to share them.

I’m listening to a podcast interview with Dana Schwartz, a writer known for, among other things, running the Guy in Your MFA Twitter account, whose posts

I often screenshot to send to my best friends across state lines. We’ve known a few Guy in Your MFA types—I’m sure I’ll meet more in the next four years.

It’s strange to think that of all the relationships in my life, the ones with these friends will remain the most constant.

It’s always been long-distance: Together we represent every time zone in the United States, having met for the first time at writing camp in Iowa City two summers ago. We text often and Skype less than we’d like to. We reunited this past August, days before all but one of us culled our belongings to what would fit in our familys’ duffel bags and headed for the future. Sometimes I listen to the songs that Claire, the only one still a high-schooler, wrote and recorded for us, named for the cities we’ve been in together. I wonder what my song would sound like here, in Providence, alone.

As she mentions in the podcast, Dana Schwartz went to Brown. She majored in Public Policy, just like my roommate wants to—she became a writer, just like I want to. I Google her as I’m walking and stumble again, this time under a tree that looks barely older than a sapling, the freshman of the block, unsure of how far to stretch its branches. Dana Schwartz is from Highland Park, Illinois, a half hour

from Evanston, where I lived until six weeks ago. She worked at the Adler Planetarium in high school, which I visited for the second time after graduation.

I feel like I can trust this disembodied voice in my headphones—she knows my old home, she understands my new one, she made it through both relatively unscathed, probably even strengthened. I stop for a bit, partly because I think I see a car cresting the hill to my right, partly because I feel that, for a moment, maybe I can make things work here.

I keep walking, enjoying the slight burn in my calves, still unused to walking uphill. I have passed RISD territory now. I’m in a residential area, with colonial houses looming above me, somehow boundless and quaint at the same time.

They’re the kind I always admired on postcards, the kind we don’t have many of back home, the kind my dad joked George Washington would strut out of after an afternoon of top-secret business.

I feel far away from Brown, unmoored somehow, though I’m eagerly taking in the newness of my surroundings. I think about the number of children I see on the Main Green every day, and the vast array of dogs. In many ways, I thought college would be full of adults, and big ideas, and responsibility. And it is, definitely.

But I’m still in a city, where people live, people completely unaffiliated with the university where I spend my days, and that reassures me. If I look at the toddlers on the grass, or the slightly shabby poodle on the steps of Wilson Hall, I can picture Providence puncturing my college bubble, growing up around me and me with it.

I’ve spent this walk alone, like I’ve spent most of the day. It used to bother me—despite being arguably too comfortable on my own back home, I felt like every minute spent in solitude here was a waste of my college experience. It didn’t stop me from watching movies in bed on Friday nights, but I did so with lingering guilt. I haven’t found a solid group of friends yet. Sometimes it worries me—really, most of the time. But that’s the key word: yet. If “providence” means anything to me, it’s the promise of eventual protection, insurance—divine or not—that means everything will be okay. If Providence means anything to me, it’s somewhere I’m starting to feel comfortable, on my own now, but one day, with a group of people I can call friends, in a city I can call home.

lifestyle

5

the cheerleader effect the allure of trench coats, tight coats, and bucket hats

CHANTAL MARAUTA staff writer illustrator EMMA MARGULIES

This week, amidst a sea of midterms, friend drama, and adult responsibilities, my mind could focus on only one thing: How did the Backstreet Boys manage to look so sexy in absurd 1990s fashion?

Let me backtrack quickly and explain how I got to be so obsessed with one of

the most iconic boy bands of all time— and, by consequence, their decade of glory.

I’m a Friends fanatic and often watch brief snippets of episodes during study breaks. I tend to watch clips from earlier seasons set in the mid-1990s, so my “suggested” tab always presents me with an array of music videos and trailers from that decade. This week, the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” was first on the list. Suddenly, I was thrown back in time, once again that three-year-old sitting in the back seat of my mother’s car, listening to those catchy, upbeat tunes. As I sat on my computer, a wave of nostalgia was released, and for the next hour I cruised through BSB music videos, reveling in the songs and fangirling over how incredibly attractive I found each band member.

But once I stepped back and actually took in their look (or, as we say today, their “aesthetic”), I realized it was intrinsically terrible. From A.J. McLean’s collection of tight vests (which no doubt later served as costume inspiration for the Jersey Shore men), to Kevin Richardson’s flasher trench coat, to the entire band’s matching white baggy trousers, BSB’s

fashion choices just kept getting worse.

Since these were the clothes that were in vogue at the time, it makes sense that BSB fans found the outfits and the men wearing them full of sex appeal. But I am a modern girl with modern fashion tastes, yet I still found myself incredibly drawn to the band’s aesthetic.

I am under the spell of the “Cheerleader Effect.” This phenomenon, also known as the group attractiveness effect, dictates that people standing in a group appear more attractive than they would appear as individuals. Made famous by How I Met Your Mother, the “Cheerleader Effect” says that people in a group look better than they would each look as individuals. The members of a group balance out with one another.

In “I Want It That Way,” a group of mildly attractive young men wearing similar fashions stand together, singing passionately at the camera. Despite their bucket hats, awkwardly-hanging jackets, and baggy dad jeans, their confidence, smooth voices and synchronization make them awfully sexy.

So do we think that something is “fashionable” just because we see a large group of people wearing it? In itself, the archetyp-

al Ivy League douchebag look—comprised of high socks, boat shoes, checkered shorts and a too-tight Polo—is hardly fashion forward. Yet, when tons of men standing together all wear this attire, it’s attractive.

But take one of them out of the group and put them on a campus of a university in, say, Italy (where the style standards are completely different), and they will look like, to put it kindly, an absolute idiot.

The same goes for girls. Going back to the 1990s, the Spice Girls made some questionable fashion choices (latex bodycon dresses, neon feathered boas, and platform boots to name a few). Yet the public worshiped them. They became style icons of the decade, giving off an aura of coolness and blithesomeness.

So would these bands have had the impact they did, had each person been a solo artist? The Spice Girls’ explosion of color and idiosyncrasy, and the BSB’s part-flasher, part-Jersey Shore looks worked because they were all peculiar together. As a united front, they set the standards for what we now see as absurd 1990s fashion. Collectively, each band became that group of cool kids who looked hip no matter what they did or wore. Together, they were golden.

white ashes and pixels

SAANYA JAIN features section editor illustrator TYMANI RATCHFORD

Sometimes when snow falls, you think of her. You think of how you never imagined seeing in your mind, over and over again, her body crumpling as the flames ate her toes and her hair and her belly button until all that was left was white dust just like the snow that is enveloping you silently.

You have never met her and never will.

But you sit at the piano and you sing. You sing as if you could sing to her, this stranger you have had so many imaginary conversations with. You sing to heal the cracks on her skin, to remove the blankness of her eyes, to take away the whiteness of her tiny mouth.

The only image you’ve seen of her is her laughing on a merry-go-round, just like any other seven-year-old. What the camera can’t show, what no one can see, is the tumor in her brain growing to the size of an apple.

Six months after the diagnosis she’ll go through surgery. Some days she won’t be able to get up. She’ll crave pizza but forget she ever wanted it. She won’t be able see past her hand. She’ll scream in anger and her face will no longer be her. And she’ll laugh just as quickly and it will be her again.

You know her only through her brother.

He asks if you were crying on the phone.

You were trying not to. All you seem to be able to do is stare into the blue and white of cyberspace separating you from her and say you’re sorry and use dumb emoticons. :( :’( :’’(

He asks for your help, and you rejoice because, finally, you feel useful. Instead, he writes: A year with her or a few happy days? A year with rashes, psychological problems, hair loss, vision loss and memory loss? For the illusion that medical sciences *might* find a cure for cancer in the next 12 months? There is always a chance that things might go right and she comes out fine. Or do we let her go?

You want to say: How do I know? I don’t want to hurt you. Why are you asking me?

Let me help you. Instead, you look at the white box and let the space between you widen until you know you’ll never be able to cross it again.

You decide that night to name your own daughter after her. Riya.

Later that night, you don’t expect him to write again: I’m sitting right next to her. Can’t take her to the cremation grounds before morning. Last night with my little sister.

One day of silence. Another day. You go to school. A young girl passes you and you do a double take because she looks just like her. You stare at your brother until he refuses to be around you. What would happen to you if he were gone? Who would you be? The magnitude of the loss is as incomprehensible as looking at a skyscraper through a magnifying glass.

** A year later, you’re walking and snow is falling. How do you love someone you’ve never met? you ask yourself. You think of how you used to imagine showing her the way the blue of the sea is really so many different blues together, a blue that makes you want to step inside and close your eyes be-

cause you know everything will be okay. But nothing will ever be okay for her.

She’s somehow in the space between New Delhi’s streets and Tunis’s empty ones. She’s suspended in cyberspace, within the pixels of the blue and white screen. She’s in the flakes that fall and melt on your skin, mixing you with her. She is snow and you are dust.

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arts & culture

defend it like beckham twenty years of arsène wenger

EMILE BAUTISTA contributing writer illustrator MICHELLE NG

October might as well be Arsène Wenger month. This past weekend, he celebrated his 67th birthday and two weeks ago, his 20th anniversary of managing my beloved Arsenal Football Club—an English soccer team (technically, he was appointed in September, but his first match was October 12, so you get the idea). Us fans showered him with praise and adulation—on social media, at the stadium, and anywhere else we could— to thank him for all he has done for the club.

This was all for a French man who has spent nearly a third of his existence managing a football club in North London.

I have spent more than half of my life cheering on Arsenal, and by extension, Arsène. They both came to me 12 years ago in an unexpected way. A friend of mine returned home with a red jersey adorned with O2 on the front—the then-sponsor of the club—and Henry on the back with the number 14. As an avid soccer player in search of a team to watch, I thought it wise to try out

my friend’s mystery team.

Truthfully, I do not remember what I initially thought of the team. What I do know is that: a) it was a weird coincidence that the manager of a team called Arsenal is named Arsène and b) from that point, there was no turning back; I became a self-proclaimed Gooner (the name the fans have given themselves based off one of Arsenal’s nicknames, the Gunners).

I was not yet a fan when the team was going through its golden years. I arrived shortly after the invincible 2003-04 squad completed an entire Premier League season undefeated (one season after Wenger himself said it would not be shocking if his team went the whole campaign unbeaten). Over my tenure as an across-the-pond spectator, I have experienced the highs and lows that come with being a diehard fan.

I saw our goalie Jens Lehmann get sent off early in the 2006 Champions League Final against Barcelona, only for Arsenal to score first, but ultimately lose 2-1. I saw the definition of humiliation in an 8-2 defeat at the hands of the hated Manchester United.

And I saw the departures of three of our core players (Robin Van Persie, Samir Nasri, and former captain, now snake Cesc Fabregas) who I thought would return us to glory.

I speak of “us”

and “we” as if I am part of a team whose home stadium is over 4,000 miles from mine. Yet, I feel a connection to them more so than most things. And the thread that ties everything together is the man himself, Arsène Wenger.

Here is a man who came to England in the late 1990s and was one of the only foreign managers in the entire league. The papers printed “Arsène who?”, the same question I asked myself when I started following the club. Now, you would be branded a fool if you called yourself a soccer fan and asked that question.

As long as I have backed Arsenal, Wenger has been there. Players have come and gone (some to my dismay, some to my pleasure) and there has been a circus of other managers rotating in and out of other teams in the league. In the last 20 seasons, Arsène is all that remains. He has stayed when bigger teams have come knocking at the door (I’m looking at you Real Madrid and the French National team). He stayed when the team made its move from Highbury to its current Emirates stadium, a move that cost a fortune in a time when other teams were emptying their pockets to court the highest level of talent. He relied on his faith in young players to survive the rough waters, and we relied on him and his loyalty to steer the ship in the right direction.

Of course, his reign as manager would not come without criticism. I myself have been guilty of armchair managing over the years. As much as I like to doubt his starting lineup, player purchases, and (often) late substitutions, time and time again he has proven that Arsène knows best. However, this does not stop other more vocal fans from lambasting him with jarring boos and ban-

ners that read “Wenger Out”. The pressure of managing a top-flight team as celebrated as Arsenal is endless.

As of late, he has come under fire from fans, especially when the team comes out with a poor result. Some criticize his stubbornness to adhere to his tactics rather than adapt to what the opponent is showing him.

Others firmly believe it is time for him to move on. This idea was epitomized by the video that surfaced showing several fans heckling Wenger as he boarded a train after a 3-2 loss. But in true Wenger fashion, he shrugged it off by saying that fans shout things like that in the stadium too and that he does not enjoy the fans being upset after a loss.

Granted, he has said before that fan reception may have been a little harsh, but the man rarely responds more harshly than that.

He almost never lashes out, and when he does, we can all enjoy it (see: infamous shove of the arrogant Jose Mourinho). You can feel that he genuinely wants what we all want: for Arsenal to be successful. And without him, I am not sure I would be able to have seen the highs that I have.

I remember Wenger’s wry smile as he hinted at the impending signing of midfield maestro Mesut Özil. I remember the raised arms as the nine year trophy drought was ended with the 2014 Football Association Cup victory. And I am seeing a team that has not finished outside the top four,nor below our most hated rivals, Tottenham, since Wenger took over.

No one can know where the team will go after he decides to call it quits. We have seen teams make managerial transitions (sorry Manchester United fans) and capitulate under the pressures of past success. But,

page and screen thoughts on book-to-film adaptation

AMEER MALIK staff writer illustrator JENICE KIM

I’m trying to overcome the idea that I’ve missed out on something when I only watch a film adaptation of a book without reading the source material. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to stop thinking this. We often hear the phrase “The book was better,” or we learn that a film removed aspects of a novel’s plot in order to prevent the runtime from becoming too long.

The book isn’t always better, though. When we assess a work of art, we should engage with it on its own terms: which medium was used first is not important. Sometimes a film adaptation is near unrecognizable from its source material (see Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet).

The audience’s reception, therefore, comes down to whether the work on its own has attained its goal.

Film and literature are two different mediums that each come with their own possibilities and limitations. A work of literature tries to achieve its goal through written language, which is both its greatest strength and weakness. Language is incredibly free and versatile.

It can make time and space flexible; one paragraph can encompass what has happened in an entire city over the course of decades, while pages and pages can construct an incident in a

single room in a way that feels like it’s in realtime.

One important dimension of language in a literary work is voice, which conveys the work’s content. In fiction, the voice tells the story. It can belong to a narrator, to one or more characters, or, through free indirect discourse, it can exist in a fascinating area between the characters and the narrator. In this last case, the voice is usually in the third-person, but it can move in and out of characters’ minds, tuning itself to different characters’ thoughts and perspectives.

A unique strength of prose fiction, therefore, is direct access to the minds of the characters.

When we read a story, we can know, either by what the voice directly says or implies, what the characters are thinking, what motivations are compelling them, and similar details.

A movie does not have the advantages that written language on its own has. But film can rely on other tools. One is the camera. The angles and perspectives of the camera can infuse a scene with particular messages or emotions.

A shot of a person who is off-center can create a subtle sense of unease. In a similar way, the way different shots are edited together also adds to a scene’s impact. A match cut can powerfully convey a connection between two

seemingly-different objects or events. A metaphor can achieve the same thing, but only if it’s well-written; otherwise, it can come across as confusing or silly. Furthermore, a film can rely on the performances of actors to bring characters to life through vocal inflections, body language, and other techniques, which add dimensions to characters’ dialogue and actions that are not easily conveyed through the page.

For example, a subtle gesture by a character can keep more of its subtlety on the screen than on the page. On the screen, not everyone might notice the gesture. On the page, if the gesture is described, every reader notices it. Music, too, can be quite helpful in shaping the emotional dimension of a scene. It activates the auditory portion of the brain instead of the visual, sometimes arousing feelings more intensely than than written word can.

But because film has so many of these parts, these different factors all have to work in order for the film to be successful. Furthermore, though it seems that film has more tools at its disposal than literature, this does not mean that film is the more powerful medium. Film needs these tools because it cannot access the interiority of characters the way the books can.

It has to find ways to somehow (through act-

ing, music, cinematography) make this interiority external.

With these details in mind, let’s turn to a case study, which I think illustrates an example of how a movie can be better than the book: The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Both the book and the movie resulted from the work of the same artist, Stephen Chbosky, who wrote the novel and later directed and wrote the screenplay of the film. The story of Wallflower centers on a high school student named Charlie and his experiences with his friends Sam and Patrick. In both the film and the movie, the story is supposed to be an emotionally-charged coming of age tale.

I came across the movie first, but I knew it was an adaptation of a book. I stumbled upon it while flipping through channels. I’d missed roughly the first twenty minutes, and I usually don’t continue a movie on TV when I miss the beginning. But I was gripped. The scene I began with takes place at a party. The yellowish color scheme invokes a sense of warmth, which sets a foundation for the characters’ intimate interactions. Charlie (Logan Lerman), is high from marijuana and talks in a rapid voice about good times with an old friend before he reveals that his friend recently committed suicide. Ler-

arts & culture man’s performance is layered and nuanced; he rambles until he mentions the tragedy, then he slows down his speech and starts to choke on his words. Charlie’s intoxication, then sorrow and frustration, are palpable. The performance

by Emma Watson, who plays Sam, is also moving. Watson, without speaking much dialogue, conveys through her countenance, through the care in her eyes, Sam’s compassion toward Charlie as she listens to him. From that moment, I was invested until the end.

After watching it, I decided to read the book. I haven’t been able to finish it, though.

I’ve tried really hard, but I can’t get through it.

I think it’s because I don’t find the voice in the novel interesting. The novel is a series of letters

by Charlie, so the entire story is in his voice. But his voice is simplistic, dull almost. The way he talks about his friends makes them seem much

less interesting and real than they seem in the movie. He describes his friend Patrick as a kind and funny guy, but I don’t get a strong sense of what exactly Patrick is like from the page. But, in the film, when there’s little voiceover, and the camera focuses on Ezra Miller’s charismatic portrayal of Patrick, Patrick becomes real for me. The novel is trapped by Charlie’s uninteresting voice, so the story, for me, doesn’t come to life on the page the way it does on the screen.

After much effort, I finally decided to put the book on hold indefinitely, and I rewatched the movie, this time from the start. I thought the film was even better the second time I watched it.

For me, the Wallflower movie was better than the book. In my ultimate judgement, I didn’t focus on how the film interpreted the book. I didn’t care about the differences in plot

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and character details between the novel and movie. I didn’t care about what was included in the book, but not included in the film. I cared about how the book used its tools to try to reach its goal of making me emotionally invested in the characters and their difficulties, and I cared about how the movie used its tools to do the same. The book left me cold, but the film moved me. That’s why the adaptation succeeded.

I’m hoping to use my experience with Wallflower to guide my assessments of other bookto-film adaptations. Ultimately, I think it’s more interesting to focus on adaptations and source materials as separate works that happen to have certain similarities. These similarities, though, shouldn’t be the foundations of the audience’s reception. Each work should be evaluated on its own.

this is my story supergirl’s struggle for autonomy

JENNIFER OSBOURNE staff writer illustrator KATIE CAFARO

Psylocke has been my favorite comic character ever since her appearance in the Uncanny X-Force series from 2010. With ninja-like combat skills and psychic powers, she proves again and again in a short twentyfive-issue series that she is tough as nails and unapologetic about her flaws. Yet her appearance in this year’s Age of Apocalypse amounts to enslavement by a patriarchal godlike figure in an anachronistic costume created for her by 1970s comic artists. Despite this, the film was still enjoyable, and I can always get my feminist fix through reading the comics in which she appears, but sometimes it’s nice to see your favorite female characters appear on the screen without being gift-wrapped for male consumption. Popular opinion here suggests TV shows are the panacea, with Jessica Jones, Supergirl, and Agent Carter marking the start of an era of strong superheroines on the small screen. After having seen all three of those shows, I find that there is generally something jarring about watching a supposedly feminist TV series, particularly in the case of Supergirl. While I watched the first season of Supergirl and enjoyed it, I feel that the show’s representation of women is more complicated than most reviews would lead one to believe.

Supergirl is now in its second season, and it focuses on Kara Zor-El, who is sent to Earth from Krypton as a teenager to protect her infant cousin Kal-El. However, by the time her craft arrives on earth, her cousin has already grown to adulthood and has adopted the role of Superman. After spending years hiding her powers and living as Kara Danvers, she eventually becomes National City’s protector. The first season focused on Kara’s gradual growth into her new role and struggle to juggle her two identities.

After a rocky first few episodes, the show settles into an enjoyable plot arc and undeniably shines at various points in its portrayal of women. Media mogul Cat Grant, Kara Danvers’ boss at her day job, gives the show its most refreshing take on feminism.

Immensely successful in combating the “you can’t have it all” stereotype surrounding working women and arguably a bigger source of inspiration for young girls than Supergirl herself, Cat is not the stereotypical powerful woman who gives up her personality and has to be masculinized to succeed.

Abrasive, unapologetic, and unfiltered, she consistently delivers the best lines on the show. While women’s relationships with each other in film are often clear-cut, Cat and

Kara have a more complex surrogate mother-daughter, boss-subordinate, and mentormentee dynamic that alternates throughout each episode. While Kara is encouraged by her friends and family who are aware of her secret identity, it is really Cat who gives her reality checks and pushes her to be better, even though she does not share this knowledge. Many of her lines also offer candid and simple advice to working women in general, claiming “you don’t build a company like Catco by being a wallflower and not having an opinion and strong point of view.” The bond between Kara and her adopted sister Alex is just as complex, going far beyond the standard cute and constant affection featured on most shows. Supergirl’s most compelling villains are also women, including Kara’s Aunt Astra and her former rival at work, Siobhan Smythe.

Despite all of its strong supporting female characters, Supergirl is doomed to fall short of many feminist standards due to the main character’s back story. She first emerged as a character in 1958, literally springing from a magic totem as a companion and helper for Superman after being wished into existence by his sidekick. Although the TV series dates from almost sixty years after this first comic, its influence is still present in the constant comparisons between the show’s heroine to her already-established cousin, Superman.

Throughout the show, Supergirl struggles to justify her own existence and live up to the expectations her male cousin has created.

A recurring plot tension is whether her love interest James Olsen will call upon her, and not Superman, in moments of need. When James finally recognizes that she can accomplish the job just as well, it is treated as a major triumph for her development rather than an issue of geographic convenience: I, for one, would rather have Supergirl fly 20 blocks over to rescue me from a burning building than ask Superman to travel a distance of 200 miles from Metropolis. This reinforces the idea that Supergirl can only hope to achieve the same level of recognition as her cousin, damaging her ability to establish her own unique identity.

In fact, so much of the first season can be condensed to Supergirl proving herself just as good as her male counterpart, so much so that she lacks any of the personal flaws central to the development and depth of male superheros. Wolverine, for instance, would not be as compelling as a nonviolent man with a background of scientific experimenta-

tion; his drinking, gambling, and inability to forgive helps the contracts roll in for Hugh Jackman. The antihero is the character who captures our attention, and the one episode in which Supergirl is chemically induced to become an antihero ends with Kara in tears about how she will never repair her reputation. At the same time, the show’s first season spends a troublingly small amount of time asserting how a female superhero might be better equipped to handle dangerous situations than a man; Supergirl, like her cousin, largely prefers to fight force with force first and attempt mediation and manipulation later. Cat Grant encapsulates this central dilemma on the show. When asked why Supergirl hasn’t been branded Superwoman, she responds, “If you perceive ‘Supergirl’ as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” A whole team of writers, editors, and producers thought Supergirl was good enough on her own. And yet, they failed to consider how their own artistic decisions fail to live up to that standard.

It is possible the show will improve on Supergirl’s representation in its second season, though as of now it seems to be set up for further disappointment. Cat Grant’s replacement with new boss Snapper Carr forces out one of the most productive relationships on the show and replaces it with the overplayed trope of the grumpy male boss underestimating the abilities of his pretty female employee. The death of Aunt Astra also leaves the show without a recurring female antagonist, and the decision to make Superman a recurring character threatens to draw attention away from its protagonist altogether. If Supergirl is to build on its first season, it can only do so through the lens of Kara discovering her unique strengths by working with her cousin, rather than becoming his shadow.

The genre of superhero TV shows only became mainstream around three years ago, and although women now make up 46% of self-identified comic fans, the assumption that male viewers will dominate the consumption of these programs restricts the production of many shows with a dominantly female perspective. Agent Carter, for instance, was cancelled after only two seasons and spectacular reviews because of low viewership. Unlike comics, which are usually produced over time and can alter issue by issue based off of public response, entire seasons of a show are shot at once. Companies are prevented by economic incentive to

run experimental TV shows that are truly progressive in gender representation, making the industry by nature conservative rather than revolutionary. Second, the newer companies such as Image Comics that are breaking new ground in the genre do not have the resources to move to a television medium at all. While TV shows are still a less expensive media form than the blockbuster movie and therefore have been a breeding ground for some growth in representation of female superheroes on the screen, the feminism of these shows is currently over-hyped.

But the youth of the industry is also cause for hope. The first attempts to align comic superheroines with the ideology of the 1970s feminist movement ended largely in disaster, yet encouraged comic writers to place female heroines in positions of power and created a generation of younger, more powerful women like the aforementioned Psylocke. Conditions will likely improve with time. Season two of Supergirl may yet exceed our expectations, or at least provide some insight for future shows on what not to emulate.

8

lifestyle

topten

people

1. me 2. me 3. Alicia DeVos (email her at alicia_devos@ brown.edu)

I feel like I did 5/4ths of this group project

“

hot post time machine

“

A: I feel like people stigmatize farting.

People don’t care as much about burping, and you can’t hold in farts.

B: You can. Your asshole is much tighter than your mouth.

4. me 5. me 6. me 7. me 8. me 9. not you 10. me

Donuts are at their best when they’re not trying to be what they’re not. Since they’re not pie, they shouldn’t be filled with fruit or, worse, jam...Call me a purist, but I mess with no funny stuff or attempts at experimentation.

the holesome baked good • 02/28/13

college caricatures who will you meet in college?

You introduce yourself too often your first semester in college. Each time it’s the same thing—you shake hands, forget the people’s names, and see them cross the Main green every once in awhile. As their names, home states, and favorite flavors of ice cream fade from your memory, you start to remember them only as caricatures. How many of these college caricatures can you check off?

snap of the Friends rerun on the gym treadmill? We get it. You work out and you love Smelly Cat. But please, for the love of god, isn’t this a little anticlimactic for your visual autobiography? So next time, before you send that weirdly-angled selfie of you “not paying attention in classsss omg kill me,” do yourself a favor. Think. Then close out of Snapchat.

Then learn something.

1. Facebook Hotshot: The first few days of school are undeniably awkward.

You have shitty conversations exchanging “Hi, I’m ____. I’m from ____ and I live in ____ and I plan on studying ____” over melting ice cream at those damned socials. The only names you can remember belong to the Facebook Hotshots.

They’ve posted exactly 32 times in the class page, the first one a self-introduction, the 27th one about housing, and everything in between, including plugging clubs they’ve preemptively joined.

You’re sure that everyone has memorized their profile picture. They might draw a small following, but hey, freshmen are just ducklings who imprint too early.

3. Crush Crazy: We all know this one. The person across the hall whose crush rotation is scheduled like a sitcom with a new episode each week. And hey, whatever works right? For the Crush Crazy, there’s no time for attachment or even a conversation with their love interest. Instead, Crush Crazies admire from afar, extrapolating data from those discrete gazes made across the SciLi and coming home to tell all.

2. Snapchat Hap-py: College is an exciting shitstorm, sure. But that doesn’t mean I want snapchats of the buffet line.

Or the bathroom line. And that blurry

4. The All-Nighter: You know adulthood is too much responsibility when someone becomes effectively nocturnal.

It’s not that cute, especially when they ditch all their classes. For a week straight.

Oh, and how do they eat? They’re not even awake when the dining halls are open. Sure, it’s their lifestyle choice, but maybe take it with a dose of caffeine. (To stay awake for that 9 a.m. If they’d con-

EVELINE LIU contributing writer sider showing up.)

5. My Life is Together: The antithesis of The All-Nighter, they start their problem sets the day they’re passed out, meet with their professors three times before submitting their papers, and still maintain an active social life. You know who they are, sitting in the front of each lecture hall. When you ask how they are, they brush it off with “I’m just getting by,” and you think about the exam you have tomorrow for a class you don’t even own the textbooks for. Sometimes you’re annoyed, but underneath it you’re really just jealous. They wake up at 7 a.m., get in a workout before class, and go to sleep at 10 p.m. Same.

6. The Networker: There’s nothing wrong with making connections in college. Brown’s steep price tag comes with an incredible community of alums and students, but The Networker is dropping their generic Microsoft Word template resume and matching business card at any and every conversation. They’re ready to deliver their self-promotional spiel, and you don’t really care. You smile and nod and secretly hope you’ll never see them again.

7. I’m on Too Many Listservs: The activities fair was dizzying madness in the stuffy OMAC track. Upperclassmen guilted them into signing up for way too many listservs, and they don’t know how to unsubscribe. So they receive emails about Club Volleyball even though they only ever played in eighth grade gym. Pirate a capella tells them to audition even though they only ever sing in the shower and not even that anymore because public bathrooms give them stage fright. It’s not all bad though. They find out that they signed up for BAAT, Brown Assisted Animal Therapy, so they get 10 minutes of bliss petting a happy dog.

8. We Should Talk More: This is the boy two doors down whom you always see, sometimes carrying his art supplies that exceed the size any sensible bag could be. He says he has the same laceup boots as you, but in black. When the two of you chat briefly while heading in opposite directions, you wish you could bring yourself to say, “We should talk more,” or “Hey, can we grab coffee?” or even just ask for his number. But you don’t, because you’re not sure how. So for now, he’s still just the boy two doors down whom you always see.