Spare Rib 25W

Spare Rib

letter from the editors

Echo, the theme for the 25W edition, is a combination of two juxtaposing themes: Quiet and Outcry. In reflecting on the events of the last year, both on the Dartmouth campus and globally, our members sought to re-envision our role and goals as an organization: what do we want Spare Rib to look like, feel like, and contribute to the greater community? How do we reconcile the violence and oppression that seems to run rampant, without losing ourselves to the noise and chaos?

From this discussion, Echo was born. In this edition, we explore the power of Quiet in its many forms – as inherent to nature, as a tool of oppression, as germination for creativity, as a facade of security. Simultaneously explored (and often intertwined) is Outcry, rising from a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a refusal to be silenced. Outcry is a renewal of the term “feminine rage,” which has been frequently overused and lost its vigor as a result. Together, the two phonic themes – Quiet and Outcry – interact to create resonance, reverberation, and harmony. In other words, an Echo.

Echo is a reminder to slow down in a fast moving world. What can the legacies of intersectional feminists before us tell us about how to move forward? What can our own stories and experiences tell us about our individual and collective identities? Echo is an affirmation of voices both quiet and loud, but most of all an encouragement to listen. We invite you, dear reader, to consider the echoes that surround you– what do you hear?

With love,

Eda Gokdemir, Samantha Kang & Maggie Emerson

25W Writing Leads

2024 spare rib mission statement

The Spare Rib newspaper was first published in 1992 to highlight women’s accomplishments and persisting problems in the two decades following co-education at Dartmouth. For reasons we are still working to discover, the original Spare Rib went out of print after a few years. Thirty years later, our goal reflects a movement that has evolved considerably since 1995. We are re-establishing Spare Rib to discuss struggles, achievements, and history of people and places beyond the center, hindered (but not constrained) by racism, classism, sexism and further means of oppression, through analysis, humor, and critique. Our struggles deserve recognition, our perspectives deserve to be voiced, and our strengths deserve to be celebrated.

the name “spare rib”

As written in the second chapter of Genesis, God took a rib from Adam, the first man, and from it fashioned Eve, the first woman, to serve as his companion. We propose a different origin story, in which no one is merely a piece of flesh, secondthought, servile, or spare.

statement against colonial exploitation

In accordance with Spare Rib’s values and mission, we want to bring attention to the land on which we stand, its history, and its original peoples. More than a land acknowledgement, this is a statement against a historical injustice. This is a historical demand and a material necessity that has been brewing for over five centuries. Dartmouth College is a settler-colonial, patriarchal, bourgeois institution, founded on the eve of the American revolution. It is thus profoundly entangled with the settler-colonial project. This institution stands on unceded, continually-occupied Abenaki territory and within the wider Turtle Island, lands currently under the violent, fascistic military occupation of the Euro-American settler regime. These lands have seen genocide, warfare, and plagues, which have decimated most of its original inhabitants. They have seen treaties ignored and broken, cultures and languages forcibly erased, and entire populations displaced. Indigenous peoples remain here, standing proud and resolute, in love, community, and joy, awaiting the new dawn to come.

Now more than ever, Spare Rib assumes the historical duty to stand in solidarity and dedicate ourselves to a genuine end of colonial injustice. Spare Rib stands for a return of the land, people’s government, and Indigenous self-determination. This statement is a new beginning for our efforts for Indigenous justice and autonomy — this is not the end. As we move forward, we devote ou selves to a future of collective liberation for all oppressed peoples.

land

acknowledgement

Spare Rib was created by students at Dartmouth College, a school built on unceded Abenaki land that, to this day, prospers off of Indigenous trauma. Settler-colonial exploitation is ongoing, complex, and dama ing to all, and Spare Rib aims to acknowledge the privileges and exploitation we take part in within society—devoting ourselves to honoring Indigenous peoples and allies around the world that fought and co tinue to fight for a more equitable and inclusive future. We will continue to voice our support and encourage others to educate themselves and learn about Indigenous issues and identities.

disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in Spare Rib are those of individual authors and not necessarily reflective of the zine, writers, or staff as a whole, nor represented as wholly complete or correct information, nor intended to disparage any group or individual.

IDOL WORSHIP IDOL WORSHIP

By: Angela Zhang

by: Geena San Diego

It was the summer before college began, that magical summer of no responsibilities and no directions, when I went hiking up a mountain with Nina. I was fond of neither hiking nor mountains, but she was fond of both, so there I was, climbing stairs amidst a stream of people, panting, sweating, complaining.

Te pictures Nina sent me before the hike depicted deserted bridges, waterfalls shrouded in mist, trees and vines hanging over a girl reading against a stone wall, a perfect tranquil utopia. I had listened to her excited voice messages and knew that this mountain was too big of a tourist attraction to be anything like that. I was right. People crowded every walkway and platform. At every available corner, there were merchants selling souvenirs, food, and overpriced boat tickets. Groups of men stood at every turn, ofering to carry tourists up the mountain in makeshift carriages made of bamboo sticks with cushions between them. But Nina was undeterred in her endless joy.

Design by: Ella Grim

I didn’t really like looking at maps. I had a very poor sense of direction. I looked at them to be prepared for our trips, so I could adjust my expectations and reactions to the day’s events in a properly pleasing way.

Te map showed a hike that was not very long or very steep, perhaps two hours to reach the top. Tere were small temples and sheds along the way, but the real attraction of the hike was the daoguan at the top of the mountain. It was a famous Daoist temple in the region with beautiful architecture that attracted visitors from all around the country. Behind the temple, there was also a platform to look at the view and take pictures.

She lived a dazzling life, and I was the spectator.

“I’m so happy we’re doing this,” she said, turning to look at me with sparkling eyes. “I’ve missed hanging out with you. We’ve been too busy lately with graduation exams and all that.”

Te sincere radiance in her smile sent a futter through my stomach, and I replied with a stilted expression of gratitude at her presence. I had never been good at open expressions of a fection. I turned away, searching for something else to talk about, and spotted a map at the edge of the small plaza we were standing in.

“Let’s go look at the map,” I said. “I want to see how much I have to hike.”

Nina cast a sideways glance at me, grinning. “ Tat’s so you. Looking at maps wherever we go.”

Suitably prepared, we began the hike up the mountain. It was nice, I had to admit, despite all the people. It was cooler there among the trees than in the city, and that summer had been unprecedentedly swelteringly hot. I had spent all my time indoors, carrying out the same rote routine of waking up at noon, spending countless meaningless hours scrolling online, and then falling asleep again at an obscenely late hour. Nina, on the other hand, seemed to have had a wonderfully exciting summer.

She carried out an endless stream of chatter as we walked up the stairs, careful to not slip on the moist moss. She told me about her time in her home city by the coast, how she spent her time going to the beach with her family, browsing vintage markets for articles of clothing and jewelry that she found for abnormally low prices and somehow all worked together in an efortless style that I could never achieve, and talking to random people she met in bookstores, who just so happened to all have the most interesting life stories. It was always like this

Art

with her. She lived a dazzling life, and I was the spectator.

She pulled out her phone at some point to show me the niche indie band with the weird name that she was obsessed with at the moment. She told me about their interviews and sent me their songs. She had never expected me to actually listen to the songs that she sent me, but I had saved each one of them religiously to my library. I was always looking for things like that, songs and books and movies that she liked that I could like too.

When we walked a little further, Nina suggested that we should take a break and drink some water. Tere were no benches or sheds visible anywhere nearby, so she sat down at the edge of the path, shielding her eyes as she looked up at me through the blinding sunlight. We had stayed like that for a while, not quite looking at anything in particular, when Nina spoke.

“Have you been talking to anyone from your college?”

“I’ve been texting some other freshmen,” I said. I had been messaging some other students from my region who were also going to my school. But with none of them had I found that magical feeling of instant connection. Te sort of connection I found with Nina. I hastily changed the subject of the conversation away from my pathetic inability to be socially likable.

“What about you?”

“I’ve been talking to someone online. A girl from my college. I found her on Instagram, and I’ve been talking to her a lot these past few weeks.”

I looked at her, immediately interested. “What’s she like?”

Nina glanced away, but I caught the way the edges of her lips turned up and brought a warm sparkle into her eyes.

“She’s amazing,” Nina said wistfully. “I’ve never met someone who I could just talk to like that, so easily and so soon. I feel like I can tell her anything. I’ve told her so much already, and I haven’t even met her.”

Something rose in my chest, hot and sharp and uncomfortable. What did she mean? She had never met someone else like that? I was the one who had been here, all this time. Te idea

of her being so close to someone else su focated me. I should have been enough for her.

“Tat’s really nice,” I told her, grappling for something that would be supportive. With a sort of masochistic desperation, I probed a little further. “I’m glad you’ve already found a friend like that at college.”

“I’m hoping she won’t just be a friend,” Nina responded after a moment of hesitation, smiling shyly.

“How could you even know? You haven’t met her,” I f inched internally at the spite that I accidentally exposed. I hastily added, “It’s just that, it’s so hard to tell sometimes, what that liminal space between female friendship and romantic attraction is.”

Nina tilted her head, contemplative. She always liked theoretical questions dissecting some aspect of human connection.

“I suppose you’re right. It’s hard to tell. Tere’s some sort of special feeling, although I can’t describe it,” she said. “I like to use the hand-holding rule. I think about whether I would like to hold their hand, and if I do, I consider it to be more romantic.”

I looked down at Nina and thought about whether I would like to hold her hand. She was leaning back and resting on her hands, one leg stretched out in front of her. With her body slightly curled up like that, I felt an impulsive need to bend down, cover her body with mine, and kiss her.

I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I looked away and told her that we should be on our way.

After mounting one fnal steep and long f ight of stairs, we fnally arrived at the daoguan that marked the top of the mountain. We passed through a looming archway carved into a gold-painted wall lined with mahogany beams, the temple’s name written on a wooden plaque hanging over the doorway.

We were standing in a clearing with the viewing deck to one side and another short f ight of stairs leading up to the temple to the other. We went to the viewing deck frst so we could save the temple for the last stop on this trip. She had been looking forward to this all day, ready to be dazzled. Te view was impressive, to be sure. Miles of trees stretched

in front of us, a dark green carpet lining the rise and fall of the mountain range.

Nina and I sat there for a while on one of the long benches reserved for tourists admiring the view.

“A view like this makes me understand why so many Chinese poems and paintings depict mountains,” she said. “Tere’s a kind of serenity here that you can’t access anywhere else.”

“Do you feel inspired?” I asked with a sardonic half-smile.

“Oh yes. I have an idea for my next poem already.”

I looked at the trees and tried to feel some semblance of Nina’s inspiration. God knows I needed to start doing some creative writing again. of a life with no original creation was beginning to frighten me.

But I already knew that this would be useless. I was not a person who had ever been impressed by natural scenery. I would see pictures of places like this online and think, “Surely, if I see this place in person, I would feel a greater sense of awe at the physical grandeur.” But when I got to the place, the scenery was just an image. I saw it, my brain documented it, and then I was ready to move on, no strong emotion stirred.

It gave me a sense of nihilism, my inability to channel intense reactions to nature that might result in some sort of creative awakening. thing that made me less grounded and connected to the world around me, less real than her.

“Do you ever think about how we won’t be able to say something like this anymore when we go to college in the U.S.?” Nina asked, interrupting my thoughts. “We won’t be able to casually make references to Chinese culture and art and assume everyone listening would already know what we’re talking about.”

“Adjusting to cultural di ferences would certainly be a struggle,” I acknowledged. “But I think there’s something to be said about the value of diversity of mind. And who knows, maybe I’ll appreciate Chinese culture more when it becomes my unique, special “But that’s just it, what I’m worried about. Our high school is so un-diverse. Everyone shares such a unique cultural experience and the mindset that comes with f into the distance, seeking an answer between the valley and the at’s true, I suppose,” I echoed. I was aware that I was just repeating what she said, but that was the easiest way to contribute something appropriately relevant and intelligent to the conversation. t into either side, Chinese or American.”

“It’s not even just that. Our high school is such a unique mix of Chinese and American, public and private, that I also don’t fully relate to other international students. I don’t fully know how to describe it.”

But I knew exactly what she meant. “ Tey’re either too American, with all

their energy and overbearing wholesomeness, or they’re too Chinese in the way they think about the world. Tere’s an apathy to matters that don’t concern themselves, a lack of radicalism in politics that we assume as the basis of every interaction in our high school.”

Nina beamed and told me that was exactly what she meant, that she was so glad I understood. Moments like this made me wonder whether Nina might just be a friend to me after all. We understood each other in a way no one else could, understood the feelings and impressions that weren’t always able to be clearly articulated. in a conversation like this with her, wrapped up in the intimacy of it all, I wondered what the di would even be between romance and what we already had.

Fully rested and ready to keep exploring, we left the platform and entered the gates of the daoguan. We were standing in a small paved clearing in the center of the temple. Open corridors ran along the sides of the clearing, lined with black wooden benches and maroon columns. On the side of the corridors, I could see more passageways leading of into buildings where the monks studied, lived, and prayed. Two stone wishing pools and potted plants stood in the corners, the sunlight sparking of the coins covering the bottom of the tubs. T

vendors too, selling refreshments and souvenirs from their carts.

In front of us was the central temple, where visitors went to pay their respects to a slew of Daoist deities. Another f ight of stairs led to the imposing gate fanked by a pair of stone lions. Te structure had several layers, each with slanted black clay tile roofs that formed a tower.

Nina and I climbed up the stone steps and arrived at the temple’s gates; a wooden step was laid across the threshold. I stepped in, right rst on the right side of the gate, while Nina did the opposite on the left side. It was thought to be disrespectful to the gods to go in through the center. e chamber we entered into was suitably grand for a temple so e high, vaulted ceilings were painted in all sorts of colors and decorated with drawings of dragons. Two stone carts stood on either side of the chamber, lled with ashes and burntout incense sticks. In the middle of the temple, a row of Daoist deity statues lled a glass case that lined the back wall of the room. Tey were decked in gold, glaring imposingly down at us.

Nina and I went to a small table in the corner to take two incense sticks and light them in the lanterns beside the tables. We then joined the lines of people waiting to pray. It took us a while to get to the front of the line, and my incense stick was half burnt already. Kneeling on the cushion in front of one of the statues, I began the customary motion of clasping the stick between my palms

and bending forward so my forehead touched the cushion.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was wearing a hat. Was I allowed to wear a hat while praying? I vaguely remembered an adult telling me that was impolite. And the incense was almost entirely burnt. What if the fame reached my fngers before I fnished praying? Was I even praying in the right way?

From the corner of my eyes, I saw the person who had stepped up to pray at the same time I did stand up to leave. I hadn’t begun making wishes, but I didn’t want to take up this slot any longer and embarrass myself in front of everyone in line behind me. It probably didn’t matter. I wasn’t a Daoist. I doubted most people in the temple were Daoist. Nothing I was doing or thinking mattered that much.

I stepped back from the altar and joined Nina in the center of the chamber. We stood there for a moment, taking it all in. Everywhere around us were hushed whispers and bent forms; some monks hurried in a procession through the temple, holding books and heading to their duties. Two fake gold trees stood, with small, wooden, heart-shaped plaques hanging from the branches on which people write down their hopes and ambitions. Te eyes of the saints watched us from every angle, embedded in statues that were put on stands all around the room.

To distract myself, I stared at the red prayer cards hanging from the trees, the concreteness of the desires written on them a direct contrast to my jumbled yearning. It was a special kind of cognitive dissonance, feeling so much about the same interactions that the other felt nothing about. Our connection was real; all the deities were there to witness it. So why was it that I was being burnt alive while she just stood there, cool and oblivious? Perhaps she was just better than me. Perhaps there was nothing there at

On the way down the mountain, I decided is was the last time I would see her before college started; I would have plenty of distance from her. Besides, all the melodrama in my head was probably just delusions. Nina was just an extremely close friend at a time when I was wading through the mire of my sexuality. I was ready for new, frmer

Nina reached out suddenly and grabbed my hand, saying something about a spiritual experience. I didn’t hear what she was saying; every inch of skin in contact with her burned, and the fames traveled through my whole body. Te feelings her hand ignited in me felt improper under the inquisitive stare of the saints. Tey felt wrong in this space, too raw and exposed. But of course, it couldn’t truly be that inappropriate because Nina felt none of these things as she threaded her fngers through mine.

By the time we reached the hotel, I had solidly made up my mind. Later that night, we laid next to each other, bodies pressed together, watching a movie on my laptop. When she clutched my arm at the climax, I felt no stirring in my chest. I was so happy about this that when the movie ended, I turned to Nina and gave her a list of things I appreciated about our friendship, all the ways I grew and all the things I only managed to endure because she was there. Her eyes were sparkly by the end, and she hugged me and told me that she would miss me enormously in college.

I went to sleep that night serene, thinking of my upcoming college life instead of her. But she came to me anyway in my dream. She stood a little distance away, with her back facing me. Phantom winds lifted her hair and whipped it around, and her shoulders shook with laughter. I tried to move forward, reach her, and still those shoulders, but I was stuck in place. Ten she was gone. I was left standing in the middle of a circle of idol statues, spinning, laughing, swallowing me whole.

sink — after Ariel

By: Anna Costello

by: Peiwei Ha

by: Lauren Kang

is there peace for Sylvia at the bottom of the Connecticut? all that kicking and fighting just to pass through time, thrashing in aerated water why not walk barefoot, heel-toe on the blue stripe let go to that white tile paranoia — in her nightgown moves from room to room, looking up at the white lights

there is that night sky on I-89 like an overhead bridge, a respite between rains maybe the cold would purge it out of her, a lingering wet cough — still the latex odor clings she holds up two lungs and an eye, round pearl in one palm, the other over her belly — still more to go, more to go

the water fills her wound like a chlorine pool in June, she marries it with stitches and waits for you and another scalpel. a surgical theater, a house in the woods, a house of her own takes on water in long, delicate veins that trickle under the door.

Art

Design

some romantic confessional

by: Avery Lin

art by: Sam Kang design by: Rachel Roncka

As a preface you might understand that my conceptualization of life has been historically framed by novels and mediated through a distorted window-pane; that I (used to?) primly shuffle between collegiate rooms with collared clothing and grandiose baggage, anxiously participating in classrooms thriving on simulated energy sustained by a fallacious faith in authenticity soured, still, by a lurking suspicion in the false promise of the academic haven, in the contentious theory of this lightweight ‘suffering’ as a cruel perversion of the truer more life-affirming thing; and even feelings seemed to exist primarily in the crude realm of the intellectual, the impressions of subjects in bleary Impressionist paintings, caught in the sieve of a privilege-shaped rationalism stunted at the altar of getting sh*t done.

As a story:

the way I thought that maybe I wasn’t destined designed for romance until one day I, or perhaps my incurably conditioned psyche glimpsed a hackneyed hope (I cannot exaggerate how reassuring this was) in a nonchalant guy’s charming idiosyncrasies and endearing neuroses embalmed in diagnosable masculinity, activating some pathological submissive disposition married to unwilled coquetry enacting coded behaviors for which

I’d once fancied myself too unsocialized like sprawl out (performatively?) in his lap take a childish fistful of his shirt and pleasure in pleasing bite the flesh of my lip idolize his opaque mind but tease, gently, cushioned by apology emphasis on the joke (just kidding!)

lovingly scheme of ways I can slide the gift of my female personal validation in his lap say that his troubled genius is authentic and that I see the emotional underbelly beneath his acerbic airs;

that he doesn’t have to explain himself to me (I’ll do the talking!) that he will never know how gratifying (is this deliverance?) it feels to be the abstract object of his substance-enhanced attentions.

How fulfilling it had felt to say, with simpering affection, how impossible it is to hold anger (it dissolves…my laughter is placating, trivializing, effacing) when I intimately know the blissful innocence of his intentions, the casual thoughtlessness of his carelessness…

I am ashamed to confess that under cover of sleeplessness that first year away, determined to bloom/get unstuck I nurtured the seed of the shallow thought that it will all be worth it when, fortified with a degree like a shot, I clutch an imperfect child absorb by glimmering osmosis the wonder of life tacitly affirmed by witness of his adoring gaze (I am always arranging my face); and then I will have something non-cliché, humbly self-referential yet proudly alien to call my own; something other than two-faced writing and indulgent thoughts, exorcizing the guilt of my materialistic attachments.

And then I might finally feel as though life had not passed me by, stroking the palm of domestic bliss…

I think I want the noble irresponsibility validated by exhaustion born by the unselfish purposefulness of a life outside of my own:

I want to do less yet be incontestably more, to outgrow this tenuously sculpted female egoism sustained by flaky visions of self-fulfillment materialized by calculated assiduousness and creative thirst, of uncontrived individuality and inherent selfhood…

I know that I should be thinking about more than grades when note-taking, about more than establishing self-image when parading around and personality in non-capitalist terms; that writing should be more about cutting through bullshit and less about framing self-reflection in an empowering and palatable way;

That I should be propelled by some self-conviction divorced from the prosaic hope that my lovable humanity may be validated by my loving him without

condition or circumstance, dazzled by the glare of the theoretical ‘forever’; that I will be the first line of defense for him and his rich psychological crises that haunt a wilder, more poetic tundra than mine.

I know that I should feel less assured by the thought that when I walk around feeling chronically displaced, comically frazzled privately preoccupied with my shoes and jacket and all the materialistic things filling my room, wondering whether my twisted priorities are just run-of-the-mill girl stuff, that there’s a precedent and theory for all of it:

––had I once confused loneliness with independence?

Yet sometimes I cede, more happily than indifferently, too much power to this hackneyed vision of assuaging his insecurities on the armchair I chose, drying my hands on a couture dishcloth and padding demurely in slippers, tending to something important ––

So as an afterword: one day I may let my eyes rest strip down all the flowery prose spool out something like pride, hold it up to some artificial light and laugh at the pretentiousness, at this vampiric impulse to narrativize and simply bask, artfully unmoored, in the covert delight of saying anything at all.

Quiet!

Art by: Lilla Bozek

Design by: Lauren Kang

Quiet adjective /´kwīǝt/

To be known / is to have your silence / cremated, decided, half-kindled & / thin / relentless fire under skin / stony, formational / urn all marble. This corpse-note, these ashes / whisper / “come home.” / Perhaps the burning / will calm / the plume of our asouls. What do we know / of the flame that chose / this fleshy hearth? / Only that to be / cleansed of sin is to be / eternal. The matchstick looms / hot and heavy / on the heels of this / relational calm. / We are dead / quiet / & forever hypostatic.

By: Saturn Guo

By:S:SaturnGuo,RacachelRonconckaka,AnnnnaCostelstello,Ao, ,AditditiSiningh,anh,andSdSamKanang

To them you are quiet. This is a flaw. But then if you react with anything less than the expected level of deference — which is what branded you as quiet in the first place — you are suddenly aggressive. Overreacting. Abnormal. An unwelcome surprise.

Now that word ignites something in you everytime you hear it. You flare up at innocent remarks, the slightest of suggestions Can trigger a landslide of memories

How many times have you been talked over?

Tentative words met with no response? Are you really quiet — or are they just not listening? Silence is learned. Taught. Imposed.

You try to trace it back. How did you arrive here? You became so used to someone speaking for you. Volunteering an opinion for you before you even had a chance to form one.

Perhaps your voice is quiet (an anatomical consequence that you can’t control) But your mind is anything but. Half-formed thoughts not fit for speech Reverberating within your skull.

If you unleashed all the noise contained within It would deafen the world

A sonic wave swallowing the planet whole. If only they knew what you were sparing them from.

Maybe it is not your nature

But you are learning to shout above To demand to be heard

And not care how surprising it is

By: Rachel Roncka

the hotel air conditioner sounds like I’ll be gone in a day or two

the fan in a Marriott grumbles along to the same eighties line it sings dutifully to all of the bodies here, marked by an anonymous stain, poking spring and

pre-wedding excitement waterfalls over the balcony — sleep is always better lulled by distant voices late at night

how many shapes remain pressed into soft fibers in the tulle of a dress? or an old mattress worn and welcoming by limbs laid over limbs for blurry eyes for a moment — the time is just red is that life or only the dizziness of morning?

if we carry on knowing everything soon we will not know what we dreamed about, or what white shadows briefly held us in the dark

By: Anna Costello

Weeds

It doesn’t feel right to let my mind explode all over the paper like so — colors slipping through my cramped

awakening pine-needle kisses, kind and wispy whisper the stories of centuries of love and exploration and beauty. wet dew-drop mornings encased in soft earth pass through crevices in sandpaper fingers, a lover’s tender grasp, filling the space as easily as the fog masks the river’s reflection.

the dirt would breathe in my lungs, loved like the quiet air

evaporating into crisp conifers and their thick, camellias stretching roots deep into clavicles, merging with tired veins

with the petaled promises of unfettered, unapologetic

once jaded garnet blood becomes rainwater and liquid sunlight the inside of my body is no longer foreign. instead, it smells of the rich morning mist, fresh grass scent overlaying warm sunflower faces and the sound of absolute tranquility —

i am a girl made of paper & plastic my arms trophies my torso a shuffle of transcripts and résumés

[I am pleased to submit my résumé for the] spilling out like entrails

[p]

[Dartmouth] [I excel]

[a][c] [e] [d]

[e n v i r o n m e n t s]

[experience in many] [A]

on the f l o o r. tape me up so all that precious worth doesn’t spill out bright red, screaming, LOOK LOOK LOOK IT WAS ALL WORTH IT because you’re here now.

and my head stuffed to the brim with that

rat race culture screaming GO GO GO IT WILL ALL BE WORTH IT because it has to be eventually.

i like to think that it’s getting better. because i am okay with [B+] instead of [A] some of the time it is okay to lose some of that worth for my own happiness

i won’t cringe when i see someone splayed guts and all on the operating room table

but i will vomit hands shaking when I (don’t) finish that test or don’t get [A] because i could have

to take care of too riddled with anxiety every thought sharp and AM STILL THE BITCH OF ACADEMIA. even though i pretend to be

A feminist Independent Mature Better

i am still that shiny product shipped from somewhere foreign ( but inside just stuffed with papers and fucking

i am melting embers at the edges. this priceless product that is my brain is damaged

a girl made of paper & plastic cannot live only survive.

Playlist Echo

Solitarium

Her flashlight is dead, and there is no way to tell how long ago that happened - months, years, decades even. There is nothing to see, no way to tell days from nights. Food is getting harder to find. No more of her time could be dedicated to searching for a way out. She didn’t feel hungry, that feeling had passed long ago, yet logically she knows she has to eat. Logically, she knows she should be afraid of death, but that fear escapes her. She focuses on making her life comfortable. She spends her days crafting as comfortable a home as she can, sweeping dust into a nest that she pads with scraps from her hiking backpack. This feels wrong as well; there is nothing that will fill the empty pit within her. Who is she performing this homemaking for? Is it truly for herself in this moment, or does she miss the routine of a life that felt eons away? Those are questions she feels too tired to answer. They were for another day. She would have plenty of time. Nestling down in her new bed, she traces the skin that was once kissed and warmed by the sun. It feels different now.

By: ElliE AppElgrEn

Art By: lilliA HAmmond

dEsign

By: lAylA CHArron

Passage to passage she wanders, guided by the weak beam of her flashlight. Water drips around her, slowly making its journey down the stalactite and to the cave floor where it is doomed to sit for centuries until some unlucky accidental carelessly stomps it away in a haze of panic and fear. She is not supposed to be here. In this moment, she is acutely aware of her position. Her palms sweaty, cold to the touch in the cave air. But there is no one there to touch her. No one to hear her heavy panting, no one to console her. She is utterly alone. Not the false sense of loneliness she felt while walking down the street, when eyes followed her, caressing every inch of her body. There is no one.

She walks down the street. Earbuds in, sunglasses on, iced coffee in hand that every so often drips condensation on her flip-flopped foot, shocking her even though she’s come to expect it. She focuses intently on the things within her control, trying to block out the looks pointed her way. Her head is on a swivel and soon she notices a figure, face hidden by a baseball cap, behind her. She begins to pick up her pace, trying to put as much distance between her and this stranger. He yells to her, a lewd comment about her legs, or her breasts, or her mouth, or any visible part of her. She turns to yell, to fight, to defend herself, but there were too many of them. He had multiplied, different forms splitting off from each other into one indistinguishable mass of words. Ripping control over her body back, she took off down the busy city sidewalk, stumbling over herself.

She wakes suddenly, head cloudy, and tries to open her eyes. Her eyelids stretch, but they do not open. Panicking, she draws her fingers up to graze the spot where her eyes once were. An empty divot is all that is left. She caresses her body, fearful of whatever other changes she would find. Dragging her fingers down her arms, she recognizes them not as her own. They are thin and spindly, extending down past her knees. Standing, her legs bring her higher than they ever had before so that she has to crouch to fit under the low hanging, gravelly ceiling. Bile creeps up her throat, fighting for a way out, but she swallows it down, burning as it goes back to where it belongs. She shrieks a guttural yelp and begins to tug on her skin, trying to pull it away from herself. There is nothing she can do. This is who she is. Pale, eyeless, hunched, hideous.

Her body has become less foreign. Her legs carry her the streams from which she drinks, her fingers snatch up beetles, her organs still help her live. This body is no longer a source of fear. It shows her strength. She was not swallowed whole by this cave. She fought back, carving a space for herself within this darkness. This body is proof of that. Eyes would never again grace or mar her skin. She would never again be corrupted by the thoughts or judgements of others. Her body is her peace. It is wholly her own.

Intergenerational Dreaming

after Langston Hughes

by anonymous art & design by yawen xue

Te amo hija

i can’t help but think about how you gave up your dreams, to

Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.

Mold my wings. I take all Your dreams with me, Lucha por tus sueños.

Unf orgotten. They lay safe in my arms; I will make sure to bring them to life. Tú puedes hija.

Birth them into existence.

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

By: Grace Lee Art/Design by: Grace Lee

We saw him for the first time that day, Shrouded in a sea of green, His golden locks in the sunlight, so yellow, so bright.

We watched him, the other nymphs and I, The ends of our peplos peeping out—if he peered closely enough.

Some of us hid in our trees, others, from in between the flowers and leaves.

He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer. He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer.

But he didn’t that day, he didn’t ever. He strutted into the forest with a boar slung over his shoulders, Clothes clinging to his back, his clothes, a muddy red.

We got the closest we could, crept closer each step he took.

He would’ve heard us, if he looked closer. He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer.

But he didn’t that day, he didn’t ever. We watched as he laid down the boar on the green summer grass, We thought it was ours, a gift, a thanks for the earth.

When the glint of the axe shone bright high in the air, it was too late.

He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer. He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer.

He did, he saw us, kept chopping all the same. Each tree branch, each nymph, halved in two, Split right down the middle, between the eyes. The trees, the leaves, the branches, all gone, all gone.

He would’ve heard us, if he looked closer. He would’ve heard us, if he looked closer.

That night, the rest of us crept out.

A rope of daisy-chains and twisted tree vines, Dragged him out to the pond, Came back the next morning.

He would’ve seen us, if he looked closer. He would’ve seen us, if he could look closer.

But no one saw us, no one heard us.

Told everyone he’d fallen into the pond, fallen in love with himself.

Who could say otherwise?

After all, it’s not like I can say anything.

It’s not like I can say anything.

This poem reimagines the classic Greek myth about Narcissus falling in love with his reflection. In the original tale, though, a nymph called Echo falls in love with Narcissus but is cursed to only repeat what others say without being able to say anything original of her . Here, Echo and the other nymphs here reclaim the tale—when Narcissus trespasses into their forest and begins hacking away at the trees, they plot revenge—and of course, no one expects Echo to be able to say anything.

the in-between

By: Claire Kovac Art by: Anonymous

head between your knees in the shadows of the white plains parking garage freeways stretch ahead and behind streams of cars and silence and then streams down your cheeks when it hits out of the blue like the car you once crashed pristine to utterly wrecked in a split second

more color out of this dull gray

next door the hotel receptionists apply their makeup as they listen with wide eyes to the girls who spend their lives in the sky between because only pilots stay here

by: Ella Grim

Design

you play the game and count the colors but there are only grays no green among these yellowed weeds and smog a sick satisfaction exists in this stasis

head on your knees in the shadows of white drowning when will you fnd it within you to get up

I.The Institution

Te myth of academia promises community in the liberal arts institution: students from a wealth of backgrounds, like-minded in their intellectual curiosity, come together and learn about themselves and each other through the passionate pursuit of knowledge. University in practice falls short of this promise. While disillusionment is not uncommon in academia, it carries greater pain for women, people of color and queer people. It threatens the community that sustains the oppressed.

Dartmouth College functions as a corporate institution. Te community that this institution promotes — the coinciding, but ultimately individual striving for excellence at all costs — is antithetical to community as a supportive network, a lifeline, a collective. Meaningful community, community in which solidarity is possible, must be rooted in what belle hooks characterizes as “interests, shared beliefs, and goals around which to unite.”1 In the corporation-controlled private university, unity under shared goals is not possible. Trough the expectation of “academic excellence,” the institution promotes competition and divides common interest.

It is one thing to acknowledge the institution of the university, especially the private university, as incapable of promoting collective good and unity; it is another thing to fnd that it never actually claims to do so. In reality, Dartmouth College’s mission is geared towards “educating the most promising students and preparing them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.”2 Tere is no promise of community, other than the intellectual community, which is hardly a community at all. Te promise is to our benefactors, that the institution will produce leaders that will return on their investments.

Our motto, “vox clamantis in deserto,” rings true in the worst way.3 Te institution encourages individualism, but individual voices go unrecognized. Only a select few — those

who refect the excellency that Dartmouth demands through their economic capital or legacy status — are heard, let alone considered. Te feelings of isolation that persist on this small campus are symptomatic of a community that neglects care in favor of optimization.

By and large, the students of Dartmouth College adopt the attitudes of the institution. Tey are taught to care about one another, in terms of what their peers possess and how they might gain from it; they are not taught to care for one another. In the same way that community is thought of narrowly (i.e. existing at Dartmouth is sufcient engagement with the community), alternative conceptions of power, such as the creative and life-afrming power that might challenge traditional patriarchal systems, are dismissed by the institution.4 Students are equipped to become powerful, in the traditional sense of power as domination and control.

Tis erasure of value conceived outside of traditional structures of power is harmful to every person who strives to succeed by traditional means. Dartmouth’s expectation of excellence is meaningless as a metric of success.

By:

Voices With Artby:RachelRoncka

In a 2017 linguistic study about the prominence of the word “excellence” in academia, researchers Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, and Damian Pattinson determined that “‘excellence’ is primarily a rhetorical signaling device used to claim value across heterogeneous institutions, researchers, disciplines, and projects rather than a measure of intrinsic and objective worth.”5 Te emphasis on heterogeneity is particularly notable; diference and inequality are prerequisites for excellence in the academy. Te goals of students as “leaders” must be achieved at the expense of their peers.

Even worse is the harm for those who attempt to participate in this traditional power structure while having an identity historically disenfranchised by power systems. As belle hooks theorizes in Feminist Teory: From Margin to Center regarding white feminists of the 1970s, marginalized identities can use institutional power to gain purchase in larger spheres, but only through “embracing, supporting, and perpetuating the dominant ideology of the culture,” which continues to oppress them. Tis is the paradoxical

hout an Ech o

Designby:EllaGrim

problem with cultivating community with the shared goal of individual excellence. While a marginalized person may attain traditional success through corporate institutions like Dartmouth, the systematic harm persists. Tey are told that their success in using the master’s tools is the rule and not the exception.6

II.The Resistant Collective

To reduce the harms of the corporate institution, we must reject excellence and turn our attention to a collective struggle for autonomy, justice, and safety. When feeling the pressures of the institution, we turn to each other. Te creative power that comes from the collective challenges the oppression we face as we’re made to feel individual, isolated, and worst of all, invisible. Farnush Ghadery, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Rohini Sen detail this acute sensation within academia, stating that “neoliberalism [in the university] forces us into an isolationist, individualist conception of labour where structural inequality is made invisible and a politics of care untenable.”7

Citations

[1]bell hooks, Feminist Teory: From Margin to Center, (South End Press, 2000), 67.

[2]Dartmouth College, “About,” Dartmouth, 2024, https://home.dartmouth.edu/about.

[3]Jonathan Good, “Notes from the Special Collection: Te Dartmouth College Seal,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 37, no. 2, April 1997, https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/Library_Bulletin/Apr1997/Good.html.

[4]hooks, Feminist Teory: From Margin to Center, 87.

[5]Samuel Moore et al., ““Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3, no. 16105 (July 2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105.

[6]Audre Lorde, “Te Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series), (Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2007), 110-114.

[7]Farnush Ghadery, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, and Rohini Sen, “Collaborative Praxis: Unbinding Neoliberal Tethers of Academia,” Feminista, May 6, 2021, https://feministajournal.com/collaborative-praxis-unbinding-neoliberal-tethers-of-academia/.

Noelle Blake

Whispers Through the Glass

B By: Soraya Fonseca / Art by: Anonymous

Content Warning: depression, ED, body dysmorphia

The sky is brighter here. I can feel the weight lifted off my shoulders. Outside, the cold is working overtime to remind me that I’m no longer in the steamy depths of Alabama.

September 2015

Mamí came today.

I was sitting in the auditorium and I heard my name. I knew it was coming but I was struck with the sudden urge to throw up. I didn’t want to walk up there with my head down and shake everyone’s hand and receive my award for whatever it was I did. I was embarrassed that I didn’t have someone to cheer for me. I sunk deeper into my seat. But I knew that everyone around me was whispering, so I gingerly trudged up the stairs. As soon as I was finally able to walk down the steps, face blazing hot, I decided to stare down the crowd. I knew what they were thinking. What is she doing up there? She knows she doesn’t belong.

As I wondered for probably the hundredth time why my family wasn’t here to defend me, I noticed a figure standing in the back. I almost didn’t see because the person was standing in the far back, beside the double doors. But I would know her anywhere. I saw her and my heart started pounding. She waved and I smiled so hard my cheeks felt like they would burst. She actually came to see me! I was too overwhelmed to respond so I forced my feet to keep moving – right back to my seat.

I was buzzing in my seat. Throughout the rest of the program, I kept turning around to see Mamí, to make

I hate when it rains. Rain means something bad will happen. It comes as no surprise that on the morning of that Saturday in May, it was storming outside.

I woke up to the sound of tree branches dancing against my window. Dark figures lingered over my bedroom walls, threatening me with phantoms of my past. I didn’t get a chance to decide whether I wanted to sleep in because images from last night quickly flooded my mind.

I saw Mamá, sitting at the dinner table, expertly avoiding my eye. The empty seat at the head of the table meant that Papá was working late today. It was just the two of us, like old times. However, we both realized that things had changed. Neither of us understood when it happened –from one day to the next, I wasn’t “Sory la Princesa” anymore. I was okay with that, I promised myself. She wasn’t the hero I would look for in the crowds anymore.

We were having molé for dinner. I hoped Mamá remembered it was my favorite – maybe she did care about me. Mamá asked me whether I had finished my homework and when I was going to clean my room and if I wanted more food. As usual, I was only half-listening to her. I made sure to nod at the right moments and say just enough that she wouldn’t get suspicious. Then, she asked if I spoke to her today.

My breath caught in my throat. The words clawed at my tongue, begging me to keep my mouth shut. My critters in my chest accelerated my heart to an alarming rate. I wanted to be quiet – I tried to be quiet. We were having a normal dinner for once. But, of course, she knew what she was doing.

This was it. I was retiring my role of the “perfect daughter.” She didn’t deserve it, not anymore. Maybe it was because I was tired of constantly parroting back responses I knew she wanted or maybe it was because I was tired of her draining all my energy. I answered the only way I could.

My voice, strained from inactivity, suddenly rose in volume. I did nothing to control myself. I shouted “Yes, as a matter of fact I did talk to her!” and “There’s nothing that you can do!” and “I don’t care what you think!”

Mamá sat there calmly while my confidence soared. This was my life; she had no power over me. She couldn’t do anything.

After a couple minutes of watching me, she simply told me to sit down and finish eating. The fight in me was

Embarrassed, I escaped to my room.

I intended to stay in my room all day. I was not going to apologize for what I said last night. Still, I feared what Mamá would do. I feared her telling Papá. He was hard as stone, and unforgiving to a fault.

I decided to make myself busy with schoolwork. From previous experience, I expected that Mamá would advise everyone to keep out of my room. After a while of sitting in silence, I heard footsteps coming. A voice I recognized quickly echoed out that dinner was ready. This time, I was uneasy about joining her by myself.

In spite of that, I decided to try again. Upon opening my door, I could hear voices in the dining room. I sighed a breath of relief. I wanted to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, so I tiptoed my way toward the fragrant smells of fresh cilantro and pollo guisado.

With every step, the voices were getting louder. I could hear Mamá’s voice, low and desperate. Whispers of Padre Vicente and a girls camp told me everything I needed to know.

I knew she disagreed with my “lifestyle,” but I never expected Mamá to betray me like this. She couldn’t change who I was, no matter how hard she tried. I wouldn’t let her.

Some stupid part of me thought that maybe she would apologize this time. I thought she was done controlling everything about my life. Then I remembered who I was talking about.

As soon as I entered the dining room, Mamá looked at me with a smile, the same smile she usually reserves for when she runs into her old “friends” she no longer tolerates. I could tell she was going to say something I didn’t want to hear, so I braced myself.

“Hija, hemos decidido que ya no puedes ver a [Redacted]. Ella no es alguien con quien quieres que te vean.”

I didn’t get a chance to argue because the conversation was over just as soon as it started. She began passing the food across the table and that was the end of it.

I wanted to understand. I wanted to understand why she didn’t want me to be happy. [Redacted] made me happy. But I knew better than to defy the rules Mamá sets in place. That didn’t mean I could hate her any less.

August 2021

It started out slow – almost imperceptibly. I began by looking at myself in the mirror a little too long. Seconds turned into minutes. I scrutinized every angle of my body, turning this way and that. I sucked in hard, like I was feigning to be dead, to see how flat my tummy would become. Not good enough.

I started skipping breakfast, because who really wakes up at 9 in the morning? Not me. I don’t even like breakfast foods so I wasn’t missing much.

What really drove me to the edge was my mom. Our relationship had been uncomfortably cold for some time. She no longer asked my opinion on gifts when she went shopping (she made sure to always invite me to go with her because she clearly didn’t want people to talk) and she didn’t care to go to my performances at school. I became a living ghost shuffling through her house.

She would often comment on my appearance, telling me to trade in my oversized pants and long t-shirts for dresses and skirts. She started to talk about my arms and how fat my face would become if I didn’t start taking care of myself.

I don’t know if she had changed or if this was me simply seeing her for who she really was. She was mean.

I would stay awake at night thinking about the things she would say. I would wonder if she knew that her words echoed in my mind. Surely she did.

When school became harder, I became so absorbed in my academic performance that I forgot about everything else. I didn’t want to think about the nasty comments Mom would say about me, so I simply ignored everything and dedicated my days to school. I didn’t go to school lunch period because I used that time to finish up extra schoolwork. I stayed hours after school to help with elementary school programs and athletic events. I completely lost myself in it all. And I didn’t care to stop.

Of course, I didn’t even stop to see how bad things got. I started hiding food in my closet, with the proposition that I would eventually take it out and no one would notice. The snacks Mom bought me were left stashed in black garbage bags, because I didn’t know what I would do if I was tempted to eat and I saw food at my disposal. I became nose-blind to the rancid smell permeating from my small closet. And I knew I didn’t have a prob-

lem because, truly, I could stop whenever I wanted to There was nothing wrong with what I was doing.

The difficult part was dinnertime. Mom insisted on family dinner every weekday, which made my situation harder to manage. I knew I couldn’t trick her into thinking that I had eaten early dinners because she would see right through me. She knew me better than I knew myself, she always said. Thus, desperation drove me to ridiculous lengths. I started packing Ziploc bags in my pants pockets and large hoodies so I could stuff food into them as we were “eating.” I talked and talked throughout dinner as I would sneak food into the bags. If Mom found my chatter suspicious, she didn’t say.

With every day that passed, I was thrilled that I could go another day. As with any challenge, I counted how many days I could go without eating. I never called it fasting because fasting was something that happened when people had problems eating. I didn’t have a problem with food, I only wanted to control how much access I had to food. I wanted c o n t r o l.

I understood that maybe I had a problem when I realized that I avoided my friends and didn’t sleep well at night. Although my rumbling stomach excited the competition in me, I was miserable.

It wasn’t until Mom figured out that I was losing chunks of hair when she understood how everything was affecting me. I didn’t tell her how she makes me feel, though. I can’t. I don’t want to blame her – it wouldn’t change anything.

She helped me through rehabilitation and therapy. She held my hand while I had my NG tube meals. She took me shopping for clothes that I could fit into. And she helped me when I was stressed about college decisions.

Even though our relationship is and may always be complicated, we still have each other.

The brightening colors outside remind me that change carries beauty. As flowers bloom and die out, they carry traces of their lives with them. I am the breeze flowing through Hanover, as the wind has led me from Alabama to here. My journey is solely my own.

Nineteen in '64; Nineteen in'24

By: Anonymous

Art/Design

By: Ellie Appelgren

My grandma was nineteen when she got engaged. Or maybe eighteen—she doesn’t remember for sure. What she does remember is that it happened at ALDI, where she spent all her precious high school afternoons working as a cashier. After dating for four years, my grandfather finally made the big move: he got in line, loaded his groceries onto the conveyor belt, and, at the very end, placed an engagement ring. He didn’t say anything. She, on the other hand, said yes.

I knew he was wrong for me in every way, but I loved him. He was romantic, and thoughtful, and sweet. He had the most earnest pair of eyes I’d ever seen, and a sheepish grin that made my cynical heart stutter. It was the kind of love I can’t justify rationally. Maybe it was the loneliness of being back home for the summer, or the technical, inevitable collision of opposites attracting. If you’re a romantic, you could call it love at (near) first sight. As for the pessimists, you’re welcome to believe it was animal desire. All I know is that if you had felt it, you would have called it love, too.

They got married at eighteen, and had their first kid, my aunt Heather, at nineteen. She followed him to college. They had three under three. When I ask her about this time in her life, she tells me, I was a kid raising kids.

I spent a lot of this summer thinking about my grandparents’ love story. Mostly because I was handed my own on a silver platter, and I gave it up.

He was a good, southern, Catholic boy. I, on the other hand, am an aspirationally-good, culturally un-southern, and definitively not-Catholic girl. He picked flowers and gave them to me in empty Gatorade bottles. He planned dates and wrote me a love letter scented with his cologne. He complained about his Master’s program and how it meant another year before he could settle down in Charlotte and start a family. He never stopped talking about his future wife.

Sitting in the car, after he asked me to be his girlfriend, I told him that I had dated women before. I asked him what he thought about that.

I don’t blame you for having desires, he told me.

But do you blame me for acting on them?

I wouldn’t let him answer. I didn’t want to hate him.

He was making me dinner when he told me that divorce was wrong. So I told him the story of my parents. He listened as I explained that my parents’ divorce was the best thing that could have happened to me. When I was through, he stared down at the stove and decided that my parents were the exception. Not the rule.

I told my grandma about him. She was thrilled. I had found a good, twenty-something Catholic boy just like she had. When I told her that he planned to move to Charlotte after graduation, she had to hide her excitement. I’ll finally have you close to home, she said. We both knew that was never going to happen, and yet I let her imagine it. I let myself imagine it, too. Even as I fell in love, I knew it had an expiration date. I loved him, but being with him forever would have meant giving up my career, my independence, my childhood. I didn’t want to be a kid raising kids. Hell, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be an adult raising kids. I wanted New York, and a shitty job I loved, and my twenties. But some secret part of me wished for security instead. He would have taken care of me. He would have loved me. And though I know it wouldn’t have been enough, I think about how easily I could have had it. For an instant, I saw an echo of my grandmother’s life— the version where I follow him to school, marry him, have three kids on a lake in North Carolina—and I said no.

He called me the other day to tell me he was seeing someone new. On their second date, they went to Mass together, and on their third, they debated what color eyes their children would have. At first, I was angry. He was getting exactly what he wanted. And then I realized: so am I. I’m here, at Dartmouth, working my ass off on projects I’m passionate about, going to parties with my friends in outfits he would have hated, and applying for every internship and grant I can get my hands on. A million different futures diverge in front of me, and I realize, that’s what security could never give me: possibility. I hope he and his new girlfriend enjoy their security—and I mean it. I hope they have a love as pure and long-lasting as my grandparents’. Because even though it’s not the life for me, I know it’s a life full of joy and fulfillment. I wouldn’t give up the world for it, but my grandma wouldn’t give it up for the world.

Mimesis: Mimesis:

M Meemmees, F s, Fanoanon, an n, and t d the R he Reevvoolluuttiioon o n of O f Oppttiimimissm m

By Serena Suson | Design by Lillia Hammond

Hesiod first said that there was Chaos “... then broad-breasted Earth, the unshakeable seat of everything, then Eros …”

—Plato, Symposium 178b

There is a meme to which I often return, somewhat surprisingly, to remember my own optimism. Perhaps a visual pun reminiscent of the infamous, melodramatic “Loss,” the image, most commonly dubbed “Dmitri Finds Out,” usually consists of four panels, all captured from freeze frames of an interview con-

ducted in a Russian nightclub.[1] Over time, the subtitles have morphed to poke fun at various Internet gags; but the most popular iteration constructs a political narrative. The young man being interviewed, his skin slightly shiny with sweat, speaks into the microphone and admits heavily, “I live in constant fear of the Western descent towards fascism.”[2] I imagine a short pause here after such a severe statement, as the man makes eye contact with the woman holding the microphone, as he musters a strange sense of earnestness and duty amongst the stunt and strobe lights. Across the last three panels, the young man states:

But I digress.

The club is bumping. The ladies look good. The alcohol is flowing. There is much pain in the world but not in this room.[3]

Sometimes, in longer versions of the meme, the creator will include footage of the young man dancing.

One almost balks at the idea of critically analyzing a meme. Surely, some dewy professor has integrated the practice into their coursework by now, much to the incredulity of their students. The study receives its fair share of giggles and puzzlement as peers point it out to each other on the syllabus. Of course, the meme must turn out to be incredibly stale, its semiotic insides kamikazed and floating in the Internet ether, fodder for the next great technocultural supernova. A scholar much younger than I am now might quip that they will close read “Skibidi Toilet” someday.[4] But even that reference must be outdated by now.

Even as a seasoned English (modified with Classics, I always string out, that work of eternally holding a candle over the abyss) major, who understands the way that signs birth into symbols with the proliferation of any media, I find some levity in the ordeal. I revel in the absurdity. Yet, somewhere, despite the humor of the task, the aesthetic always reaches out to me. This meme, especially, always punches me in the gut. Despite it all, despite the silliness, I somehow connect the four panels in front of me to the great struggle of humankind.

I compose this piece, my first article since sophomore spring, as Hurricane Milton tears across the southern United States. He follows Hurricane Helene, who, with her chaotic storms, has already displaced and destroyed so many homes. Friends in my thesis class tell me of their families back home. One notes that the rich in Miami tend to live right on top of the water, while the rest crowd inland away from the waves. We all consider the irony and wonder how this event will distort the pattern of gentrification in the area in the years to come. In the echo of our discourse, cranes in Florida cry out to the sky, for what purpose I cannot comprehend, other than that idleness in the face of disaster would be far worse.[5] Skunks I have never seen before in my four years here crawl alongside the sidewalk next to Rauner, and I wonder if they, sensing it too, have left somewhere else behind. How things have scabbed over despite the “healing” that happened four years ago![6] Although I am far too young for the thought, these days I casually consider never having a baby. Today, though, I have decided to write. The creation does not abet the destruction but happens in spite of it.

What has happened since I lost my voice? There has been calamity, and the land has clamored back. Palestine, now Lebanon too, regrows its martyrs in the felling of genocide. Sudan sustains the intifada against the RDF. Congo rings a copper drum out to the rest of the world. Bangladesh has broken free. Yemen remembers ten years ago, yet she has bandaged her bombed boats and set them out to sea.[7]

I allude too briefly to geopolitical struggle. While the page and topic constrain me, I still feel I shirk my solidarity. Perhaps, however, the time has passed for education and awareness — that reorganization awaits the ex-colony.[8] A certain intertextuality must ring out when Yahya Sinwar, donned in a keffiyeh, crouched next to a couch in a bomb-outed home, uses his one remaining arm to throw a piece of rubble at the drone that eventually kills him. He casts it like an Expo marker.[9] I am tired of explaining the evident. Has not the Symbolic transplanted the Real?[10] I am tired of appealing to [neo] liberal semantics. If your heart still beats, you will hear me.

When one interprets the political meaning behind “Dmitri Finds Out,” the easy equation to derive is escapism. Dmitri, the meme’s so-called human center, himself appears to find distraction in the attractive people around him; the alcohol dulls his senses. Just so, a club of the early 2000’s transforms into a speakeasy of 1920’s flappers and cosmopolites, a site of hedonism and debauchery as the Great Depression rages on outside. Ke[$]ha blares over the speakers.[11] The dance floor extends its fair shares of “Willkommen!”s and “Bienvenue!”s. There are NO. troubles here. Here, life is beautiful.[12]

But it is that acknowledgment of the situation that strikes me. Dmitri pays tribute to the perpetual terror that lingers, a what-if that hovers above his head like the sword of Damocles. Will he be the one to set it off? Or will it be his inaction? Despite the fog of the club, Dmitri can distinguish where exactly the threat of fascism lurks; and in that articulation, he alludes to his position in the structure of empire. Dmitri is wise enough to know that the West waits outside the club doors; or, even more imposingly, it has paid off the bouncers to crowd around him, to colonize his feet, to colonize his mind. With such acknowledgment of doom, Dmitri does not decide if he will dance but how. He decides how to orient his body. The difference is quite subtle.

Like the emcee in Cabaret, Dmitri too makes a declaration of absence, a statement that forges a separation, a definition between here and there: “There is much pain in the world but not in this room” (italics added for emphasis). In contrast to the emcee, however, Dmitri defines his “here” — “this room” — a microcosm of the world he wants to see. While he testifies to the pain of the world as a whole, he carves out a space free from that struggle. Perhaps you are not convinced of that nuance. Still, in my imagination, Dmitri draws a line, one that does not disavow the world across from it but simply demarcates it. Still, in my imagination, Dmitri dances valiantly. Still, in my imagination, Dmitri dances in spite.

Albeit far from a well-established theory, a recurring theme that has echoed through my studies has been the proximity of creation to chaos. The late twentieth-century Martinican psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon recognized a similar phenomenon while he observed the Revolution in Algeria. So many objects of the conservative or colonial order gain resignification through the course of general resistance, as recorded in his oeuvre.[13] In his essay “This is the Voice of Algeria,” Fanon elevates the work of the local townspeople to the feats of those engaged in armed struggle atop the mountains, as the villagers listen to the sound of intercepted radio transmissions to bring to each other news of battles. Once a contemporary, colonial prop meant to spread French propaganda, the radio becomes an extension of the Algerian consciousness, by which the everyday villager gains agency.[14] Similar to his internal subjectivity, the colonized must parse through the static of suppression to discern the voice of the resistance’s broadcaster. Fanon describes the act of listening as a unique bodily experience:

The listener, enrolled in the battle of the waves, had to figure out the tactics of the enemy, and in an almost physical way circumvent the strategy of the adversary. Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians present in the room would receive

the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would then be asked of this incarnated voice…

A real task of reconstruction would then begin. Everyone would participate, and the battles of yesterday and the day before would be re-fought in accordance with the deep aspirations and the unshakable faith of the group. The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.[15]

noise, they join the fighters on the hills and arm themselves with words.

Sometimes, my soul burns to remember the seeming inefficacy of political org anizing on this campus. When I originally committed to Dartmouth, I did so with the intention of resignifying the privilege that came with my position. I cannot recall my thought process exactly, the exact point from which I perceived I would redistribute my wealth. I think I have had to reorient that ultimate political goal. I have not been able to rid this place of pain, but perhaps I have drawn some lines, drawn out some light — anagnorisis and catharsis. When I encounter fresh faces, I make sure to attest to the disappointments I have faced but to frame them with an air of renewal. Some tools, born of empire’s platinum, can never be resignified. Dartmouth and its populus may be like that. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn what can moulder, what can change. And when in doubt, our bodies and minds, born from dust and stars, can always be reshaped. Steal what you can.[16]

Many people did not anticipate riot cops and state troopers to march onto the Green on May 1st.[17] A humble show of solidarity with the emergence of student encampments across the United States and a reply to the demonstrations against the school’s complicity in genocide and ethnic cleansing that began on Dartmouth’s campus back in October, those five tents were uprooted in a matter of hours, the circle of people who sacrificed their right to assembly to the carceral system dissolved. A library of books marked for a landfill. Surely, the acts of terrorism to which President Beilock, Dartmouth College, and the State of New Hampshire consented are nothing compared to the continued extermination and epistemicide in Palestine. But surely, despite the project’s ostensible failure, the chaos that ensued under the shadow of Dartmouth Hall, that experience bred something new. It taught us something new.

When I talk to friends about the sequence of events now, all that springs forth is gratitude. I would never have met so many brave and kind-hearted souls if it weren’t for this kind of audacious work, the kind of early-in-life organizing that has you folding zines in between allies and freshly-baked muffins on a sticky frat basement floor. The kind of organizing that has you singing, reciting songs that come down from adapted slave spirituals. The kind of organizing that keeps you singing, crowing a cappella renditions of Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” as the cop car bumps an hour down the road to Grafton County Jail. The kind of organizing that teaches you to dance dabke a month later on Baker Lawn, because you are forbidden from walking on the Green.

But I digress. Change does not always come in the ways that we imagine it, but it will come as long as we do imagine. Plan, take action, write, recite, and repeat in the ways that you can. To dream of romance and utopia is not sensationalism, but the reification of optimism. Certainly, the Forms — if that is what we shall call them — evade us, but let perfection veer far from what we seek. Let us strive for amalgamation, improvisation, collaboration, liberation. Let us listen; let us read; let us sing; let us share. The world will be born again and again, so let us resonate every essence for the world that we hope for. Until then, we have our words, and we have our stories. There is much pain in the world, but we will not let there be.

[1] In a mere four panels devoid of dialogue, the central character of the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, authored by Tim Buckley, rushes to the hospital to discover his wife has suffered a miscarriage. Due to the abrupt tonal shift in comparison with the rest of the comic and the extreme reductionism of a traumatic event, the panels burst onto the meme scene as “Loss” or “loss.jpg” as a symbol of melodrama and facile minimalism (“Loss,” Know Your Meme, Literally Media Ltd., Last modified Apr. 22, 2024, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ loss).

[2] “Dmitri Finds Out,” Know Your Meme, Literally Media Ltd., Last modified 2020, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dimitri-finds-out.

[3] “Dmitri Finds Out.”

[4] “Skibidi Toilet,” Know Your Meme, Literally Media Ltd., Last modified July 2024, https://knowyourmeme. com/memes/subcultures/skibidi-toilet.

[5] John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Critical Edition, ed. Gordon Teskey, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), 10.1055.

[6] It became a joke in the early months of the pandemic in 2020 to remark, as the canals of Venice cleared of humans and the daily stain of the anthropocene for a moment faded to translucency, that “nature was healing, we are the virus.” (Emmanuel Felton, “The Coronavirus Meme About “Nature Is Healing” Is So Damn Funny,” Buzzfeed News, April 7, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-memenature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus).

[7] Despite a charismatic persona that helped to proliferate a sense of tranquil normalcy among the American middle-class and elite on the homefront, Pres. Barack Obama in 2015 continued the imperialist trend of interventionism inherited from his predecessors to support the military efforts that eventually left Yemen as one of the most destitute countries in the world (Micah Zenko, “Obama’s War of Choice: Supporting the Saudi-led Air War in Yemen,” Council on Foreign Relations, September 25, 2017, https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-warchoice-supporting-saudi-led-air-war-yemen).

[8] Notably, the presence of political education for Fanon both stimulates and enforces a revolutionary movement, but its greatest need falls amidst the decolonial process, to refine the “spontaneity” of the original driving force of action. I invoke Fanon’s theory here to suggest that we have already reached a threshold of knowledge to inform our decolonial action. Now, we must combine that intellectualism with action, until we must again reorient and historicize ourselves (Frantz

Fanon, “Spontaneity: its Strengths and its Weaknesses,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 138; Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness, in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 180).

[9] Refaat Alareer, interview in “Watch: Day 3 roundtable on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Flood,” Electronic Intifada, October 9, 2023,https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ nora-barrows-friedman/watch-day-3-roundtable-gazasal-aqsa-flood.

[10] Here I make a vulgarization of Lacan’s register theory. Generally speaking, the Real refers to an understanding of existence as it is, so to speak, which can never fully be understood. Consider the Romantics’ idea of the sublime. Physical, corporeal, yet elusive of intelligence. For much of Lacan’s career, he hoped that another register, the Symbolic, would take precedence over the Real and the Imaginary, the register of images. The Symbolic constitutes the essence of structuralism, e.g, the way that language organizes the images we perceive and the avenue by which we articulate our own consciousness (Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/lacan/.)

[11] I use brackets here to distinguish Kesha’s old stage name in the early 2000’s: “Ke$ha.”

[12] “Willkommen,” Cabaret, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, 1966.

[13] “Conservative” as in the persisting traditions or precolonial customs of the colonized.

[14] Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 2022), 85–6.

[15] Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 2022), 85–6.

[16] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, March 1, 2016, https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/robin-kelley-black-struggle-campus-protest/.

[17] “Spare Rib Statement on May 1st, 2024,” Spare Rib, May 5, 2024, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/ post/spare-rib-statement-on-may-1st-2024#:~:text=Although%20the%20events%20of%20May,We%20 stand%20with%20Palestine.

Afterlives / Afterlives / Life, After Life, After

By: Saturn Guo

Art by: Samantha Kang

Design by: Anonymous

Content warning: Rape

Ponyboy, authored by Eliot Duncan, is fundamentally a story of unraveling –in the half-world of pre-transition, the main character, a trans man, is “electric.”1 Despite his initial implacability, we meet him in his alternating philosophizing and arrogance, a man crafted by trauma and becoming. In a twist of narrative norms befitting the subject matter, the story rapidly and often disorientingly alternates between Ponyboy’s fall into drugs and his childhood in Western Nebraska, a killing zone for nontraditional bodies. Despite the story’s narrative focus on addiction and Duncan’s skillful mastery of crafting and cen-

1 “Electric” perhaps as energizing, ephemeral? Duncan, Eliot. “Ponyboy.” W. W. Norton. Accessed October 7, 2024. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051220.

2 Duncan, Eliot. 2023. Ponyboy. New York, NY, W. W. Norton & Company.

tering settings, its essence – and eventual conclusion – is a reflection and near-resolution of transness.

“We won’t be making love. Fucking, maybe, but not love.”2 Sex in Ponyboy is unbecoming – rather than described physically, Duncan paints it opaque and dark through harsh language and unspeakable pain. At the core of each of Ponyboy’s sexual experiences is an undeniable disjuncture between the masculine body that he envisions and the feminine nature of the intimacy that he experiences – the novel starts by placing Ponyboy in what the blurb describes as a messy love triangle. On one hand, Ponyboy’s childhood best friend and forbidden lover “bends… before him,” “allowing him to [fuck] like [himself].”3 Intimacy with Toni is masculine and fulfilling, it allows him to breath and be. On the other, his girlfriend, Baby, whom he dearly loves, casts him into shapes of “woman, d***, girl,”4 unable to see herself with a trans man. While intimacy for Ponyboy can be masculinizing, without Toni, no one is willing to fuck him as such — indeed, the writing itself becomes more unraveled as Ponyboy (in)coheres into woman for Baby. For Ponyboy, the disjuncture he feels is startling and disgusting. He re-ravels with drugs, a hit of ket or line of blow, and so the writing swings rapidly between rejection, sex, and Ponyboy’s writing, which is influenced by a haze of substances so potent as to be dizzying.

Ponyboy’s self-destructive feminization in sex is perhaps best encompassed in a poem he writes labeled “Baby, Paris,” which he describes as not a poem, but his biggest fear:

“Chop off my chest / you’re my surgeon just cut me open / pull out the tissue and / feed it to your dog / he’s a good boy / like me / adrift and afraid of the name they / gave me he can’t make this about my / social capital again / Baby cries I say / it’s murder the way no one is stunned / by your form / lit from behind / the loud cars get fucked by rain / later / her handsome, veiny hands hold up / Catherine Opie’s photos / this is it / she / shoves it in my face: / a woman with a cartoon home cut into her back / this one is it for you / you hold the knife at your own back /

3,4,5 Ibid.

6 Duncan, Eliot. Ponyboy.

Ibid.

10 Mulder, Eva, Antony Pemberton, and Ad J. Vingerhoets. “The Feminizing Effect of Sexual Violence in Third-Party Perceptions of Male and Female Victims.” Sex Roles 82, no. 1–2 (March 27, 2019): 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01036-w.

but instead of words I / surrender to something ancient / churned-up desire melts into another aimless hand job engrossed in / sticky affection cumming / again and again Baby says / we’re fucked / and at dinner I’m tying Baby up / their conversation lulls and praises and then dies / drunk eyes glance over at me / me, perversely fingering the thick metal ring / it’s loud and I look unhinged but / mentally I’m hooking it all together / Baby’s tiny wrists here and her torso on the table / my cock / blank, raw / harder their table conversation goes on in that language I won’t learn / I told you Baby I told you / I told you / you erode my solitude you golden / slut.”5

Top surgery – gender-affirming, man-making – is described not as freedom but as a brutal murder, flesh discarded and fed to the jowls of a hungry beast, a “good boy / like [him].” Indeed, in Ponyboy’s work, he consistently describes transmasculinity in the context of his own repulsion – he figures himself as “perverse”, a sex toy, “unhinged,” “blank,” at best a vehicle of “churned-up desire,” at worst a defiler of his “golden / slut.”

In other words, transmasculinity in its incompleteness and continued attachment to the feminine sex he knows is, too him, deeply repulsive – his “biggest fear.”6

Sex with Baby is indicative of perhaps the broadest contributor to Ponyboy’s incoherency – he is unable to depart from femininity. His inability is despite his efforts – throughout the novel, especially with Toni, he sees himself only when the taste & bubble of beer erases him until he only knows the masculinity of his mind. In other words, Ponyboy abuses substances until he can temporarily forget his girlhood – “[He drinks,] fast, fast, and then faster…

[he wants] to not be a body anymore.”7 This is startling in light of feminist theorization that yields connection between the body and the feminine — for example, Judith Butler critiques the dualism of the mind (subject) and the body (object) as the unifying force in the gender binary. In other words, Ponyboy’s wish to be more-than flesh is a wish to be more-than sexualized, more-than fuck-toy, more-than woman. Looking at a mirror (self) disrupted by lines of cocaine, he sees and calls himself by name: “Ponyboy.” While inebriated, he describes himself as “cock-intelligent,” “cock-conscious,” masculine only in mind and numbness.

Beyond merely sex, the inseparability of his femininity from his transmasculinity is seen in all his experiences, both past and present. As masculine as he knows his mind, he is touched as girl, seen as girl, affected purely by womanly experiences. The most impactful of these upon Ponyboy’s psyche is his experience with sexual assault. In a section titled “An Interlude of Becoming,”8 Ponyboy describes being raped at fourteen, “all wide-eyed, unmoving, coming to.”9 The titling is indeed significant – while every other section is attributed to a person and place, this experience transcends physical descriptors: violence in this form for Ponyboy could be nothing but becoming, nothing but formational, nothing but incoherent and yet engrained, feminine scar tissue upon a masculine mind. How is Ponyboy meant to cohere himself when the root of his addiction and the beginning of his sexuality comes from a feminine violence?

This is not to say that sexual assault is a violence enacted against women, or that there is a universal langauge or experience of sexual assault. Instead, I make the argument that Ponyboy himself experiences perceived feminization post-assault – by linguistics, language, society, and especially himself. This is, again, not universal, but a common experience known by many – on the scientific side, Mulder et. al describe how “the label ‘victim’ elicits connotations of passive femininity”10 and

11 Bonthuys, E. (2008). Putting gender into the definition of rape or taking it out? Feminist Legal Studies, 16(2), 249–260. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-008-9091-4.

12 Dora, after being assaulted by her father’s close friend, had difficulty breathing, historical choking, a loss of voice, and fainting spells. Freud attributed this and her disgust at the assault as hysteria – as Ponyboy puts it, “Freud can’t understand why a girl would be revolted by such advances.”

13 Duncan, Eliot. Ponyboy.

14 To Ponyboy, cigarettes are repeatedly interpreted as a symbol of masculinity. He often admires the way men smoke. He was once told by his sister, correctively, that the way he smoked was “like a boy.”

15 Duncan, Eliot. Ponyboy.

how men who were victims of rape experienced what they felt as demasculinization — in being fucked, they felt woman. Rape is hence perceived as subordination and submission so destructive as to create feelings of femininity and weakness within the victim.

Furthermore, though theory on & geneologies of rape are disturbingly sparse (there was only one article on sexual violence in Feminist Studies in the past ten years), even a cursory viewpoint of theory yields the same conclusion. Though this is a grossly short and simplistic description of rape’s effects, when taken within the context of the common claim that gender itself is an embodiment (in any fashion) of certain constructed standards as opposed to a set of sex characteristics or genatalia, rape has an actively gendering effect. This is best summarized by Bonthuys11: “a man who is raped loses his masculine status and becomes, in terms of his sexual role, a woman—while the sexually subordinate status of a woman who is raped is thereby confirmed.” For Ponyboy, mentally man and yet trapped within what he feels is a girl’s body, the effect is twofold: he is relegated over and over through habit and force into the feminine role, “sexually subordinate,” dysphoric, tortured.

The effect of sexual assault upon Ponyboy’s psyche is painted in artful prose, but still evidently significant nonetheless –in both instances of rape that he experiences, he describes the incident as “fucking dreams and breath out of [him] forever,” implicating his masculine futurama itself. However, this is perhaps most evidently shown in his exploration of and co-existence with Dora, a Freudian case study of sexual assault12, who he finds himself in front

of in “dreamy admiration… Dora. Dora. Dora.”13 Dora is, to Ponyboy, an honest reflection of his own self. Though he imagines a future where him/Dora can overturn their trauma, overcome the imperatives of gender and sex, sit shoulder to shoulder and roll cigarettes14 and live a life of dancing and wine, in a stunning act of self-defeat, despite “begging for [her] story,” Ponyboy acknowledges that she, like himself, is “gone.”15 In his mind, both himself and Dora are without dreams or breath, have been lost by violence to history and heterosexual summation.

Beyond mere physical illegibility, however, Ponyboy’s move towards the world-making of drugs is a symptom of his (linguistic) unthinkability. Without drugs, he not only feels feminine, he often doesn’t feel within the world at all. This is attributable to what Luce Irigaray describes as linguistic illegibility – the “subject” feminized by a metaphysical definition of what it means to be is simultaneous- ly excluded from subjecthood altogether by the unintelligibility of womanhood in a phallogocentric language. Ponyboy, despite feeling man, is feminized, Ponyboy, despite being, is denied. The lived effects of this denial are best described in one of his many drunken poems: “What dreams do I live with ink on page / how do I know which words and when / how do I know I’m man[?]”16

How does the transmasculine subject know which words and when? How to overcome the incoherence of a feminine intimacy in a masculine body? Neither Ponyboy nor I can come to any totalizing antidote, but he himself finds an antidote, ironically in intimacy itself. Later on within the novel, Ponyboy meets 16 Duncan,

20

O’Shea: “Can the

speak? A report to an academy of psychoanalysts. By Paul B. Preciado (trans. Frank Wynne), London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2021. pp. 77. ISBN: 978‐1913097‐58‐5,” Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(3), pages 1152-1154, May

Eliot. Ponyboy.

Duncan, Eliot. Ponyboy.

Saoirse Caitlin

monster

and fucks a cis male named Gabriel. The photographer is gentle and affirming, calling him “a gay boy,” “a pretty boy,”17 but though the intimacy they share casts Ponyboy in a traditionally feminine role, it finally makes him feel as if he “could breathe.”18 A direct and oppositional parallel is drawn between the assault Ponyboy faces, described at-length above: “[Gabriel] listened with his whole body, thrusting dreams back inside me forever.”19 What is different about this intimacy? What allows femininity to finally become a part of healing rather than fracturing?

Ponyboy’s fate is not to be fucked by man into healing — after Gabriel leaves him, he snorts and drinks like never before and ends up in a hospital bed. Instead, Duncan’s purpose in juxtaposing sex as affirmation (with Gabriel, with Toni) and sex as fracturing (with Baby, in violence) is to contrast a pair of differing relations to femininity. While the latter demonstrates Ponyboy’s inflicted incoherence as felt due to a failed departure from femininity, the former shows Ponyboy as departing from gender-mimetism altogether. When Ponyboy attempts to imitate masculinity and depart from femininity altogether, his inability to cohere a “feminine” violence/intimacy/sex with a “masculine” mind causes an internal fracturing. For him, the solution is to understand that “the rainbow can become a skin.”20

In “Can the Monster Speak,” Paul Preciado, a trans man, states to a crowd of psychoanalysts: “I am the teenage boy kissing a girl behind the church door. I am the young girl who dresses up as a Jesuit and learns screeds of Spinoza’s Ethics by heart.”21 Similarly, Ponyboy learns the self by becoming both cocksharp man and fucked feminine, gay boy and pretty girl.

21 Ibid.

22 Duncan, Eliot. Ponyboy.

Where, instead, can Ponyboy find a formal definition of identity? If his suffering comes from his attempts to depart from femininity, how else can transmasculinity be explained? In a satisfying conclusion to his battle with the self, as Ponyboy finally recovers from his addiction and substance abuse in rehab within his childhood home, he both denies definition and solid identity and instead accepts a trans kinship. In a letter to Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was killed and violated near Ponyboy’s hometown, Ponyboy describes how “I never met you, Brandon. But your life lingers like a fiery exponent, always in my peripheral, illuminating new shapes of myself. I learn, with you, that my wingspan is greater than the threat of death.”22 With Brandon, Ponyboy traces a track of lived experiences and survival, of transness as gnostic and fluid and beautiful. In kinship, in lived brotherhood, he becomes.

An Open women

By: Samantha Kang

Back home, the Asian Pacific Islander Student Association (APISA) at my high school was constantly ignored or conveniently forgotten. My school always made sure to emphasize “cultural diversity” but stopped short of remembering to buy graduation stoles for the Asian affinity group, providing adequate support for campus events run by APISA, or addressing hate crimes towards Asian students. e most popular events we hosted were the Spicy Ramen Challenge and the Crochet Asian Food Fundraiser, which also happened to be the events where we “sold” already popular East Asian cuisine. Coming to an institution like Dartmouth, I naïvely expected things to be different. It wasn’t rooted in any logical explanation, but simply in a hopeful desperation that it had to be at this prestigious, well-funded, and well-educated school.

In my first quarter at Dartmouth, I experienced racial microaggressions from a professor in an introductory public speaking class. rough my speeches, I explored the history of sexual violence and fetishization of East Asian women. e professor often offered critique — expected for a college classroom environment — but the feedback harbored demeaning, racial undertones.

What do the white men in the room think of this speech?

Where did you get these sources from?

Isn’t only 2% of the Dartmouth student population Asian?

e last assignment of the class was to write and

Letter To Asian at Dartmouth

Art and Design

By: Shena Han

record a celebratory speech. I chose to write a celebration of life for the victims of the Atlanta Shooting. e process was incredibly painful; many of the women who died reminded me of my own (Halmeoni), my Korean grandmother. As such, it took many attempts in front of the candlelit altar I created to finish the recording. Instead of solidarity, or an acknowledgement of this grief, however, my professor offered one critique:

You should have been angrier about the Asian women’s death … for stronger rhetoric.

What amount of rhetoric is needed to convince someone to care about the lives of the women who were murdered? Aren’t their names, faces, and hobbies rhetoric enough? Be angry, but just the right amount to get your point across. Grieve, but not excessively. Write a celebration of life, but you better still be angry while doing it otherwise I’m not convinced of the pain and oppression that you feel.

One of my best friends at Dartmouth observed unsettling dynamics between Asian women and white men in Greek Life at Dartmouth, from both her

own experience and her friends. At one fraternity, a friend overheard brothers saying that they should “let all the Asian girls in.”

Later that year, she was asked not to tell a guy’s parents at dinner that “her dad was Asian,” because his parents had to “come around” to the idea of it first. Nonetheless, he seemed to love her “island girl vibes” (she is a gorgeous + powerful Hawaiian and Vietnamese woman) on the condition that she dressed “not homeless” and that her hair was “straight instead of wavy.” In his words, she wasn’t wife or child-bearing material because he couldn’t handle the thought that she struggled with her mental health at times.

I, along with several of my Asian women friends have had uncomfortable interactions with white men on campus. From overly-touchy to persistent attempts to be (more than) friends, there is a transparent trend that seems

to be all but invisible to the rest of the Dartmouth “community.”

Fetishization & Racialized Sexism throughout American History

e most prominent example of fetishization of Asian women is “Yellow Fever,” a term that

describes a sexual preference or obsession with East Asian women, most commonly by white men. ough Yellow Fever is not a new concept, its origins in Asian-American history are relatively unknown. Most people are familiar with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers into the US. Far less known, however, is the Page Act of 1875, which banned “the importation into the United States of women for the purposes of prostitution.” Two qualities stand out about this piece of legislation. First, it is rooted in the belief that all women from outside the US are sex workers. While sex work is undeniably a part of Asian-American history, East Asian women were singled out among their white counterparts for carrying sexually trasmitted diseases and threatening the institution of marriage as “temptations.” Second, the word choice of “imported.” Objects are imported. People are not. is phrasing inherently objectifies Asian women as goods to be exchanged. As Maria Hwang and Rhacel Parreñas explain in their 2021 analysis of the hypersexualization of East Asian women throughout history, “the Page Act established the gendered racialization of Chinese women as diseased immoral prostitutes — in other words, villainous temptresses.” Flash forward to WWII. As the US military presence in Asia increased, sex industries were mounted around American camps to

serve the men who inhabited them, a trend that would only continue throughout the Korean and Vietnam wars. Under these white supremacist ideologies, what became a colonization of Asian countries, also became a colonization of the bodies of Asian women. is history permeates the culture around Asian women today; the duplicitious ideas that Asian-American women are both hypersexual objects and dangerous temptations prevents them from being seen as individuals.

Fetishization & Racialized Sexism at Dartmouth Dartmouth, too, has an insidious past concerning Asian women and sexual violence. In 2000, the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program (SAAP) released a report on the prevalence of sexual violence against women: 40%

of sexual violence

reports in 1997, 37% in 1998, and 30% in 1999 were reported by Asian women, who made up 12.3% of the undergraduate population at the time. at between 3–4 in 10 of these reports were coming from only 12.3% of the population is appalling. In response, the Pan Asian Council (PAC) formed the Sexual Assault Committee, which was “not as popular as they had hoped.” In 2002, there was a decrease in the amount of sexual violence reported by Asian women, at 7% compared to 30% in the previous survey. However, there was a sense of ambiguity about the subsequent decrease: it is “unclear to this day whether they decreased due to the effectiveness of PAC’s response programs, or an increased fear of the visibility and consequences of reporting an incident.” Given the severity of the initial three reports, it seems obvious that further investigation on sexual violence towards Asian women was (and is) warranted. But no further reports were ever created.

To this day, there is a muddy picture of how sexual violence continues to affect Asian women at Dartmouth. Every two to three years, Dartmouth administers a sexual misconduct survey to the student body, and the data is posted online. In the 2022 survey, you could sort by either gender identity or race, but not both simultaneously. Further, Asian was not a category, instead falling under “Other.” When we asked Kristi Clemens, the Title IX coordinator last fall, about this discrepancy, she responded that sorting for intersectional identities was not included because it reinforced stereotypes about certain groups of people and helped maintain confidentiality. She assured us that they monitored the data carefully to ensure that there were no groups with data that would cause “significant concern.” However, she declined to give us access to data regarding Asian women on campus. is is explained simi-

larly on the 2022 Survey Dashboard, as a “dashboard with no data suppressed was delivered to Dartmouth’s Title IX Coordinator and a select few administrative staff whose responsibilities include sexual misconduct prevention and response.” As of the 2024 Sexual Misconduct Survey you can now simultaneously sort by level (undergraduate or graduate) and gender; the option to see data on race has been eliminated completely. It’s curious that “Dartmouth is committed to discovering the reasons for trendlines and continuing to work to address all areas of concern,” but they make it nearly impossible to distinguish those trendlines to the public. ere is a huge oversight in acknowledging intersectional discrimination; it is not possible to “address all areas of concern” without acknowledging that certain groups experience unique kinds of racialized sexism and violence.

e Sexual Misconduct Survey is also by no means comprehensive. e 2000 SAAP report “cross-referenced student reports with sexual assault peer advisors, deans, and program counselors, and compiled data,” which is important to account for the tendency

of Asian women to underreport sexual violence. erefore, even if current Sexual Misconduct Surveys analyzed in private do not show enough “concerning” data, this is far from the full picture. is meeting, along with our personal and overheard experiences within our first few weeks at Dartmouth, sparked many additional meetings with other organizations and departments on campus, most of which were equally frustrating. For concision, here is a brief summary of what we did and who we met with in the 2023–2024 school year:

1)Amanda Childress, Sexual Violence Prevention Project. We discussed our concern about trends of sexual harassment towards Asian women on campus, and why it was

not addressed in the SVPP curriculum. Ms. Childress told us that SVPP aimed to provide a broad foundation for all students to understand sexual assault, rather than examining specific groups. She offered that we could add a few scenarios to the sessions related to fetishization, but it was difficult to reach her to follow up on this idea. She also told us any research or current surveys that we wanted to conduct would be for “personal” satisfaction or use only (i.e. not necessary to create policy change).

2)Dr. Mishka Murad, Office of Greek Life. We deeply enjoyed talking to Dr. Murad about Asian women and Greek life dynamics on campus. She served as an advisor to us in writing a grant to research current sexual violence towards Asian women on campus. When we inquired whether we could incorporate new training to Greek Life leaders (which are required each year before rush), she told us we would need to have a strong research basis first.

3) e Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, Hoffman Grant. e Hoffman grant is a stipend offered to students each year to conduct research on sexual violence. With Dr. Murad’s mentorship, we submitted a proposal to interview Asian women about their experiences on campus and collect data about the prevalence of sexual violence. Although the SPCSA stated that there was no set limit on the number of grants that would receive funding given as long as the proposal was relevant and compelling, we did not receive the grant nor any other feedback on why we were not selected.

4)Baker-Berry Library Student Displays. We proposed a collage project raising awareness on sexual violence against Asian women to be presented duringAsian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPHIM ). We submitted our request before winterim for display in May. We were tentatively approved, and then the display was canceled due to “staffing issues” although students were expected to mount their own displays.

5)Office of Pluralism and Leadership. We reached out to OPAL in hopes of collaborating to create displays and programming for AAPHIM related to Asian women. We were redirected to the student coordinator, Deborah Jung ’24, who tried to help us get our display up in Collis after it was declined from Baker-Berry.

6)Collis Student Involvement Center. We emailed Collis inquiring whether they could display the collage we had intended to make for the Baker-Berry display. We did not receive a response.

We ended our freshman year extremely frustrated by the lack of support that our concerns received. However, I want to emphasize our appreciation that so many

people were willing to meet with us and openly discuss our concerns. Rather, the reaction we received represented a systematic and bureaucratic failure by Dartmouth’s sexual violence and diversity resources as a whole. e very organizations that are supposed to advocate for the safety and voices of marginalized groups of students ultimately failed us as Asian women on campus. We didn’t get very far despite exhausting the resources so readily advertised to us. We spent the entire year in a sort of echo chamber, hearing the same reassurances, affirmations, and suggestions over and over again: “Have you tried reaching out to ______?” “I’m going to send you over to ______; this is more of their department.” “ ank you for bringing this to our attention.” ere was a preface of concern and a seeming willingness to take action which never quite translated to real life. It was too “niche,” “too specific” an issue to incorporate into the SVPP curriculum. Are these not the issues, the “niche” and invisible ones, that need to be addressed? A broad blanket of sexual respect does nothing to address the complexities of racialized sexism and discrimination. What of other minority groups affected by sexual violence? Are their concerns too “niche” to address, too? e response of SVPP, along with other organizations, translated to a resounding message: this is important, but not important enough.

Last year, two Asian students were found dead in the Connecticut River. Won Jang ’26 drowned in a river due to hazing. He did not know how to swim.

Kexin Cai, a twenty-six-year-old graduate student, was found dead by a fisherman following a “mental health crisis” as reported by her boyfriend.

If Won Jang were white, would he have died that day?

If Kexin Cai were white, would she have been found faster?

I want to be clear that these tragedies are not directly related to sexual violence against Asian women on campus. But they highlight the perpetual narrative of Asian invisibility:

Of course it was two Asian students who died in the same year.

Of course their faces flitted past on misspelled remembrances without any acknowledgement of the systems of power that had enabled their deaths.

Of course it was an Asian student who was left behind.

Of course there is only one small room dedicated to the Pan Asian Community on campus.

Of course my friend’s boyfriend loved her “island girl vibes,” but only if her hair was straight, too.

Of course it’s important to publish data on sexual violence, but only if gender and race are kept separate.

Of course Asian women have historically represented a huge portion of sexual violence that goes on at Dartmouth, and of course no one knows that.

Of course it makes sense that Asian pain would fade into the background, because it always has and always does.

On Oct. 10, 2024, Daniel Lin ’23 wrote an open letter to Asian students at Dartmouth following the death of his friend Won, saying:

We are allowed to mourn these absences, but only as pinpoints of grief in an otherwise happy composition. e deaths of our community members and the lack of institutional support can only exist as siloed, unfortunate events — as isolated dots on a page. What if we dared to connect them?

I don’t have a definitive solution. Far from it. I am angry, I am grieving, I am hopeful. For now, I’m writing to offer a few more dots, and maybe some strings too. What if we dared to connect them? Let’s.

If you are interested in connecting, helping with these issues, or adding your own “dots” to the page, fill out this form or reach out to me @samantha.j.kang.27@dartmouth.edu or @zoe.e.manning.27@dartmouth.edu.

¹Daniel Lin and Deborah Jung, “Lin: An Open Letter to Asian Students at Dartmouth,” e Dartmouth: Opinion ( e Dartmouth, Inc., October 10, 2024), https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2024/10/lin-anopen-letter-to-asian-students-at-dartmouth.

%On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long went on a shooting rampage of three spas in the Atlanta Area, killing six Asian-American women and a white man and woman. He was arrested a week later and pleaded guilty, explaining to the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and needed to eliminate his “temptation” (Ruth Graham et al., “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, with Fears of Anti-Asian Bias,” New York Times, March 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/ shooting-atlanta-acworth.).

&An act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese., Public Law 71, U.S. Statutes at Large 22 (1882): 58-61. https://www.govinfo. gov/app/details/STATUTE-22/STATUTE-22-Pg58-4.

⁴An act supplementary to the acts in relation to immigration., Public Law 327, U.S. Statutes at Large 18 (1875): C477-C478. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/STATUTE-18/STATUTE-18-PgC477.

(Maria Cecilia Hwang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “ e Gendered Racialization of Asian Women as Villainous Temptresses,” Gender & Society 35, no. 4 (July 14, 2021): 567–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211029395.

)To this day, many state governments refuse to take accountability for endorsing the sexual exploitation of comfort women during WWII. In 2021, South Korea dismissed demands for reparations to be paid to Korean comfort women sold into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. (Amnesty International, “South Korea: Disappointing Japan Ruling Fails to Deliver Justice to ‘Comfort Women,’” Amnesty International, April 21, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/04/south-korea-disappointing-japan-ruling-fails-to-deliver-justice-to-comfort-women/).

⁷Susan Marine, “Annual Statistics Report of Sexual Abuse Incidents, 1995-2000,” Sociology 76 (Winter 2023): Race, Power, and Politics -Dartmouth Course Exhibits, 2000, https:// course-exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/s/SOCY76/item/3291.

+“Responses to the Report of Sexual Violence against Asian Women on Campus · Sociology 76 (Winter 2023): Race, Power, and Politics · Dartmouth Course Exhibits,” Dartmouth.edu, 2023, https://course-exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/s/SOCY76/page/responses-to-asian-targeted-sexual-assault-incidents-on-campus.

,“Responses to the Report of Sexual Violence against Asian Women on Campus · Sociology 76 (Winter 2023): Race, Power, and Politics · Dartmouth Course Exhibits.”

¹-“Responses to the Report of Sexual Violence against Asian Women on Campus · Sociology 76 (Winter 2023): Race, Power, and Politics · Dartmouth Course Exhibits”

¹Dartmouth College Title IX Office, “Intro and Navigation Tab, 2024 Sexual Misconduct Survey: Students,” Office of Institutional Research (Dartmouth College, July 2024), https:// www.dartmouth.edu/oir/sms_results_2024.html.

¹%Dartmouth College Title IX Office, “2024 Sexual Misconduct Survey: Students.”

¹&Dartmouth College Title IX Office, “2024 Survey Conclusion, 2024 Dartmouth College Sexual Misconduct Student Survey: Executive Summary of Results” (Dartmouth College, July 2024), https://www.dartmouth.edu/oir/pdfs/executive_summary_sms_2024.pdf.

¹⁴“Responses to the Report of Sexual Violence against Asian Women on Campus · Sociology 76 (Winter 2023): Race, Power, and Politics · Dartmouth Course Exhibits.”

NDAs: How Three Letters Silenced Generations

By: Aditi Singh

Art by: Dayanara Martinez

Design by: Rachel Roncka

My dear perfected democracy, What a perfect woman! Stitches line her lips, promising to dissolve the hysteria of yesterday. Threads drag the corners of her mouth into a smile. Don’t mind the saltwater — It only makes her face sparkle in the sunlight.

Signed, Man of Your Choice

Nadia, a young Australian woman, was sexually harassed in her workplace by a man taking inappropriate photos of her, and after effectively being forced to resign, was made to sign a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for compensation. With no real accountability taken to protect women like her, Nadia abandoned her dream job and now works in “almost exclusively female settings so she can feel safe.”[1]

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have been criticized for their silencing of women for decades, and while legal reforms have improved women’s safety in the United States, a lack of global reform means that the voices of women around the world continue to be suffocated by a document they signed under traumatic circumstances. Understanding the context of NDAs is crucial to recognizing how women’s oppression is often ingrained in the law and imperative to empowering women. Because one woman’s voice echoes around the world, the silencing of even one woman stifles generations of progress.

The most well-known instance of NDAs role in covering up sexual assault cases was in the 2017 Harvey Weinstein case, in which New York Times reporters Jodi Cantor and Meghan Twohey exposed the systematic abuse he perpetrated within his company — a film studio called Miramax. The company renowned as the parent of hits like Pulp Fiction, The Holdovers, and Scream, women and men alike cherished the opportunity to join such

a successful organization, but instead of finding career growth, women were condemned to a lifetime of trauma and isolation. Inviting women working under him to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, Weinstein promised career boosts in exchange for “accepting [his] sexual advances.” As young women were under immense pressure to maximize their careers in a cutthroat industry, Miramax employee at the time Lauren O’Connor aptly described:

I am a 28 year old woman trying to make a living and a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64 year old, world famous man and this is his company. The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.[2]

The power imbalance made it nearly impossible for women to refuse his advances, but even with over 87 victims over the course of twenty years, the scandal was only uncovered in 2017, all because NDAs silenced them before they even understood what happened to them. While the original exposé referenced a “young female employee” describing that “a nondisclosure agreement prevented her from commenting,” the widespread nature of these agreements was only exposed a few months later, finding that dozens of these women were coerced into signing NDAs in an effort to protect Weinstein.[3] Threatened with indefinite trials and the possibility of people not believing them compounded by a looming power balance, the women who were offered NDAs never truly had autonomy in their decision to sign the agreements.

This deteriorated autonomy impacts women of color the most, and especially considering that they are more likely to be assaulted, recognizing their perspective is beyond important. Particularly haunting are the words of Filipi na-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, yet another one of Weinstein’s victims:

I didn’t even understand what I was doing with those papers…I was really disoriented. My English was very bad. All of the words in that agreement were super difficult to understand.[4]

Gutierrez signed away her voice and her story without even knowing it, and while Weinstein was the criminal, NDAs were the cruel weapon that enabled this possibility. These agreements precluded victims “not only … from talking about Weinstein’s behavior, but also about [their] entire career at Miramax,” making it functionally impossible to connect any sort of assault to Weinstein or the company.[5] If even one of these women had the legal means and empowerment to expose Weinstein’s despicable actions, perhaps dozens more would have been protected. Without people’s ability to tell their stories, progress in social justice is virtually impossible because we fail to recognize that oppression is even happening. By virtue of his position in society as a powerful White male, Weinstein was already empowered to steal Guiterrez’s choice, but NDAs empowered him to trap her story of subjugation in a body unable to speak.

Following the Weinstein trial and many other instances of such abuse, beginning 2023, United States federal law officially prohibits the use of non-disclosure agreements in sexual assault cases. Unfortunately, many other countries have failed to follow suit. The United Kingdom Parliament recently struck down a request to ban NDAs in harassment, and Australia’s overuse of the agreements in recent years has persisted, despite continued criticism.[6]

In fact, in Australia, the statistics speak for themselves: a survey conducted by The University of Sydney found that 75% of legal practitioners have never resolved a sexual harassment case without an NDA, and 50% have never advised a client to decline an NDA. What does it say about a society when weaponized silence is normalized? It tells us that the established power structures — structures by nature rooted in patriarchy — inherently fail to protect its most common victims: women. As Fordham professor Julia Suk explains, “it [is] ... helpful to think of misogyny as existing even if there are no misogynists,” because even if those in

power do not have an express desire to harm women, we still have an ingrained, “legal structure that we could describe as misogyny because the hatred, violence, discrimination, and hostility towards women” is undeniable.[7]

Advocates of NDAs as a means to empower women rather than subjugate them argue that women who do not wish to speak out deserve the choice to receive alternative compensation. There is one key issue with this argument: signing non-disclosure agreements is often positioned as a choice, but in reality, the circumstances surrounding them are incredibly detrimental to any real autonomy. Autonomy is limited in a few different ways:

1)Women of color are more likely to be targeted in sexual assault cases, and considering that vulnerable populations are easier to exploit, they often lack the resources (both financially and language-wise) to accurately interpret the documents with which they are presented. Lack of accurate legal counsel and language barriers fundamentally impair this illusory choice — how is a woman making a choice if she does not understand the choice she is making?

2)The women making these decisions have just experienced a massively traumatic experience and are forced into signing these documents within a matter of days or weeks. Without the time to process their experiences fully, these decisions are made under terrible circumstances, and despite potentially regretting the decision in the future, they can never reverse the damage of their signature on a paper they did not understand.

3)The people developing these agreements are often from enormous companies, like Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, and the prospect of fighting against them alone in a legal battle is beyond daunting. Even if a woman was to acquire adequate legal counsel, they would likely advise her to sign the agreement purely because they are likely to lose the settlement. Although multiple women joining together would make winning the case more likely, these agreements prevent victims from ever connecting with and finding solidarity with one another.

Trauma is a stain on autonomy, and insofar as our autonomy informs our sense of identity, women’s ability to reclaim their voices following such tragedies can be critically healing for them, empowering future women and preventing them from experiencing the same pain in the future. With our advocacy, perhaps a new generation of women in Australia or the United Kingdom may finally have the tools to speak out against their assaulters. They will reclaim their voices as part of a legal system that

truly helps those it claims to protect. Until this narrative is true for women across the world, women continue to be silenced, and each woman’s suffering echoes for generations.

Although legal conversations often appear to be dense, academized, and generally inaccessible, taking the time to parse through the language and decipher the systems around us is important, and it is inherently feminist. Robbed of such language, we cannot advocate for ourselves and others, and we cannot dismantle generations of oppression.

The stories of these women — these 87 women Harvey Weinstein assaulted — have faded since their exposure in 2017. While we should allow time to let us heal, we should never allow it to let us forget past atrocities. These women were tormented in their silence, and as injustice persists half a decade later, it is our responsibility to ensure that the lessons of their courage remain.

The unfortunate reality is this: we exist in a power structure where women are inherently discredited, mocked for their emotion, and often ignored despite their desperation. To allow a legal structure to reinforce these narratives rather than dismantle them is an unacceptable, tragic atrocity.

[1] Henry Zwartz, “Widespread use of non-disclosure agreements in Australia is ‘protecting serial predators,’” UNSW Sydney, last modified August 19, 2022, https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2022/08/widespreaduse-of-non-disclosure-agreements-in-australia-is--pro.

[2] Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” The New York Times, last modified October 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html.

[3] Kantor and Twohey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment”

[4] Ronan Farrow, “Harvey Weinstein’s Secret Settlements,” The New Yorker, last modified November 21, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/newsdesk/harvey-weinsteins-secret-settlements

[5] Zelda Perkins, “An NDA from Harvey Weinstein cost me my career – at last, banning them feels within reach,” The Guardian, last modified December 15, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/15/ nda-harvey-weinstein-confidentiality-clause-abuse

[6] “Government refuses to ban non-disclosure agreements in all harassment cases,” UK Parliament, last modified May 14, 2024, https://committees. parliament.uk/committee/158/treasury-committee/news/201427/government-refuses-to-ban-nondisclosure-agreements-in-all-harassment-cases/; “Overuse of NDAs in sexual harassment cases in Australian workplaces,” The University of Sydney, last modified March 6, 2024, https://www.sydney. edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/03/06/overuse-of-ndas-in-sexual-harassment-cases-in-australian-workpla.html.

[7] “How The Law Fails Women and What To Do About It,” Current Affairs, last modified December 14, 2023, https://www.currentaffairs.org/ news/2023/12/how-the-law-fails-women-and-what-to-do-about-it.

Letter from the Design Leads:

Echo took thematic inspiration from the vibrant colors of falling leaves and dusky autumn skies as the new class arrived to campus. Each year, the story is both the same and autumn skies as the new class wholly new all at once. Te same place, same traditions. But new faces, new stories waiting to unfold.

What does Echo mean to us? It’s how the infuence of our past staf members, now alumni, reverberates through new blood; how we attempt to convey our history to the new members joining Spare Rib; how the call to community sounds a little diferently every year, yet remains charged with the same underlying message and impulse. Echo resounds with wisdom and fond memories, but also loss and past mistakes. As dawn moves to dusk, as golden leaves return to the embrace of the earth, brilliant yellows and burning oranges melt into mellower greens and purples. Our color scheme encourages new visions for this cyclical, inevitable transition between old and new, death and rebirth.

We lost and gained so much this year amidst cacophonies of anger and determination, pain and healing. It’s our responsibility to listen to the lingering wisdom of those who came before us, and amplify the lessons we learn, adding our own voices and perspective to the mix. Tese days, the need to unite our voices in outrcry is stronger than ever before. As reactionary movements gain momentum, we see shadows of a hateful past echoing into our present. It is in our power to shout above their noise and call for a new, brighter vision of the world we want to live in.

Rachel would also like to dedicate some space in this letter to the person who inspired the suggestion of “echo” as a theme: Won Jang ‘26. Won passed away in 24X far too early, but his memory still echoes throughout the consciousness of our campus and the hearts of those whose lives he touched. those whose lives he touched. He loved music, and was ridiculously talented at it too, so of course he’d inspire a theme with such auditory connotations. H He would probably fnd it both funny and fattering that he, a straight dude, was now somehow part of an intersectional feminist zine, but he embodied so many of the values that make Spare Rib the compassionate, caring community that it is. Tat enduring sense of community remains a source of great comfort to Spribbers in the face of all tragedy and hardship, and we so deeply appreciate all who continue to cultivate it. <3

We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our amazing staf, who brought this publication to life with every letter, stroke, and splash of color. And for bearing with our many, many Slack messages. We wish to extend this gratitude to all of our new ribbers; we are so excited to see their work evolve over the next few years. Pretty soon, the legacy we build together now will be echoing in the ears of generations of future ribbers.

With love, 24F Design Leads, Angela, Lauren, and Rachel

Our Staff:

Abby De Leon ‘27 community development*

Aditi Singh ‘28 writing

A.S. ‘27 writing, art, design*

Angela Yuhan Zhang ‘28 writing

Anna Costello ‘28 writing

Avery Lin ‘27 writing, logistics*

art: created art for articles

design: created layout for page writing: authored an article *: acted as a department lead

Claire Kovac ‘27 writing

Dayanara Martinez ‘28 art

Geena San Diego ‘28 art

Grace Lee ‘28 writing, art, design

Eda Naz Gokdemir ‘25 writing*

Ella Grim ‘25 writing, GM*

Ellie Appelgren ‘28 writing

Kate Ginger ‘27 writing, marketing*

Lauren Kang ‘25 cover, art, design*

Lilla Bozek ‘27 art

Lillia Hammond TH‘26 art, design

Maeve Kenney ‘27 logistics*

Maggie Emerson ‘25 writing*

Erika Sowah ‘28 writing

Erica Mao ‘28 design

Idil Sahin ‘26 marketing*

Layla Charron ‘28 design

Noelle Blake ‘26 writing, community development*

Peiwei He ‘28 art

Rachel Roncka ‘26 writing, art, design*

Sabrina Chu ‘26 special projects*

Sam Paisley ‘25 art

Samantha Kang ‘27 writing*, art

Saturn Guo ‘28 writing

Serena Suson ‘25 writing, GM*

Shena Han ‘25 art, design

Soraya Fonseca ‘28 writing

Vanessa Wynn ‘28 art, design

Yawen Xue ‘26 art, design

Yehalah Fernando ‘26 logistics*