The College Hill Independent - Vol. 36 Issue 6

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 06 16 MAR 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 06 MAR 16 2018

Yellow Rat Bastard Pia Mileaf-Patel

NEWS

FEATURES

02

Week in Review: Growing Industries Soraya Ferdman, Marly Toledano

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A Progressive Recess Jane Argodale

14

TECH

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METRO 07 11

13

15

"For the Well-Being of the Company..."

Olivia Kan-Sperling

OCCULT

Citizens United Sara Van Horn

09

Offshore But Not Out of Mind Kion You

ARTS

Under the Moonlight Ruby Aiyo Gerber, Paula Pacheco Soto & Emma Lloyd

Every Rose Has Its Thorn Mitchell Johnson

LITERARY 17

I Love New Björk Mica Chau

Eat 'em Tabitha Payne

EPHEMERA

Heretofore Tatiana Dubin

08 X

Motivational Poster Amanda Denmark Anecdotes + a Fib Zak Ziebell & Liby Hays

MISSION STATEMENT

FROM THE EDITORS: It snowed this week in Providence. A thick white snow that blustered through the Tuesday wind. On Wickenden Street a car spun out on the ice, ran onto the sidewalk, nearly hit a tree. A police car paused and drove on.

On Wednesday snow became ice. Students walked out of their classrooms around the country to stand in support with the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In Providence, students from the Providence Student Union organized a rally at the Rhode Island State House. A now familiar chant: Enough is enough.

Many of us have felt enough is enough for a long time. I remember where I sat when I learned of the Sandy Hook massacre. When will the laws begin to change? Governor Rick Scott of Florida raised the age to buy firearms from 18 to 21 years of age. Students from Parkland like Emma González and Allyson Adak are organizing students to march, to meet with legislators, to demand change. Might this be the moment?

By week’s end the snow will be gone. Enough is enough.

-JT

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community.

The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

SPRING 2018

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Paula Pacheco Soto

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed

SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma

LIST Jane Argodale Amos Jackson Fadwa Ahmed

TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott

Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Wen Zhuang COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Rémy Poisson DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery

X Zak Ziebell

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Gabriel Matesanz

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN

GROWING INDUSTRIES

BY Soraya Ferdman & Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION BY Carly Paul DESIGN BY Laura Kenney

Reasons to Lyft After a long Saturday night and a few too many tequila shots, sometimes the only thing the uninhibited mind desires is to pass out in its very own bed. At home.

At least we can guess that’s what 21-year-old Kenny Bachman of Gloucester County, New Jersey had been thinking when he called for an Uber home after a night of clubbing in late February. Not until he woke up the next morning did Bachman process that he had been partying with his friends in West Virginia that night. His Uber ride took him 300 miles from West Virginia to New Jersey.

When he got out of the car in South New Jersey, the driver informed Bachman he needed to pay for tolls in addition to the steep fee for the surge period trip.

Bachman gave him $20 in cash, a small fee compared to the total price of the trip­—he had accrued a $1,635 bill for his ride home. The confused passenger tried to dispute the bill but Uber only offered to return to him the cash he had given the driver.

Bachman started a GoFundMe page to pay for his drunken ride home. It quickly became clear that Bachman did not have much to worry about. Eat Clean Bro, a New Jersey based meal prep company offered to pay his bill in full. They wanted to commend him for avoiding drunk driving. On their site, they feature offerings including loaded guacamole and skinny shrimp.

They also offer ‘bro points’ for valued customers.

As it turns out, Bachman’s coastal trek does not even touch on the distances Uber is willing to go. Rumor has it that in 2017, one man, also known as MrBeast, took the longest Uber ride in history, a 2,256 mile trip from North Carolina to California. The forty hour trip is chronicled in a Youtube video. MrBeast also used external funding for the $5,500 ride that would have cost about $500 by air. The world record ride was funded by Quid, a software and services company.

Cross-state Ubering, though financially impractical, is not entirely uncommon. One Uber ride from Dallas to Nashville took eleven hours. The previous record-holder took a 7 hour trip, including a break for Wendy’s.

The Independent is not certain why people are competing to spend the longest amount of time with the same company who featured a promotion in France that paired passengers with ‘hot chick’ drivers and has been again and again decried for its sexist work environment.

Even Bachman has a few questions for the company: he wonders if his driver should have asked a few questions before taking a blacked out passenger for a 300 mile ride.

But maybe he thought it was best not to ask questions about an over $1000 gig with a quiet passenger on the line.

One Uber senior executive proposed a plan to create a team designated for finding out about the personal lives of journalists and using it to blackmail them into keeping the company’s image clean. Still, the company can’t seem to stop making headlines. The Indy has nothing to hide, as we all prefer Lyft.

-MT

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Monkey’s Business On Thursday, March 8, police barged into a barn on 462 19th Avenue in Comstock, Wisconsin, where they found a multi-layered marijuana farm––“a very sophisticated growing operation,” according to CBS Minnesota.

“This one was a pretty high-tech operation inside of a barn” said Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald in an interview with WEAU News. “They literally built another building inside of the top part of the barn to mask the smell and help assist with the grow operation.” Despite these peculiarities, it seemed like just another day on the job for these police officers. But then they found two monkeys.

Because the sheriff’s office did not respond to the Independent’s request for an interview, we can only offer the following speculations about what went down: Michael Haney wanted to start a zoo. Something about the innocence of it all struck him as a worthy life goal. His property, a large barn in Comstock, seemed suitable for his professional aspirations. It was certainly spacious enough, with a second floor that he hoped would one day turn into a café and gift shop.

Haney wasn’t naïve––he knew that obtaining a zoo license would be costly and could take years. So far, he had three cages and two monkeys, though he hadn’t registered either with state officials. The third monkey, along with all the other animals, would come when the money did.

At first, the pot growing was only a side business.

It was hard to find an investor as convinced as he was about the zoo market. Without a consistent job, his

goal of opening and running a zoo felt increasingly out of reach. He had never given the monkeys any of his product. Though, on one occasion, he may have asked them to weigh and package it.

Marijuana seemed like a profitable and temporary option. His love for nature, once solely directed towards building a zoo, now proved useful as a farmer. Perhaps he could mix the two dreams into one: the outer building a zoo, and the inner a pot growery. The monkeys were in favor of it so long as they had access to the café turned snack bar. Haney let one of the chimps plan the menu if they both promised to improve their Wisconsin accent.

The monkeys, originally from Texas, forgot that they had agreed to this.

By the time he was arrested by the county sheriff, his barn housed about 300 marijuana plants, 100 bananas, and a video log with Haney and the monkeys arguing about the future of their company, “Zoological Park and Garden.”

In his mug shot, Haney’s face looks remorseful: his eyebrows droop in opposing acute angles.The monkeys themselves have been recovering from years of waiting for the zoo that would never arrive and were in no mood to be interviewed. They are being looked after by a friend of the suspect who promises to have known nothing about the operation. He had always pictured his friend as a wholesome guy with a dream to own a zoo.

-SF

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

WALKING OUT

The West Virginia teachers strike and the future of American labor

BY Jane Argodale ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Katherine Sang On February 22, 35,000 teachers in all 55 West Virginia counties walked out on their jobs, shutting down public schools statewide for the second time in the state’s history. The first time was 28 years ago. Public school teachers across the country are underpaid and face poor working conditions, but the situation in West Virginia has been especially dire. According to statistics published in 2017 by the National Education Association (NEA), West Virginia ranks 48th in the country for teacher pay, with an average salary of $45,622 in 2016—$10,000 below the national average. But teachers decided to strike when the state legislature approved changes to the state’s Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA), which would double monthly insurance premiums for many state employees starting this summer. One teacher’s sign during a strike protest in state capital Charleston read, “Will Teach for Insurance.”

The nine-day strike—the longest in the state’s history—continued until March 6 in a remarkable display of unity among the teachers, who organized in a Facebook group independently of the leadership of any organization. The West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) and American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) can lobby state legislators but doesn't actually have collective bargaining rights. The strike ended when the governor promised a five percent pay raise, to halt premium increases for the next year, and to create a task force to reassess PEIA’s structure. However, the legislature failed to meet teachers’ demands that the funding for these measures come from a severance tax on natural gas, instead funding it with a cut to the state’s Medicaid program—meaning that among other issues, there is still no long-term source of revenue that could offset the costs of keeping insurance premiums low. Changes to PEIA besides the short-term cap on premiums have yet to be made.

Though the strike in West Virginia was not a complete victory, it came as an unlikely success at a moment when such collective actions are rarely seen, and still spurred similar movements across the country. Teachers in other states are now beginning to follow suit, with threats of a strike being issued by teachers in Kentucky and a statewide work stoppage planned for April 2 in Oklahoma.

In a public Facebook post explaining the reasons for the strike, Tulsa teacher Beth Wallis wrote, “I woke up this morning to a bank account in the red because a gas bill had accidentally deducted twice-over this month. My gas bill isn't extravagant, but 2x means that my once-a-month public school paycheck can't budget for any sort of emergency. I can always wait more tables, right? Maybe sell some plasma? At least I don't have massive student loan

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NEWS

payments like most teachers who are working their whole lives literally to pay off the training it took to get them the job in the first place.” Wallis’s story is not an outlier in her state. Oklahoma ranks just after West Virginia as 49th in the country for teacher salaries, with an average of $45,276 paid out to teachers in 2016.

As these state-level movements continue to build, West Virginia could also see improvements beyond the compromise that ended the strike. In an email interview with the Independent, West Virginia teacher, strike organizer, and member of the state’s branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Michael Mochaidean explained, “If other states become victorious in enacting a severance tax to pay for their pay raises, then that could signal to us that additional direct action might be needed.” Though no future actions have been planned yet, Mochaidean is optimistic: “Gym and PE teachers I've spoken with—people who have never been involved in politics or government their entire life—now know the ins and outs of our state government. That's a dangerous force to be reckoned with long-term.”

The revived movements among teachers in these states come at a time of intense national debate about the role of teachers and education in children’s lives, particularly under President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has decried public education in America as a failure not worth investing in.

Furthermore, a coming Supreme Court decision could potentially gut public sector unions, continuing a trend of dwindling union power since President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers in 1981.

The strike in West Virginia, even as it was organized without an official union, shows how crucial collective action is to progressive reform. +++ The recent strike in West Virginia is part of a long tradition of labor organizing in the state. Many teachers and supportive students at protests across the state wore red scarves—a nod to the striking coal miners who wore red scarves while fighting in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, against mine operator-backed law enforcement trying to violently suppress their union.

The gesture also points to common ground between blue collar workers and many of those employed in so-called middle class professions. Teachers are generally seen as members of the middle class, despite the fact that in West Virginia the average coal miner makes about $10,000 more annually than the average teacher.

The criteria that determine whether someone is working

or middle class relate more to their job’s required level of education and the nature of the work itself, rather than consistent differences in economic power. Michael Mochaidean argues that a more meaningful distinction can be made between the working class and the employer class. “Many teachers work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Their financial needs mirror those of other working class Americans, and while their degree status might differentiate them from traditional blue collar work, I see the income levels and health care concerns are more central to their class status than these other, ancillary points,” Mochaidean explained to the Indy. The expansion of the contemporary definition of working class to include professions like teaching recognizes that these workers largely share the same needs despite differences like a college education or more physically demanding work—particularly in light of declining workplace benefits.

In the national media, West Virginia is most often invoked in the narrative of the Trump-supporting ‘white working class,’ embittered and economically depressed by the decline of the state’s coal industry, and misled through their ignorance into viewing Donald Trump as a savior. This narrative takes up stereotypes about blue collar workers as representative of the working class as well as the Appalachian region. The perception that rural Appalachians are “helpless,” according to Mochaidean, is why he believes that many mainstream outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, initially misreported that the strike had ended after a deal was made between the WVEA and the state legislature—a narrative that positioned the WVEA, a broadly purposeless institution, as saving the teachers.

The ability to even form a union is still not on the table for the West Virginia teachers. Collective bargaining for all public employees is banned by the state, and teachers are free to join either the WVEA or AFT-WV, both, or neither, unlike a union which represents all members of its workforce regardless of membership. This is why teachers rejected the WVEA’s initial deal—it did not represent their demands in any capacity.

Typically, unions are able to charge argency fees to non-members that go towards the cost of representing them in collective bargaining. Janus v AFSCME, currently being deliberated over in the Supreme Court, could end the right to collect these mandatory fees for public sector unions nationwide, gutting their power in the same way that the WVEA and AFT-WV have already been weakened by West Virginia’s laws. In the case, Illinois state employee Mark Janus sued his union on the basis that the collection of the fee was a violation of

MARCH 16, 2018

his free speech rights, because he didn’t want to support the union. The Supreme Court, with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, is likely to side with Janus, overturning a decades-long precedent.

Still, the case of West Virginia provides an example of how labor organizing can still take place, with some difficulties, without this form of union representation.

Because WVEA and AFT-WV were forced to fight for state legislation on issues that would normally be negotiated by a union, striking for nearly two weeks became West Virginia teachers’ only recourse. Rather than utilizing what Mochaidean calls a “business unionism model,” in which a hierarchical union with paid positions lobbies an employer for certain benefits, teachers made their own demands without relying on intermediaries. +++ West Virginia’s strike came in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and subsequent comments by national public officials, including President Trump and DeVos, claiming that arming teachers could be one way to curb mass shootings in schools. Though no national legislation has been proposed to this end, serious pushes for state-level initiatives to arm teachers, including one in Florida, represent a dramatic and unprecedented expansion of the role teachers are meant to play in children’s lives.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Teachers already support students in ways that don’t fall under their official job descriptions, though they’ve never been expected to be able to fend off attackers brandishing assault rifles. In underfunded schools, teachers often end up paying to be able to do their jobs: in the 2015–2016 school year, teachers spent an average of $600 out of pocket on supplies for their classrooms, according to statistics collected by the nonprofit organization AdoptAClassroom.org. One Oklahoma third-grade teacher, Teresa Danks, made headlines last summer when she stood on a Tulsa road panhandling to raise money for her classroom. In an interview with NPR, Danks said, “I make a little bit under $35,000 a year, and that's before taxes and insurance and stuff. And then I spend about two grand a year on my classroom just to make my kids successful.” Throughout West Virginia, where one out of four children lives below the poverty line, teachers prepared and distributed meals to low income students so that they wouldn’t go hungry during the strike.

The current presidential administration, much like the previous administration, has emphasized support for charter schools and ‘school choice’ over funding for public education. In her widely-panned interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Secretary DeVos summarized her approach to education as, “We should be funding and investing in students, not in schools, school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems.” But teachers, just as

much as students, are not buildings or institutions—they are workers who take on an exceptionally broad range of responsibilities and deserve to be able to make a comfortable living. Under DeVos’ leadership teachers from state to state are likely to see their wages continue to stagnate or even decline, even as they are expected to shoulder entirely new responsibilities.

It’s not yet clear what the future holds for West Virginia’s teachers, whose demands have still not been fully met by their state’s government. What will come of the promised task force on PEIA is still up in the air, and how much the organizing power of the teachers will sustain itself beyond the end of the strike remains to be seen. Still, the impact of the strike has already reached far beyond West Virginia’s borders, speaking to the concerns of teachers all across the country as their profession has been devalued through a lack of material support, even as they’re expected to do more than ever. Even while on strike, the teachers gave the whole country a lesson on the persistent power of the rank-and-file, directly making their grievances known.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is forever indebted to the English teachers at Stuyvesant High School.

NEWS

04

BY Olivia Kan-Sperling ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Individualized healthcare and corporatized well-being +++

Of the many protest signs from last week written in that perfect classroom-style, magic-marker-on-cardstock lettering, more than one read: “I’d take a BULLET for your child but PEIA wouldn’t cover it!” Although perhaps hyperbolic, this slogan captures a key frustration of West Virginia’s teachers: while classrooms are often exhausting and stressful, teachers’ health is a low priority. Much coverage of the West Virginia teachers’ strike has singled out anger over PEIA, the Public Employees Insurance Agency, as the catalyst and rallying point for the movement. When asked about the origins of the strike, Kate Endicott, an English teacher, told the New York Times that “they told us that essentially if you weren’t a single person, if you had a family plan, your health insurance was going to rise substantially… I only clear right under $1,300 every two weeks, and they’re wanting to take $300 more away for me.” In return, teachers were offered a one percent pay raise, which would have amounted to only 44 cents more per day. After a sustained strike, teachers have now garnered a five percent raise, a temporary freeze on healthcare costs, and West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s promise that a specially appointed “task force” will meet by March 15 to find a permanent funding source for PEIA. While this is a welcome change, PEIA has been causing frustration for years; in addition to rising premiums, changes brought by West Virginia tax cuts created sky-rocketing out-of-pocket expenses.

As one teacher told Jacobin, “The number one thing was we needed a permanent fix to PEIA. It wasn’t about the money [i.e, salary] at all. It was about the insurance fix.” While precarious and unaffordable healthcare has plagued public sector workers since Reagan, tension in West Virginia reached a boiling point as PEIA started considering more invasive approaches to teachers’ health.

Recently, PEIA implemented Go365, an online and mobile phone health app, as a mandatory part of its “Healthy Tomorrows” preventative healthcare program.

In addition to tracking data like daily step-count, Go365 allows users to enter “healthy actions” such as completing a workout, getting a flu shot, running a marathon, or getting a physical exam—all for “Points” that eventually translate into Go365 Bucks. According to the company’s website, these Bucks “have no cash value,” but can be spent at the Go365 Mall on items such as iTunes gift cards, movie tickets, Fitbits, and Go365 workout swag.

Unless you’re on Medicare, you can even make Go365 Bucks charity donations to the Red Cross.

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TECH

Go365 is a subsidiary of Humana, Inc., which offers a spread of corporate healthcare plans. In addition to promoting its platform as “easier, better, and more fun,” Go365 stresses that their work is “deeply rooted in behavioral economics and actuarial science.” Bannered next to a photo of smiling, jogging white people: “You care about your employees. Go365™ can help them become happier, healthier and more productive.” Alongside the near meaningless “rewards” for good health, Go365 promises to reward companies themselves with fewer sick days, lower medical claims, and fewer hospital visits—a belief drawn from a three-year study conducted on Humana’s own employees. As their promotional material puts it, “wellness is vital” because “productivity losses related to personal and family health problems cost US employers $226 billion annually.”

For West Virginia public employees, data from Go365 was set to help decide premium and deductible amounts, and refusal to use the app, as well as failure to accrue enough points, would result in a $500 penalty at the end of the year. Many felt this to be an invasion of privacy, and, amid widespread controversy, by January of this year Governor Justice announced that Go365 would continue in West Virginia only as a voluntary program.

Although West Virginia’s teachers were able to put a stop to the initiative by collectively exerting pressure on their employers, there are more than 5 million workers currently enrolled in Go365—and, according to Humana, 46 percent of employers are looking to switch to preventative healthcare models in the next three to five years. Currently, there is a nationwide conversation underway about the role of the government in providing services, especially healthcare, to its citizens. As the number of public services shrinks, structural inequalities and obstacles to goals like ‘wellbeing’ are elided as more and more responsibility is placed in the hands of individuals. Go365 works to exacerbate this trend as it explicitly places the responsibility of wellness in the hands of employees.

Whether in a West Virginia schoolhouse, white-collar tech campus, or blue-collar warehouse, this impulse towards individualization is at the heart of workplace organization across the United States—depending on the context, however, this technique manifests itself in vastly different ways on the bodies and lives of employees.

Increasingly, digital technologies play a key role in this process of articulating the worker as a singular, nuclear entity—or, in the case of highly mechanized, unskilled jobs, articulating the bodies of workers into discrete, micro-manageable units. At the end of January this year, Amazon was granted patents for a wrist-worn device that tracks the hand movements of employees in order to increase the efficiency with which inventory items are located: the wristband vibrates when a worker reaches for an incorrect item. This is to be deployed first and foremost in Amazon’s warehouses, in which workers are already subjected to comprehensive surveillance, limited bathroom breaks, and 55-hour workweeks. Such technologically-assisted strategies operate under a logic in which employees are fundamentally antagonistic to the interests of employers, and must thus be kept under a constant regime of discipline and punishment. In order to implement such a regime, the individual worker must be made visible, so as to be singled out and corrected when deemed necessary. In this case, the worker is not an individual in any humanistic sense, but rather the possessor of a body that functions as a discrete yet interchangeable unit within a machine.

The unprecedented level of control over employees’ bodies enabled by the advent of biometric data further exacerbates abysmal working conditions. During heat waves or seasons of high demand, it is common for Amazon ‘pickers’ to collapse from exhaustion on the warehouse floor, and there have been cases of death directly linked to the excruciating physical pace of inventory jobs. Moreover, most Amazon warehouses rely largely on temp labor, which allows the company to avoid providing benefits, like health insurance, to its employees.

Temp workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation; while being pushed to higher and higher standards in the hopes of acquiring a permanent position, few actually ever make it to job security, and are instead let go after being pushed to their physical limits. The type of biometric data collected by Amazon’s surveillance technologies is crucial in allowing pickers to view themselves as individualized statistical units on the scoreboard, players with a ranking, thereby inducing them to work ever harder. While this might resemble the “rewards” system of Go365, this game is one that pushes bodies far past beneficial workouts and to the breaking point of physical health. Significantly, maintaining a permanent yet constantly changing population of temp workers precludes any possibility of their unionizing—not only are workers constantly competing with one another, but their total replaceability renders resistance impossible.

MARCH 16, 2018

+++ In the white-collar world of Silicon Valley, the corporate engines that generated many of these biometric technologies, ideas of individualization and health are mobilized in a vastly different manner. Recently, major tech and finance companies have been leading a trend in ever-more-comprehensive “employee wellbeing” programs. On their ‘Careers’ page, Google boasts that, in addition to healthcare packages that Amazon temp workers or West Virginia teachers can only dream of, many of their campuses offer on-site “wellness and healthcare services, including physicians, chiropractic, physical therapy, and massage services,” plus “fitness centers and classes to save you time and keep you fit.” Such programs are all in the interest of “helping you to be at your best.”

Companies like Facebook offer similarly holistic employee-care benefits. For its Seattle campus, Amazon has constructed two massive glass “spheres” containing over 400 species of tropical plants—the idea being that “green spaces can inspire creativity and improve brain function.”

While certainly appealing, “well-being” amenities such as these are symptoms of a troubling trend in corporate culture that discourages employees from seeking fulfillment outside of the workplace—a strategy invested not in the health of its employees but in their dependence and loyalty.

White-collar tech workers are not employees, but rather entrepreneurs, intelligent individuals in control of not only their own futures, but those of the whole world.

Perfect health, as reached through a series of SoulCycle classes, is in many ways just another facet of the competent individual, a person constituted by a series of good choices (studying hard, getting good grades, attending a prestigious university), who works at maximum capacity, always. Individualism is the corollary of a holistic understanding of the employee. Unlike the disciplinary technologies such companies impose on their laboring underclass—Amazon’s warehouses and Apple’s Foxconn factories are just a few examples—employee wellbeing programs operate under the guise of care. By promising to care for the “whole” employee, a valued individual at their company, tech employers are able to exert a holistic control over aspects of employees’ lives normally outside the realm of the workplace.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Classrooms like those in West Virginia occupy an interesting middle ground between these two sites of labor —neither as nightmarish as a warehouse floor, nor as apparently utopian as a tech campus. Go365 is an interesting point in which these similarities and differences are articulated. It is relevant to consider that Go365 is itself a product of a white-collar office space, and that, in the app, supervision of holistic wellbeing is exported onto a radically different population of workers. In many ways, the program’s marketing rhetoric and aesthetic are reminiscent of the type of free yoga class Google employees might find at their gym, and similarly promise an understanding of the “whole” person who shows up to work, or at least their whole body. But the reality of the lives of many employees is incompatible with this program’s conception of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle.

The manner in which Go365 seems to so willfully misunderstand the challenges faced by workers like West Virginia’s public employees sheds light on the economic gulf that separates the working from the white-collar class. While the leisure time for daily jogging, yoga class, and chatting with a personal health coach might be available to Silicon Valley software engineers, many teachers have to work two or more jobs—and they don’t have a massage table in the teachers’ lounge. Even the complete datafication of the body required by apps such as Go365, which may raise few eyebrows at companies like Google, takes on a different meaning in institutions like the public school system. For educators, step-count would have joined a list of invasive metrics—like students’ test scores, for example—used to evaluate their performance and dole out punishment accordingly. In this type of constant numerical assessment, teachers are inserted into

a ranking system with parallels—though also, of course, huge differences—to warehouse pickers’ stats. The fact that teachers are denied the possibility of taking care of themselves with actual US dollars reveals the additional cruelty of the “Go365 Bucks” rewards system.

Being awarded an iTunes gift card for going on a run is of little use to a teacher who is barely able to pay rent, buy groceries, and cover health insurance costs. Go365’s seemingly benevolent rhetoric of caring for the whole person disguises a practice of systemic exploitation.

Although Go365 was only a minor concern amid greater frustrations over PEIA, it is symptomatic of the type of increasingly invasive supervision employees are subjected to, whether in the classroom or the warehouse.

The biometric surveillance and interventions Go365 enables are especially disturbing in that they slowly increase the jurisdiction of the employer to encompass the whole person rather than just the employee. Moreover, preventative healthcare signals a dangerous shift in our understanding of what constitutes medical services and who takes responsibility for them. PEIA places the onus of health on the employee herself, despite the fact that her exhausting lifestyle, as necessitated by an underpaid, stressful job, may be a major contributing factor to her falling sick. Barred from actual medical assistance by poor health insurance plans and unable to fulfill the requirements of healthy living by virtue of her financial situation, such an employee is thus placed in an impossible position with regard to maintaining her health.

This making-responsible of the individual employee, the depiction of health as a direct consequence of poor lifestyle choices rather than systemic injustice, is a different iteration of the same individualism/individualization that permeates the startup as well as the warehouse.

It is important to remember that, in the case of West Virginia, public employees were able to make Go365 voluntary through collective action. As strikers were quick to point out, this small state has a long, hard-won history of effective labor organizing. In fact, the first teacher walkouts were organized by the sons and daughters of coal miners, workers who proudly remember their fathers’ participation in mining strikes. Unionization, which relies on an understanding of shared interests and injustices between members of a working class, is in direct opposition to the ideology of individual choice, individual responsibility, and individual achievement that is the cornerstone of the US workplace ethic as well as US politics. In a time when education is one of a quickly shrinking number of public services, and educators themselves are refused a living wage, West Virginia is a potent reminder of the power of collective organizing. Rather than being normalized, the relatively minor offense that was Go365 instead became a catalyst for a much wider movement: for walking the picket line, rather than the treadmill.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20 thinks you need more than an apple a day to keep protest away.

TECH

06

BANKING ON CHANGE

BY Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Laura Kenney Last Thursday, the FANG Collective and the Shame on Citizens campaign celebrated a victory after learning that Citizens Bank had ended their financing of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), one of the prominent natural gas companies responsible for the construction of the Dakota Access, Mariner East, and Bayou Bridge pipelines. As of December, Citizens Bank has elected not to renew the $72 million loan to ETP that was created in March 2015.

While Citizens Bank did not attribute their withdrawal to the organizing done by protest groups, this undeniably represents a success for public pressure activism.

To build these pipelines, ETP and other natural gas companies rely on significant loans from financial institutions like Citizens Bank to fund the clearing of forests, excavation of trenches, and pipe assembly necessary for construction. In turn, loans themselves are financed with private client accounts.

The Dakota Access, Mariner East, and Bayou Bridge pipelines are all oil projects in the Midwest and Southern United States which are constructed on Indigenous land and pose significant environmental risk to the surrounding water resources. Indigenous groups and activist allies oppose the construction of pipeline projects within treaty boundaries, citing the high risk of water contamination as well as the desecration of sacred land. Activist groups also protested the state violence involved in suppressing popular resistance. Council member for the Narrangansett tribe, Randy Noka, called The Dakota Access Pipeline, which leaked at least five times in 2017, another example of putting profit over human rights. “Corporate greed cannot come at the expense of the environment,” said Noka, addressing protesters in front of Citizens Bank last year, “and certainly cannot come at the expense of the aboriginal people.” +++ Citizens Bank, headquartered in Providence since its founding in 1828, is the twelfth largest retail bank in the United States and one of the oldest financial service firms in the country. Last spring, Citizens contributed $72.5 million to a line of credit with Sunoco Logistics Partners, an oil and natural gas transportation company then in the process of merging with Energy Transfer Partners.

While Citizens itself has painted a rosy portrait of its community outreach—most recently boasting a National Philanthropy Day Award for “Outstanding Corporation”—their willingness to finance these pipelines has drawn ire and suspicion. Over the past year, activist groups have attempted to hold Citizens to its professed core values. On March 2 of last year, protesters from the FANG Collective, an activist organization committed to environmental justice, blocked the entrance to Citizens’s headquarters. Two activists locked themselves with bike locks to the front doors of the company while a third sat down in the revolving door. The arrest and removal of the activists, involving both the police and fire departments, was recorded by FANG as a Facebook Live video that later garnered over 41,000 views. All three activists were charged with misdemeanors and released that same day. While this sort of direct action in Downtown Providence was already startling to many, Mayo Saji, a student at Brown University and one of the activists arrested, emphasized the difference in the resources and consequences of FANG’s protests compared to the protests at frontline communities: “We can plan when we get arrested and have support during our arrest and plan for press to be there.” In contrast, at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline the police used water hoses, rubber bullets, and tear gas to suppress nonviolent direct action last year.

The FANG Collective, founded in 2013, has been involved in a number of campaigns fighting the construction of natural gas pipelines and fossil fuel power plants.

FANG has also supported the Shame on Citizens

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METRO

campaign, a group created in the first months of 2017 in an effort to increase public pressure on Citizens Bank.

Shame on Citizens focused most of their efforts on persuading Citizens’s clients to close their bank accounts.

The campaign recorded the testimonies of those who volunteered to publically close their accounts and shared them on social media. A couple of weeks after FANG’s lock-down action at Citizens’ headquarters, Shame on Citizens joined with FANG to protest outside the bank’s branch location in Providence in response to a call to action by front-line communities fighting the Mariner East Pipeline in Pennsylvania.

In addition to public protest, activist groups have also engaged in legislative efforts. Last year, the movement NoDAPL RI tried to exert pressure on all financial institutions in Providence by attempting to pass an ordinance that would require the City Council to divest from all banks funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. After a hearing that included testimonies from Indigenous activists, Providence residents, and business interests, the ordinance ultimately did not pass.

Recent activist pressure has not been exclusively focused on Citizens. A few weeks ago, FANG interrupted a Morgan Stanley recruiting event at Brown University to protest the company’s financing of ETP. Citing environmental hazards as well as the current resistance of frontline communities, members of FANG emphasized the tremendous influence of financial institutions on the construction of pipelines. “Morgan Stanley says that they believe that capital can be used to create change,” one protester read. “It’s time to put those words into action and divest from ETP.” FANG then read a list of the Indigenous territories affected by the pipeline.

Because banks are often more accessible than the natural gas corporations they finance, applying public pressure on financial institutions is one way forward for environmental activism. “I think it’s a powerful statement to show that direct action and community organizing works,” said Nick Katkevich, an organizer from the FANG Collective. While Citizens hasn’t released a statement, Katkevich firmly believes that the decision to withhold funding is due to public pressure. He highlighted the diversity of nonviolent tactics in bringing about change: “There are people closing their bank accounts, there are people doing public demonstrations, and there are the lock-down actions. It made it easy for a lot of different folks to engage.” Katkevich also emphasized the importance of the protest’s location. Because Citizens is headquartered in Providence, when actions were taken, “it was right in the face of the executives and higher-ups of Citizens Bank. I don’t think they wanted to face that type of public pressure in their home region.”

As much of the success of these protests comes from their location, coordinating protests for non-local fights

Ending pipeline financing through public pressure can present a challenge. “It’s hard with the [Bayou Bridge] pipeline fight in Louisiana,” says Katkevich. “People may feel disconnected because it’s far away.” Because financial institutions have such a global scope, it is increasingly important for protesters to be able to counter with interconnected activism. “We disrupted Morgan Stanley at Brown University for funding ETP, but Morgan Stanley is also the number one financier of the company trying to build the power plant in Burrillville, [Rhode Island.]”

More connections, Katkevich believes, can be made between global and local fights. While power comes with location, making connections between protests across distance is essential, particularly as the systems these groups seek to confront are often global in nature.

“Obviously all these fights are interconnected. What’s happening to the climate is interconnected to all of us.”

According to Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, and co-founder of the climate justice organization 350.org, these activist groups have the right strategy for tackling big oil projects. Not only are banks, unlike planned construction sites, accessible places of protest for most Americans, but they are also susceptible to public pressure from the people they service. Scott Parkin, a senior campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network, agrees: “Oil companies are always going to drill for oil and build pipelines—it’s why they exist. But the banks funding [the Dakota Access Pipeline] have a choice as to where they put their money.” Companies like ETP receive their funding from large banking institutions whose profit-driven priorities do not necessarily include moral considerations. Banks, however, are ultimately beholden to their clientele. As McKibben writes in Yes! magazine, “It’s probably sustained public pressure that will do the most good.”

Saji emphasized the importance of both direct action when engaging corporate leaders and targeting the financial resources of these massive construction projects.

“FANG has gotten really good at targeting the funders of these programs,” she says. “You’ve got to take away funding and change people’s values along the way.”

Public pressure, however, is limited. And Katkevich, similarly, still believes Citizens Bank has work to do— much of it internal to the bank itself. To build their headquarters in Johnston, Rhode Island, the bank recently bulldozed 70 acres of forest. “It’s obviously good that they stopped funding Energy Transfer Partners, but we still have to dig in to see what other types of relationships they have. I hope they just continue to listen to folks in the community.”

SARA VAN HORN B’21 wants you to join a credit union.

MARCH 16, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

08

BY Mitchell Johnson ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Hanesworth DESIGN BY Bethany Hung & Amos Jackson

LOVE IS AN EMPTY THEME PARK For the past few months, my friends and I watched The Bachelor almost every week. We said we were doing this somewhat ironically. But by the end, watching became a slow and joyless slog. It was clear that the show was onto us. Ironic viewing requires a sincere, relatively naïve object. But The Bachelor is fundamentally cynical; it sees your ironic viewing and mocks you for it. Like all powerful institutions, it absorbs dissent.

Last week, the show aired its 22nd season finale.

The ratings this year, as in previous years, had declined.

Since it premiered in 2002, a slew of other dating competition shows have entered and left the market. There were celebrity-centered shows, like A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila (which featured both male and female contestants; Tequila is bisexual) or Flavor of Love with the rapper Flava Flav. There’s the current hit Are You the One?, a show in which 20 people are secretly matched via an algorithm and then tasked with figuring out their matches to win $1 million (this show seems to have realized that there are sexier prizes than ‘true love’). In this landscape, The Bachelor can feel outdated and prudish.

Case in point: what The Bachelor politely refers to as the ‘Fantasy Suite,’ Are You The One? bluntly labels ‘the Boom-Boom Room.’

But the original Bachelor—now a huge international brand—remains the most popular dating show in the US, and the center of an ever-expanding Bachelor universe. In addition to the flagship Bachelor and Bachelorette, there’s a version of the show in over 20 countries, as well as the spinoffs Bachelor in Paradise, Bachelor Pad, and, this year, the Bachelor Winter Games. Billed as an alternative to the winter Olympics, the Bachelor Winter Games brought losing Bachelor contestants from around the world to date each other in between bouts of various competitive snow sports.

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To say The Bachelor is anti-feminist has become a cliché, a powerless statement in the face of its absurdly heightened misogyny. The show doesn’t ‘fail’ the Bechdel Test so much as actively spurns it. The Bachelor leers at the Bechdel Test, sends it shirtless selfies at 3 AM. Still, the show now mostly occupies the benign cultural status of a guilty pleasure—Roxane Gay, a novelist and self-proclaimed “bad feminist,” is famously a big fan. Part of the pleasure in watching the show is in its welcome release from the demands of critique that apply to more nuanced cultural objects. To earnestly criticize The Bachelor (in a leftist alt-weekly, for instance) in 2018, is to commit the sin of not getting the joke. But the show itself seems to have internalized this stance. Rather than a chauvinistic but sincere valorization of patriarchal, heterosexual love, The Bachelor reveres its central object—the committed, straight relationship—only to defile it for our entertainment. Its genre commitments are more in line with dystopian fiction than romance novels, more Hunger Games than Pride and Prejudice.

A few notable characters from this season: Arie, this season’s titular character, is 36 (his most prominent personality trait), a former race car driver who now does real estate in Scottsdale, Arizona (swoon!). The primary function of The Bachelor’s leading man is to be an empty vessel, and Arie’s eerily dead eyes made him perfectly suited to the task. He has a tattoo of the numbers ‘24601’ on his wrist because he strongly identifies with Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Misérables. Arie’s Les Mis fanaticism was never addressed in the show itself—one suspects details like these are potentially too interesting, or perhaps the comparison to Valjean too damning.

Bekah M. was the season’s young ingénue and fan-favorite. She’s 22 (her most prominent personality trait), clearly planted to garner millennial viewers. She

goes rock climbing and has a cool pixie cut—the first contestant in the show’s history to ever have short hair (such is the pace of representational milestones on The Bachelor). Bekah often felt like the show’s sole voice of reason. In the first episode, she asked Arie what made him excited to be alive. “Excitement, you know,” he responded. Bekah then replied, “Excitement ... makes you excited to be alive?”

Crystal was the season’s villain, the lonely Other Woman in a show with almost 30 women. A blonde personal trainer with a seductive, raspy voice­—she was eventually eliminated for starting too much drama, but not before delivering the season’s best line: “I wasn’t hiding in my room. I was investing in myself.”

Kendall, Becca K., Lauren B. The final trio. Kendall is a taxidermist, clearly intended by the show to be a one-off joke in the first couple episodes, who through some glitch in the formula almost made it to the end.

After one wilderness survival-themed group date, Kendall thanked Arie for the experience: “I’ve always just wanted to eat a bunch of bugs.” He went to Kendall’s hometown and together they stuffed dead mice in her garage. It was cute, but the show must inevitably discard anyone even slightly charming. Two women remained by the final episode: Becca and Lauren. Becca is portrayed on the show as just kind of boring. Lauren, on the other hand, managed to come off as boring enough to be riveting in her own right—so blank and inscrutable, one wondered if she was some sort of robot invader.

The bachelor is not the show’s main character, and nor are any of the women. The show’s main character is its own contrived structure, a perverse twist on the standard marriage plot. It is decidedly conservative but necessarily polyamorous; the producers seem to understand that straight-up heterosexual monogamy, among other

MARCH 16, 2018

Notes on this season of The Bachelor

things, doesn’t make for exciting TV. In each episode, the show presents an impossibly idealized couple form, one that is already unattainable within the show’s structure.

The central drama emerges from each contestant’s inevitable failure to live up to this ideal, spurred by the show’s ruthlessly ticking clock. Contestants are dragged onward to the next group date, the next Rose Ceremony, always lamenting the scarcity of time with Arie. No relationship is ever developing fast enough for the show’s demands.

What makes romance romantic is its specificity, but The Bachelor requires the production of the least specific romance possible. There’s no magic that comes from any particular interaction between people on The Bachelor, only grand, empty gestures filled with a rotating set of characters. Rather than talk about their interests, experiences, etcetera, each date takes the form of relentless self-examination of the state of that week’s relationship.

This produces a unique lexicon—every conversation is spent reflecting on the “progress” of “ that connection,” or “those feelings” (always prefaced with an article). “I feel like we have that connection. You know what I mean?”

Arie says on one date. There is never anything more than this to say, and the strings of empty signifiers, combined with a few romantic guitar chords, gloss over each date’s utter dead-eyed vacuity. After watching enough episodes, the show starts to feel like a mechanistic nightmare, or perhaps heterosexuality’s death drive: the production of a relationship that is all form and no content. It’s easy to understand why robotic Lauren did so well.

For the purposes of easy filming, nearly every location in The Bachelor is completely desolate. The couples spend their time ambling about deserted gardens, eating in empty restaurants, and exploring vacant theme parks that nevertheless contain an inordinate number of intimate nooks. In one episode in Italy, the show's producers seemed to have emptied out an entire town for the happy couple to stroll through. This gives the proceedings a post-apocalyptic character, suggesting a world in which everyone has fled so that rich straight couples can peacefully spend a lazy afternoon followed by dinner.

Compound this emptiness with the fact that, by the end of the show’s two-month filming process, the few remaining women are basically spending huge amounts of time alone in hotel rooms awaiting, at most, one date with the same man each week, and the romance starts to feel even more abhorrently compulsory. Falling in love, which in the real world never occurs in a vacuum, becomes the only possible activity. No one is allowed to do anything else. After dinner, the couple will often dance alone in an empty room, while a live band serenades them onstage.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

On The Bachelor, unlike other reality TV, there’s no thrill of watching the mundane, no captured moments that inspire the pleasure of witnessing anything ‘real.’

The show feels, essentially, like a casting call—in each season, the women audition for a single role. A contestant either performs convincingly enough to make it to the next round, or misses her mark and is eliminated.

Relationships, in the show’s universe, are fatalistic— women are most often sent home for moments of doubt or ambivalence about the long-term viability of their ‘connection’ with the man they met just weeks ago. The ones who succeed are those who can muster up enough enthusiasm, who can most blatantly perform their affection in front of the bachelor and Bachelor Nation.

The finale of The Bachelor is a bizarre spectacle. Like every episode, it’s taped months before airing, but the last episode is screened in front of a live studio audience and broadcast on TV—a surreal viewing-of-a-viewing-of-ashow. This year’s finale took place in Peru (Arie: “[There are] alpacas walking around the streets randomly, you know, Machu Picchu ... It’s incredible!”). As is required by the show, he was conflicted. But The Bachelor ends with a proposal, and one of the women has to go. In the first part of the episode, Arie went on dates with both women (Lauren, in reference to Machu Picchu: “I love that”). Then, on the final stage, in a field populated with alpacas and tastefully-overturned, ancient-looking vases, Arie dumped Lauren and proposed to Becca.

But the episode was only halfway over. After a commercial break, we saw Arie show up at Becca’s rented house in LA, months after the proposal. They sat down on the couch, and he explained to her that he was feeling uncertain, that he didn’t want to break things off with Lauren, and that he regretted proposing. In an extended, unedited sequence, the show made the failure of their finally-monogamous partnership into yet another spectacle.

This dragged on through several commercial breaks, as each person was filmed in disjointed split-screen. Arie continued to follow Becca throughout the house, at one point asking if she wanted to talk or wanted him to leave.

“I want you to leave,” Becca responded, but Arie ignored this and stayed in the house. For the first time during the season, the presence of the filming crew was obvious, in

the house’s mirrors and at the edges of the frame. The entire scene felt predatory. As the camera and Arie followed a distraught Becca around the house, the show’s bad faith was laid bare; it was always less invested in marriage than in the surefire entertainment of a camera’s lingering gaze on a crying woman.

Of course, some version of this breakup scene happens after every season of The Bachelor, it just rarely happens on camera. In 22 seasons and 14 proposals, only one couple is still together. The show totally fails at producing its stated final product, even as it spends most of its time convincing you of its success. This is the central irony pervading all of The Bachelor; what made it impossible for my friends and me to watch it with any ironic distance. The falsity of engagements on the show is well-known, but this has little effect on its viewership.

At its core, The Bachelor knows we’re not watching for the romance.

“There’s nothing more to say,” Becca said to Arie in the final minutes of the finale. But that’s never a problem for The Bachelor. The camera cut back to the live studio audience, where the show’s host announced another live two-hour episode the next night, featuring Arie, Becca, and Lauren. It aired last Tuesday; I didn’t watch it. Apparently Arie proposed to Lauren (she accepted), and ABC announced that Becca would be the next Bachelorette. This summer, she’ll be introduced to a couple dozen eligible men, and after countless dates and another long trip around the world, she’ll likely be engaged to one. The machine marches onward.

MITCHELL JOHNSON B’18.5 wasn't hiding in his room, he was investing in himself.

OCCULT

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WE

THE SEA Locals respond to an ocean coup

Tim DeCristopher, a founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, stepped on a stool in the middle of the conference room. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), an agency within the Department of the Interior, was holding its public meeting on the Trump administration’s offshore drilling plan, a plan that would completely dismantle the Obama Administration’s protection of coastal regions.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for coming to the people’s hearing on offshore oil and gas development,” DeChristopher shouted, essentially taking over the BOEM meeting with over two hundred fellow protesters. “We’re excited to create this space… where we can actually get to know how Rhode Islanders feel about offshore drilling.” Earlier that day, many protesters had marched from the State House to the Marriott on Orms Street, some entering the hotel and some remaining outside, waving signs and chanting to nearby drivers.

Protesters outside chanted “No drill!” and carried signs with slogans such as “We need to end our fuelish ways,” “No drill no spill,” and “This bay is our bay.”

In April of last year, Trump announced the plan to open up nearly all United States coastal water to petroleum drilling—in the North Atlantic oil drilling had stopped over 30 years ago. On January 4 of this year, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke released the 380-page draft proposal, which would open up the North Atlantic to oil leasing in 2021. Following this release, which mandated a 60 day comment period on the proposal, BOEM announced 23 meetings in coastal states, including a meeting in Rhode Island on February 28. These meetings were framed as spaces in which communities could hear from, but not speak with, BOEM representatives about what their plans for the shoreline entailed.

The public hearing in Rhode Island, however, quickly transformed into a call and response protest planned out by groups including Climate Action RI and Resist Hate RI. While BOEM representatives stood resigned in the periphery, many on their phones, 42 speakers, including children, activists, professors, scientists, and religious leaders, stood up on a stool and delivered short stump speeches, the encircling crowd repeating and amplifying their words. Those testifying spoke on a range of issues, such as coastal communities, marine ecosystems, Rhode Island’s fishing community, and global climate change.

The slogan “keep it in the ground!” brought out the most fervor in the audience, as the collective volume rattled the room. Protesters frequently criticized the possibility of a power plant in Burrillville and a LNG (liquefied natural gas) plant in Providence itself, plans which threaten the health of predominantly low-income communities of color. State Representative Carol McEntee spoke and displayed a letter criticizing drilling, signed by 54 other State Representatives.

Towards the end of the meeting, BOEM’s Chief

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METRO

Environmental Officer Bill Brown decided to engage with the audience, but remained bureaucratic in his responses, directing the protesters to provide online comments at the laptop station. Brown stated that the format of the meeting was designed so that participants could talk to BOEM representatives individually for hours, instead of just giving short speeches to the crowd. At the end, protestors filed out of the room, led by Sister Mary Pendergast, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, repeating one line: “We and the sea are one.” While Zinke’s proposal has drawn impassioned response from coastal communities all along the Northeast, it remains unclear which messages have reached the ears of BOEM or the administration more broadly. +++ The BOEM welcome sheet stated, “Provide comments online using the laptops available or via the written comment form (there will not be an opportunity for formal oral testimony).” Justin Boyan, a co-founder of Climate Action RI, called the BOEM meeting format a “sham,” citing the fact that attendees could enter comments electronically, but were unable to make comments out loud to all in the room, undercutting any notion that these meetings were receptive to community concern. It was for this reason he and other activists had organized a concurrent “People’s Hearing.”

Duane Clinker, a former organizer and pastor, criticized the nature of the meeting while giving his speech. “I want to be a witness against the corruption of democracy.

I come from a time, like some of the brothers and sisters here, when we had actual, official public hearings… Now this system requires us to write little messages on pieces of paper and hand it in to the teacher, believing that it will be read. But we don’t get to hear each other. We don’t get a sense of our power. These bogus hearings are meant to convince us of their power.” Younger protesters nodded their heads and murmured in agreement, and some of the older members shouted in approval. +++ “It seems to me that every time I turn around there’s an oil spill,” said Gene McDonald at the hearing. Each year, around 880,000 gallons of oil are spilled from US offshore drilling. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill alone spewed 210,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. For Rhode Island’s 100 beaches and 400 miles of shoreline, the effects of an oil spill on marine and coastal ecosystems could be devastating.

For Rhode Island businesses, the total value of the maritime industry (fishing, boating, seafood production) amounts to $2.2 billion in sales and $118 million in tax revenue, and the tourism industry alone brings in

$5.2 billion. Rhode Island is also home to the nation’s first offshore wind farm, the Block Island Wind Farm.

Establishing oil rigs and oil infrastructure along the Rhode Island coast would disrupt these industries at best, and catastrophically decimate them at worst, if a spill were to occur. And all this does not take into account the environmental harm caused by burning fossil fuels. For many Rhode Islanders, memories of the deeply polluted Narragansett Bay, which took citywide mobilization to clean up, remains fresh in their mind.

These memories find no place in calculations like the ones BOEM has conducted for the net value of North Atlantic oil and natural gas, which claim to compute the project’s economic and environmental burden. While these calculations figured that drilling on the North Atlantic coast was safer than similar operations in the Gulf of Mexico, these estimates also failed to account for important environmental considerations. Chiefly, whereas the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem has unfortunately adapted to frequent oil spills, such an event would wreak havoc on the ecology of the North Atlantic coast, which has thus far been spared from such disasters. +++ “I am a climate scientist and an oceanographer at Brown University. And first, let me tell you the science side,” said Baylor Fox-Kemper during the hearing, as he went on to discuss the consequences of expanding drilling while rolling back drilling regulations. In an interview with the Independent, Fox-Kemper continued, “The difficulty is when we contemplate how bad climate change could possibly be, even burning the known resources we have will get us into a lot of trouble. Going to other places and finding new resources really is problematic.” Fox-Kemper also advocated for more jobs in the wind energy sector, which he stated would provide similar job opportunities to those made available by the oil industry.

“I haven’t heard of a single person, in any context, who has any scientific training, who has come out and said this [offshore drilling] is a good idea. And this is including the Department of Interior scientists who I talked to at the hearing,” Fox-Kemper said. He called the current situation “galling,” and as a climate scientist, found the debacle incredibly disheartening. “We shouldn’t be fighting these battles now,” he said. “Dirty fuel in environmentally sensitive locations? I thought we already figured this out.” +++ According to the Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University, the most optimistic scenario of Trump’s proposal would cause the US to produce only an additional two to four million

MARCH 16, 2018

BY Kion You ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Katherine Sang barrels a day, still leaving the US with an import deficit.

Even with new drilling, the the Department of Energy estimates that oil imports would be reduced by a mere 2.5 percent in 2030, at which point America’s offshore potential would be reaching exhaustion. Moreover, while this proposal has been cast by the administration as a shift away from Saudi oil imports, the vast majority of American oil in fact comes from North America itself.

Trump and Zinke’s plan has been met with near-universal disdain. Ralph Faust, former general counsel for the California Coastal Commission, stated that at this point it “just seems like grandstanding.” Over 15 coastal governors (including Gina Raimondo), five of which are Republican, have expressed opposition to this plan.

The Republican governor from Florida, Rick Scott, has gained exemption from Secretary Zinke from the plan, quite possibly due to currying favors with the current administration in the past.

Pundit speculations regarding even the oil industry’s interests in Trump’s plan, especially in the North Atlantic coastal region, have been mixed. In an interview with Reuters, Neal Kirby, a spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said his members support the administration’s drilling plan. He quickly added, however, that the industry was primarily interested in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, a region close to existing oil infrastructure and highly-productive fields.

Sam Ori, executive director of the University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute, warned in an interview with CBS about underestimating the potential of the oil industry to expand to all the new proposed regions, which includes the North Atlantic. Drilling in the North Atlantic stopped over 30 years ago due to lack of success, and still remains a relatively undesirable area for exploration. However, drilling demand cannot be fully understood until leasing actually begins. +++ “I’m a merchant mariner, and I’ve sailed the oceans all my adult life—25 years,” said Logan Johnsen during the hearing. Johnsen grew up in Duluth, Minnesota in a family full of sailors, and always felt attached to, as he described, the “wine dark sea.” Currently, he works as a first officer on the RV Neil Armstrong, an research ship

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and lives in the East Side with his family.

“I’ve seen the boom and bust nature of the oil industry,” Johnsen said during the hearing, “promising all kinds of economic effects but then going bust.” In an interview with the Indy, he stated, “When oil is $100 a barrel, everybody’s drilling, money’s flowing just like oil.

Then the cost of oil goes down to $60 a barrel, and everything comes to a grinding halt. Massive layoffs, ships are laid up.” Rusting rig infrastructure is often left behind during busts, such as wellheads that are about five meters under the surface and are sometimes unmarked on maps.

“They could put a hole in your ship,” Johnsen said.

Although profoundly aware of the crises the ocean faces, Johnsen shed light on the drastic improvements he has seen over the years. When he first started out on the sea, Johnsen said, “you didn’t even have to know how to navigate. You could just follow the oil slicks.” He also called oil rig safety standards “exemplary,” in that “you can’t even throw away a cigarette, or an apple core overboard on a rig. That’s not tolerated.” Johnsen mentioned a time when ships would unload all of their garbage into the ocean without second thought. However, while standards on the oil rigs are strict, the larger environmental effects that oil drilling causes continue to grow. “What is tolerated,” Johnsen said, “is the cost of doing business.”

A cost which explicitly includes immense carbon emissions. He argues that as long as these oil companies are generating revenue and insurance compensations, they will continue to increase drilling.

Johnsen provided a view of BOEM not discussed at the hearing, which was that BOEM is in charge of not only leasing offshore drilling, but also wind farms— Johnsen sees possible alliance in BOEM (since 2009, BOEM’s office of renewable energy programs has issued 13 commercial wind energy leases offshore). “We have the capacity to be a viable port for offshore wind farming, and it’s a lot less intensive, because it’s automated,” Johnsen said. Moreover, he stated that Rhode Island’s economy would not drastically improve with new oil rigs: according to Johnsen, there is simply not a trained contingent of oil workers in Rhode Island, so if offshore drilling were to come, workers would be outsourced.

Wind farming, on the other hand, would be much more sustainable in regards to local job creation, less

constrained by market dynamics, and much more environmentally friendly.

“This seems like a last ditch cash grab,” Johnsen said regarding Trump’s proposal. “Here’s a dying industry where we’ve reached peak demand. It’s just bad business.” +++ Recently this battle has been taken up in state legislatures. Rhode Island State Senator Dawn Euer and State Representative Lauren Carson have introduced bills that prohibit any offshore oil infrastructure within state waters, as well as on the mainland. Every US Senator and Representative from New England has endorsed Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline in his New England Coastal Protection Act, which is currently being worked on in congressional subcommittee. In California, the California States Land Commission announced that it would ban the construction of pipelines in state waters (up to three miles from the coast), which would presumably deter oil companies from establishing rigs further out in federal waters.

Rhode Island officials also plan to utilize its 2010 Ocean Special Area Management Plan (SAMP), a powerful rulebook for managing offshore waters, which had previously allowed Block Island Wind Farm to come to fruition. The Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), the state agency that facilitated the Ocean SAMP, plans on using the Ocean SAMP purview to stymie intrusion into North Atlantic Waters. And on the ground, incredible work in education and advocacy is being done among local activist groups, such as Climate Change RI, Surfrider RI, and the Rhode Island Student Climate Change Coalition, who will continue to fight the proposal along every step of its implementation.

However, even with this diverse contingency of support, the fight to “keep it in the ground” will continue to find opposition from above.

KION YOU B’20 is one with the sea.

METRO

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“HOLD FORT FOR LOVE FOREVER” Björk’s Utopia, and ours

It’s November 2017, and I’m shuffling through wintry New England weather, the chill biting through my half-zipped parka. I am aware of my body’s amazing strength and complexity, the intricate cellular homeostasis maintaining a stable body temperature. Does it know, I wonder? Do my cells know that they struggle in a world that is hostile to them? That they, and by extension we, are complicit in and victims of a system that enacts violence and divides us from our fellow living beings?

What to say to this apocalyptic vision? I say nothing.

In response, I slip on my headphones and start playing Björk’s newest album, Utopia.

Icelandic musician Björk Guðmundsdóttir is 52 years old. Some would assume she’d run her course as a pop artist, with the releases of her greatest hits behind her.

Her latest album, Utopia, however, sounds like the work of an artist spilling her guts out in youthful exuberance, still fresh and eager to experiment. It’s a 71-minute odyssey through woodwinds, birdsong, vibrant synth, uneasy and looping polyphony entering in and out of sync. Woven under, through, and above it all is Björk’s inimitable voice in all its eccentric glory. It is the yin to her last album Vulnicura’s yang, which chronicled an emotional journey following her divorce with her husband, artist Matthew Barney. Utopia, by constrast, is her self-described ‘Tinder album,’ and it wears its lovelorn longing on its sleeve. It’s an album of love for bodies, worlds, and femininity reasserted. It’s a response, a restoration, a refuge.

Utopia attempts to do many things, not all of which succeed, but what resonates the most with me is its marriage of sounds and lyricism in service of one idea: to behold the world in all its splendor and misery is a kind of utopian seeing. We’re all busy trying to articulate ever more obtuse and obfuscating theories to explain the world, or otherwise diving deeper and deeper into a chasm of post-post-ironic internet content. At their most toxic, both of these theories seem to be an advanced form of escapism. That isn’t to say that we don’t need nuanced thinking or should flee from the digital like unabashed primitivists, but there needs to be an earnestness involved; in the end, what does anything people say matter if they don’t sound like they give a shit at all? In this album, Björk’s attempt to evoke utopia is wilful, playful, naive, all deliberately. Björk’s utopia is an individual one, emerging from the bottom up rather than being imposed from above. It relies on each of us to create our own vision; we have to see before we become. And the world Björk wants us to see is one that’s flush with life, one that challenges the idea of people as isolated bodies and proposes instead containers of multitudes that collaborate for the greater good.

Björk brings us into her utopia not with a shout, but a sigh. The album’s opener, “Arisen My Senses,” introduces the sounds of woodwinds and synth, as well as Björk’s multi-layered vocals, that create the soundscape in songs to follow. In sound and form, it suggests a harmony between the natural world and the human, where neither instrumentation nor voice takes precedence. Instead, they weave around each other, coexisting. It sounds like thawing, the end of the song fading out like icebergs calving, the end of the volcanic winter of Vulnicura. Warm harp and spring flute are buoyed up

by Veneuzelan electronic producer Arca’s technicolor synthesizer wash. Björk’s voice itself occupies the canopy of the song, a chorus of Björks harmonizing with themselves. They repeat phrases of the main verse, enunciating them differently, stressing different vowels. Often,

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BY Mica Chau ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Katherine Sang the dominant line shifts from one Björk to another, panning from left to right in time with Arca’s multilayered rhythm. Halfway through, she sings of “weaving a mixtape,” a line that recurs amid wordless vocalizations, describing the album itself. It’s as though each iteration of Björk competes with the others, all working to complete a harmony, although they twist off into their own ends.

I see in this a certain multiplicity of the self, the way we are composed of so much that is not us, the ‘we’ in the ‘I’.

Both on a biological level, in the bacteria that sustain us and contribute to our body mass, and on a social level, in the relationships we have with our loved ones which constitute our identity as a person in a world.

The songs follow a meandering path through loss, love, and the transition between the two. When listening to Utopia, I don’t think about the healing process from Björk's divorce, although that process was evidently crucial to the conception and structure of the album; I think instead of a forest of alien, primal, gentle flora and fauna through which Björk treads, singing without filter, and of a comingling of beings intertwined, as in the title track, “Bird species never seen or heard before/The first flute carved from the first fauna.” It channels past and future, challenging us to recognize the present as the juncture between the two. We are not trapped in some eternal present, but live in our memories as well as in our dreams of the future, and in that sense, we can hold utopia inside us. There is no theory here, no plan for utopian society, but there is an impression of what it might mean to live utopically, the lived experience of bliss.

The liquid, ugly, beautiful electronic textures provided by Arca literalize this time slippage in songs that frequently meander close to and past the five-minute mark. I listen and I imagine my body liquefying the way a caterpillar completely disintegrates inside a chrysalis, completely rearranging its body to become a butterfly.

The goo it becomes mostly consists of imaginal cells, undifferentiated like stem cells, able to develop into most other types of cells to suit its needs. At times, Utopia sounds like the inside of such a chrysalis, and I can feel myself being transformed into something other, something in line with my telos. At its best, Utopia evokes this queer sensation of becoming-being. Prostheses for love. A biodigital nature, a future-present not of clean Apple-white chrome, but of slippery, chromatic, warm, pulsating assemblages of the organic and inorganic, the technological and natural. I imagine Björk reborn from the body of the slug in the music video for “Arisen My Senses,” becoming something attuned to the nonhuman, just another voice in the chorus.

Some might consider Utopia an album that is more enjoyable to think about than listen to. It is long, digressive, short on immediate pleasure. What I would give for the lush ecology of “Arisen My Senses” to thread its way through the album more, thickening those sparser

moments of only voice, flute, and harp, although they offer an elegant beauty of their own. Some lines verge on the comical; Björk’s story of meeting men that resemble her husband and feeling like she is “literally five minutes away from falling in love” being a particular example of the album’s occasional banality. But it doesn’t fall flat.

Instead, it just exemplifies the way Björk’s music is so free of pretension, so optimistically naïve, while also so deeply unconventional, is in fact unconventional because it is so unafraid to be simultaneously blunt and oblique. In a time of division and endless sectarianism, it’s refreshing for something to embody contradiction so gleefully. A proper response to the postmodern crisis requires a willingness to confront the truth head-on and duck out of its way, weave a path through it. The album opens up that space between reality and not-quite fantasy, a space that merges the oft-confused etymologies of ‘utopia’: the good place, and no place at all.

Utopia is a sonic archive of a world that exists, shimmering, alongside our own. A world without violent borders that divide peoples, states, humans and nonhumans, a world that recognizes the human-nonhuman ecology that supersedes any hermetically sealed systems humans try to enforce. It is a utopia that’s already here, not elsewhere. I can’t help but be reminded by China Miéville when he says that “We are already in utopia. It just isn’t ours.” He speaks of injustices and the machinations of systems that subjugate entire categories of humans and nonhumans. The title track speaks of a “huge toxic tumor bulging under the ground here,” a tumor of harmful human practices that damage our connection to our own bodies, to one another, and to those beyond us.

We’ve called into being something too complex for any of us to comprehend by ourselves. It’s too big. Utopia offers no pragmatic solution, but is at least a kind of musical space wherein we can rest, collect ourselves, and observe the world through a utopic lens. All things can change, Björk sings. Love can be found again, and so can hope: “see this possible future and be in it.” See it, and thus be in it.

Yes obtuse, yes difficult, yes lacking in immediate pleasure, but Utopia is not vapid. Björk’s Utopia is hardly a manifesto for change, and art doesn’t change the world by itself. But I listened to it again yesterday, and again today, and I will probably listen to it tomorrow. In her flights of fancy, I see ways to reimagine everything, ways to live better, love better. Yes, in the end, this is only Björk’s utopia right now. But if we want it to be, it could be ours, too.

MICA CHAU B’21 is a collective of cells that was mistaken for a person.

MARCH 16, 2018

SUMMER AFTER MOONLIGHT

BY Ruby Aiyo Gerber, Paula Pacheco Soto & Emma Lloyd ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

On why we are glad Call Me By Your Name didn’t win Best Picture Queer films represent a break from mainstream cinema, which is usually intent on depicting heterosexual romance. In the past few years, there has been a surge of artistic queer films winning both commercial and critical acclaim from diverse, not necessarily queer, audiences.

Two of the most acclaimed recent queer films follow drastically different plots unfolding in different backdrops. Moonlight follows a young Black boy growing up in a low-income neighborhood outside Miami trying to understand his queerness in relation to a Black conception of masculinity, while Call Me By Your Name (CMBYN) follows a young boy discovering his budding sexuality in the glamorous backdrop of Northern Italy.

Barry Jenkins, in his 2016 Oscar winning comingof-age tale, Moonlight, navigates masculinity and queerness within the context of a Black body, revealing the persistent impacts of slavery even today. In the film, Black bodies are transformed in ways that both conform and rebel against the stereotypes shaped during slavery.

In subverting common notions of Black masculinity in relation to queerness, Moonlight is able to envision a modern Black coming-of-age love story. In this love story, its main characters find that they can be reborn or baptized, transformed into non-enslaved bodies, becoming visible. This question of how to understand Black representation, as shaped by slavery, is something many Black artists grapple with, including Jenkins.

Reclaiming depictions and navigating representation is what queer cinema is often centered around, choosing to focus on coming-of-age stories, a time when we tend to fight back against social and political restraints conflicting with personal identity.

CMBYN, adapted from André Aciman’s novel of the same title, has enjoyed enormous success, becoming Sony Pictures Classics’ third-highest grossing release of the year. It capitalized on the ‘Moonlight effect.’ It received praise for the actors’ performances, screenplay, and direction, ultimately receiving four nominations to the 90th Academy Awards, and winning Best Adapted Screenplay. The film tells the summer love story between 17-year-old Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet, and 24-year-old Oliver, interpreted by Armie Hammer. The film, exploring classical studies, philosophical thoughts, and the romanticism of European languages (the young character switches between English, French, and Italian throughout the film) ultimately builds up to a carefully crafted picture of queer romance.

Moonlight is set in Miami’s low-income, majority Black neighborhood, Liberty City—where Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, the film’s director and writer, both grew up. Liberty City, first established in 1937, like many other majority Black neighborhoods slowly fell victim to racist urban renewal policies and neglect. Moonlight captures both the everyday beauty and the hardships of Liberty City through the eyes of Chiron, a small dark-skinned Black boy living in the Liberty Square housing projects.

CMBYN is set in an idyllic, European vacation home in Crema, Italy. Elio and Oliver are US citizens, but their relationship is consciously removed from the cultural and political context that American gay men in the ‘80s

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had to navigate. In 1983, the year that Elio and Oliver meet, the AIDS epidemic was beginning to cause panic in the American LGBTQ community. Yet, there is no mention of AIDS in the film. While the film’s removal from its context has been praised for giving a gay relationship the same narrative treatment that straight relationships receive in most films, it is one made possible by economic and social privilege. The only queer relationship that can afford to exist in an erotic Eden completely untouched by adversity is an elite one, screened off by obscene amounts of intellectual and financial capital.

Moonlight, on the other hand, subverts racialized perceptions of masculinity and sexuality by depicting intimate relationships in unthinkable yet undeniably real spaces.

It is not uncommon for queer films to grapple with issues of trauma and rejection. Halfway through Moonlight, there is a heart-wrenching scene where adolescent Chiron is betrayed by Kevin. Grappling with his own sexuality, Kevin is literally forced to defend his masculinity by beating his object of desire, Chiron, in front of a circle of bullies. Jenkins delivers the brutal image of Black boys punishing another Black boy because of his perceived sexuality. With every blow, the boys are confronting their own relationship to masculinity, allowing the filmmaker to further explore the representations of the Black body on the screen.

By the end of the film, Jenkins’ stoic protagonist, having been provoked to violence, has transformed his Black body to conform with the Black community’s notions of the masculine ideal. Muscular and hardened by a stint in prison, Chiron has shed the vestiges of his childhood vulnerability for the swagger of the street.

We fear that Chiron has disappeared, been usurped, conforming to the expectations of Black masculinity.

In CMBYN, the characters’ removal from any meaningful context allows them to be safe from such violence and trauma. The characters romance unravels freely, except for passing anxieties of rejection by family, religion, or the state. The film traffics in classical tropes; why can queer love be seen as a refraction of classical Greek pederasty only in CMBYN? Is queer love only legitimate in an untouched paradise accessible to only very wealthy and highly educated white men?

Part two of Moonlight portrays Chiron’s adolescent years, and his first sexual experience. Escaping from the torment that he faces daily, Chiron returns to the beach where he first learned to swim. Here, he encounters his confident childhood friend, Kevin. They sit in the moonlight looking out at the water discussing the sea breeze drifting into the hood. This is the first moment we see Chiron truly expose his internal life to another.

Eventually they share a sexual moment on the beach.

The romance and optimism of this moment is brief, and we do not see another expression of Chiron’s queerness or any sexuality till the end of the film when he is grown.

We soon learn that though hardened, Chiron still longs for physical intimacy and visibility and to be recognized as a queer man.

Jenkins ends the film with a beautiful moment of intimacy. Kevin, now grown as well, returns to ask for forgiveness, and perhaps rekindle an unrequited love.

It is an optimistic ending, letting us know that beneath the transformed Black body, lies a fragile man hungry to be truly seen in his totality. As the two men hold each other, now stripped of all disguises, the ocean sounds seep into the scene. The last shot is of young Chiron looking across the water at dusk.

On the other hand, can Elio and Oliver’s relationship even be called queer? CMBYN hesitates to read their relationship through anything besides the canonized and the safe. There is no transgression, none of the “strangeness” from which the word queer originally derives. For a highly-romanticized story of sexual awakening, there is basically no sex. The camera cuts at each moment of sexual possibility, showing the before and the after, refusing to show anything explicit. Meanwhile, the camera lingers on the heterosexual encounters between Elio and Marzia, not hesitating to show Marzia shirtless.

Instead of sex, CMBYN relies on water and fruit metaphors to talk about sexuality. Elio and Oliver splash around together in ancient-looking Italian baths and pristine stream. Water becomes the erotic medium through which Oliver and Elio flirt and connect. In replacing physical gay sex with a more “universal” (read: accessible to a straight audience) visual language, the film subjugates the physical to the metaphorical, ultimately placing mind before body. It seems like a strategy designed to make gay sexuality more palatable by divorcing it from sex.

The sex we do see is either heterosexual or solitary.

Throughout the movie, Elio is depicted having sex with inanimate objects (Oliver’s swim shorts, a peach), and sex then becomes more of a solitary act than a mutual sexual connection. That is not to say that queer fantasizing isn’t queer enough. It is the accumulation of such moments that is troubling. The graphic fixation that the camera has with Elio masturbating combined with the sudden prudishness it acquires when showing gay sex. In the end, the most dangerous— and at root homophobic idea—that Call Me By Your Name flirts with is that of queerness as a narcissistic love. Call me by your name, call you me.

The links between CMBYN and Moonlight are complicated yet worth exploring. It is undeniable that CMBYN has benefited from Moonlight’s groundbreaking work. A viewer could finish watching CMBYN thinking of Elio and Oliver’s relationship as a youthful, self-absorbed love that will eventually pass like a bad flu—as something beautiful and passionate that could not survive outside the boundaries of its particular paradise. But in real life, and in Moonlight, queer relationships exist in the world, a world that does not necessarily embrace their existence.

Despite this, these relationships are surviving, and they are enduring.

EMMA LLOYD B’18, RUBY AIYO GERBER B’20 & PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 want to be called by their names.

FEATURES

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ON LAYLI LONG SOLDIER'S

On November 28th, 1795—a chilly day in Bristol, just weeks after the French Revolution began grinding its wheels—English poet Samuel Coleridge published an odd little pamphlet entitled The Plot Discovered.

Responding to two disturbing pieces of regent legislation targeting the revolutionary fervor spreading across Great Britain, Coleridge’s pamphlet lampoons these bills for curtailing political and civil freedoms. Coleridge quotes the following preamble from “An Act for More Effectually Preventing Seditious Meetings and Assemblies”: Whereas assemblies of divers persons collected for the purpose or under the pretext of deliberating on public grievances...have of late been made use to serve the ends of factious and seditious persons to the great danger of public peace Coleridge rightly demands evidence for this

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claim—”What were the factious and seditious speeches?” he asks—and later in his pamphlet concludes that, “such a Whereas must be a most inadequate ground for the present Bill.” Interestingly, instead of saying something like ‘such a preamble,’ Coleridge uses the term ‘Whereas’ to refer to the Bill’s preamble. The habit of using the term ‘Whereas’ as a legal term marking introductory statements had been practiced since the early 18th century, but it was always used as a mere conjunction, a word connecting otherwise disparate clauses. Coleridge’s pamphlet marks the first time that ‘Whereas’ is used as a noun referring to a legal preamble. As if rebelling against the authority of the bill, Coleridge uses ‘Whereas’, a mere connecting word, to refer to an imperially-sanctioned piece of legislation. As Gertrude Stein passionately argues in Poetry and Grammar, nouns are only interesting when they break the status-quo. “A name is adequate or it is not.” writes Stein, and “if it is adequate then why

go on calling it.” By coining a new noun to refer to the bill, Coleridge refuses to call it by its legal name, thereby undermining legalese’s rigid terminology.

But while Coleridge uses this new noun for progressive purposes, namely to attack the content of the bill itself, he largely ignores the linguistic meat of the problem: fossilized terms like the legal ‘Whereas’ are also part of the violence of the law; they grant authority to prejudiced and blatantly false statements. Over two centuries later, Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier takes similar issue with a nefarious piece of legislation in her 2017 collection titled Whereas (2017), a response to the 111th Congress’ S.J. RES. 14, the first official apology by the Federal Government of the United States to the colonized Native Peoples, passed under President Obama in 2009. The Oglala Lakota People are native to the Dakotas and, like many other Native Peoples, were pushed and confined to arid reservations in the late 1800s. Congress’ Joint

MARCH 16, 2018

WHEREAS Resolution is painfully insufficient, and the following ‘Whereas’ statement reveals the JR’s mottled and bias assumptions: Whereas the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place.

Long Soldier’s poems respond to the flawed and violent content of preambles like the one above. But, instead of creating a new noun to talk about the Joint Resolution, she deconstructs the semantic power of the term ‘Whereas.’ In one poem, she explores the different possible uses of ‘Whereas’: Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth...

In Long Soldier’s case, it is clear that the term ‘Whereas’ is symbolic of a process of colonial categorization that attempts to delineate and control identity.

One particularly salient example concerns the term ‘American Indian’, used once in the Joint Resolution and unpacked in one of Long Soldier’s poems introduced by, of course, ‘WHEREAS.’ The poet attempts to describe her estrangement from Lakota heritage, “some sticky current of Indian emptiness,” but an Oxford dictionary regulates her language. “[It] warns: Do not use Indian or Red Indian to talk about American native peoples, as these terms are now outdated; use American Indian instead.” When the narrator adopts this sanitized and imposed category of Americanness, she is pushed further into identity crisis; further into the emptiness of the self:

the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is every truly attached to emptiness whatever it is I feel

now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better stated as the form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference The meaninglessness of the umbrella-term American Indian works to obfuscate the unique groups of different Native Peoples. By opposing this terminology, Long Soldier creates the semantic space for other groups to exist and signify something. Audre Lorde’s infamous line, “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought,” targets this very problem, a problem that Gertrude Stein implies in her essay: nouns are still useful in solving this problem of identity void. For example, the readoption of ‘them’ as a singular pronoun in colloquial speech helps solves English’s limiting selection of gendered pronouns; the term ‘femme’ does similar work.

The binaries inherent to languages like English are not inevitable, and coining new terms gives voice to previously muted identities. But while Long Soldier sometimes follows this tradition and coins new English words that

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express otherwise silent meanings—for example, himherself (used to highlight, rather than replace, the oppressive gender binary), and the frequent conversion of nouns to verbs (“us avalanced empty”)—she often turns to the Lakota language to express otherwise-silenced emotions.

Dissatisfied with the English word ‘tire,’ she turns to a Lakota dictionary which provides two terms ‘okita’ (to be tired) and ‘wayuh’anhica’ (to exhaust a horse by not knowing how to properly handle it); confused and unsure of which meaning she falls under, she turns to her father, whose definitions counter the dictionary’s. “How much I must labor,” Long Soldier writes, “to signify what’s real.”

Dictionaries as an institution—the authority conferred on these strange records of frozen meanings—fail to pinpoint the human experience; the urge to define and delimit the meanings of any language creates linguistic voids.

Long Soldier’s frustration with the limiting structures of language also has visual and spatial manifestations: not only are meanings deconstructed, but the words and stanzas are disjointed and left hanging. By dividing words in her poem “leftist,” so that syllables form a dripping stream down the page, she forces us to pay attention to the units of non-meaning contained in seemingly-straightforward words: not mere ly lib eral Encountering these lonely and short syllables, I think of letters urgently trying to escape the page, as if saying: “don’t make me signify this!” Long Soldier often anthropomorphizes poetry in this collection. Perhaps her most poignant example is in “Vaporative” when she describes a poem as if it’s a child, unshackled to explore the world only to return and demand nourishment. Here, a poem’s (often terrifying) interpretive flexibility is as natural a phenomenon as children’s exploratory urges: the poem forgot its way back troubled I let it go when you love something let it go if it returns be a good mother father welcome the poem open armed pull out the frying pan grease it coat it prepare a meal […] i can Whome it I can provide it white gravy whatever the craving poem eat and lie down full poem rest here full don’t life a single l etter

BY Tatiana Dubin ILLUSTRATION BY Jonathan Muroya DESIGN BY Laura Kenney

are shockingly easy to fill. By removing these words, and then dangling them in front of us, Long Soldier shows us the voids, the white holes, that these terms occupy. While the Joint Resolution originally writes, “Whereas the Federal Government condemned the traditions, beliefs, and customs of Native Peoples,” Long Soldier writes: Whereas the Federal Government condemned the [ ], [ ], and [ ] of Native Peoples” and on the following page appear the missing words, isolated from the context of the Joint Resolution and therefore robbed of their performative power. By seeing them helplessly swimming in blank space, it’s clear how insufficient these terms really are at denoting anything: traditions

beliefs customs Long Soldier herself explains her reasons for separating these terms: “I cordon it to safety away from national resolution the threat of reductive [thinking]: Long Soldier’s mission in this collection of poetry is largely revealed above: to deconstruct the reductive language of the Joint Resolution and question its assumptions. For Long Soldier, the term ‘Whereas’ represents common terms that only have power because institutions like the law and dictionaries sanctify their meanings.

Long Soldier challenges us to detach from typical semantics; to mire ourselves in blank pages and see what comes of it.

TATIANA DUBIN B’18 is mired in blank pages.

The semantic flexibility—anthropomorphized as a child’s independence—that a poet should grant their poems relates to Long Soldier’s use of physical space, the whiteness of the page, the absence of words. Choosing not to include words in a poem can be as valuable as including them, and in Part 2 of Whereas, Long Soldier uses blank spaces to signify the very linguistic voids she witnesses in Part 1. In one poem, she includes specific clauses from the Joint Resolution but deletes and brackets off the English words that control these linguistic voids.

Terms like tradition, spiritual, customs, and beliefs that aim to control and define Native Peoples are clearly shown to be semantically empty fillers, linguistic gaps that

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E AT ‘ E M I’ve figured it out The trick is eat everyone Eat ‘em all Put ‘em in your belly They can’t be mean to you if you’re digesting ‘em, see

Take each and every last one of ‘em And roll ‘em up, up into a little dumpling that you deep fry in that wok your Ma gave you That you never really knew how to clean And deep fry ‘em So their skin, all fried up and oily now, can be as brown-ugly in their eyes as yours always was

So when the oil is all hot and spitting— Like how they spat at you that time they drove by you in a car all quick and scary like that Fast pluck a hand down and pull those dumplings out With two fingers quick like chopsticks they don’t know how to use Pull ‘em out fast and quick like how your Ma could never feel the heat Like how she kept washing til the softness fled her hands Like how she washed so many dishes they can’t scan her fingerprints anymore— Ma doesn’t have fingerprints anymore— And still how do you do it Ma How can Ma still wanna cook you dumplings when you’re sad?

So graceful she still cooks ‘em for you when you go home Cause someone spat at you when they drove by you in the street O she cooks ‘em how you wish you could—

Dip ‘em in that soy sauce you mix up with the spring onion That you never really knew how to cut right like how your Ma could do so quickly And eat ‘em Fast and quick like how they eat you when they do it All fast and quick like your Ma with a knife to those spring onions Or fast and quick like how your Ma can wash a dish She washed all those dishes for you so her hands were all rough like dish sponges

Now Once they’re all hot and ready Dip ‘em in that sauce you mixed up with the spring onion And quick While they’re still warm Eat ‘em They can’t be mean to you if you’re digesting ‘em, see

Eat ‘em eat ‘em all Feel ‘em warm and spicy on your tongue and chew ‘em soft and slowly so they feel as Chewed up as you do when they do it Rip apart the skin and Chew the onion spicy good like white teeth juicy garbage in the sea Swallow ‘em and roll down that lump in your throat Swallow that lump in your throat like how you must when they do it Roll down like how your Ma rolls down the batter for that dumpling That you never really knew how to roll so you had to buy pre-rolled dumpling batter And digest ‘em Digest ‘em slow and painful like how they digest your Ma’s food They love your Ma’s food But they hate to shit you out But all you gotta do is eat ‘em— I’ve figured it out, see— Eat ‘em right back like how right they ate you

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BY Tabitha Payne ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

MARCH 16, 2018

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on Friday 16th

Brown Arts Initiative Art Show 5–7PM, Benefit Juice Bar & Cafe (404 Benefit Street) Featuring art by Georgianna Stoukides. Proceeds from paintings and drawings sold go to the Emergency Response Centre International, an organization that provides aid to refugees in Greece.

Free entry

on Saturday 17th

Spring Arts Festival 7–10PM, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (154 Angell Street) LW goes to this event literally every single semester, so here’s the rundown from a veteran: everyone is really dressed up but pretending that they’re not dressed up, so don’t be intimidated because the joke’s on them; you will mostly have very awkward conversations so it is highly recommended that you actually look at the art, which is mostly very good, and chug as much of the free wine and beer as you can. Free

on Sunday 18th

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In one of LW’s classes, a grad student recently recounted how at a summer camp he worked at in Russia, there was a day where the boys were all taught how to fight with a knife. No girls were allowed to join. Unfortunately, this class only teaches culinary knife skills, but it seems like all genders are welcome. $20 advance registration required, BYOK

on Tuesday 20th

Annual Wedding Band Show 10AM–7PM, DePrisco Jewelers (333 Washington Street, Boston) The 28th year! In case it’s time to...put a ring on it. Event is free, rings are expensive, and marriage is a sham.

on Wednesday 21th

Gay Goth Nite: Persephone 8:30PM, Alchemy (71 Richmond Street, 2nd floor) GGN + a spring equinox theme. $5 before 10PM, $10 after, proceeds go to the Rhode Island Trans Assistance Project, which supports low income trans women in RI.

Photographing Indian on Thursday 22th Country: Taking Back Our RISD Illustration Senior Narrative Show Opening Reception 5:30–7PM, List Art Center room 110 (64 College Street) See Apsalooke (Crow) documentary photographer and filmmaker Adam Sings In The Timber talk about his work and the ethics of documenting Native stories. Free

on Monday 19th

Knife Skills Class 6–7PM, Easy Entertaining Inc. (166 Valley Street, Building 10)

6–8PM, 55 Canal Walk There are seemingly multiple RISD illustration senior show openings this week? This is one of them? Glad art is still going strong!

Astrological Weather Welcome to Fire! Except for....a new moon in Pisces....right next to your Chiron, where it hurts. Does it feel like hell yet? The Aries in the air will make you too much of a hasty baby to deal with your problems for real, but, uh, you’ll have to. Cry over some knives at the Knife Skills Class so people still think you might be tough.