Lila Rosen & Jeffrey Pogue
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The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
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The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
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ILLUSTRATION
c Last week, during my semi-annual walk to the Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial, (which by the way, is smack dab in the middle of the Providence River Greenway and is rumored to have been partially sponsored by the IRA; a story for a different time), I saw a Gondola. I mean, I had seen the Providence Gondolas before, but it was this time that I really saw them. This was no measly dinghy. She was a Long, Elegant, Soaking Wet Six-Seater, “Bella Donna,” Gondola and she looked majestic, glistening upon the river water.
At the oar (singular) was a scrawny teenage gondolier with an acne-prone complexion, who was fidgeting with his sailor costume. Behind him in the coxswain position sat a woman no younger than one-hundredand-four, playing a very small violin with color-coded stickers on the finger board. From my vantage point, it looked to be that she was clutching the chinrest with her dentures. The passenger, sitting alone with arms collapsed around his torso, was a pot-bellied businessman. In place of a lover, his briefcase occupied the second seat in the carriage. He might have been wearing a Bluetooth receiver in his ear. (I might be projecting on this one.) All in all, the lone rider seemed totally placid as the boat glided smoothly along. I had no choice but to heckle them loudly, throw a rock, and run away.
Providence is one of several mid-sized American cities offering Venetian-themed Gondola attractions to tourists and straight couples celebrating dubious occasions. Visitors to Central City Park in New Orleans can pay about one hundred bucks plus-tax-and-tip to listen to what the NolaGondola website calls “recorded romantic Italian music” while drinking the BYOBeverage of their choice. Indianapolis, a city desperately trying to steal our swag through a rebrand as “Indy,” offers a public “Old World Gondolier” experience. The official destination-marketing organization for the city, Visit Indy, recommends the attraction as a teambuilding activity for local company outings. Unpopular opinion, but I would rather drown in the White River than be subjected to a 50-minute boat ride with the staff of the Indy, with which I am myself involved.
Point is, monopolistic for-profit gondola tour companies have taken over the riverways of Ft. Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Irving, Texas, and Naples (the one in Florida). For places with limited tourist infrastructure, these tours—which end up costing anywhere between sixty to three hundred dollars per ill-fated couple—consistently rank pretty high on “To Do” lists and flyers left on bedside tables at Best Western Hotels.
Personally, I don’t like gondolas. I think they should stay in the motherland.
can get a taste of Venice with a view of the Biltmore. The tours are fifty minutes long, and similar to the competition, BYOB. Be not mistaken, I don’t mean, Bring Your Own Babes; La Gondola includes these in your package deal. The fact is that even if it would seem that Providence has nothing new to bring to the Gondola industry, one thing makes us stand out from the rest: our Gondoliers are the spiritedest, babe-iest, and most importantly, Italianest in the biz.
La Gondola, which has been operating boats on the Providence waterfront for the past thirty years, is currently under the presidency of Matthew Haynes, a former high school physics teacher and college crew star with a passion for “Venetian culture.” You might be wondering: What the fuck does that even mean? Don’t ask Matthew, he won’t be able to tell you. You should instead turn to his Italian alter-ego: the boyish, coy, handsome, and pronouncedly Mediterranean “Marcello.” According to the company website, “Marcello” has been “at the helm of the company since 2007,” a witty, cheeky lil’ pun if only gondolas had steering mechanisms to speak of. We’re off to a bad start.
Described lovingly by his employees as “Il Boss,” he remains an active gondolier despite his presidential accolades. The son of a choir director, Matthew—“Marcello”? I don’t know what the fuck to call him—has introduced a new feature to the waterbound excursion. Song. Unlike gondoliers anywhere else in the world, including Venice proper, the Providence gondoliers are known to burst out into song. Marcello in particular has got some pipes on him, which he uses to serenade morose couples when they reach a lull in their bickering. (He doesn’t just do it while rowing. The La Gondola website inexplicably features a video of an out of character Matthew belting out a Gregorian chant under a waterfall. What is it about men and water? What possesses them to sing? More questions for a different time.)
Other than the musicality, which is a La Gondolaspecific innovation, the company seems to be committed to providing an “authentic” Italian experience. Despite the fact that out of the thirty-six gondoliers currently on staff at La Gondola, only three have “any real Italian blood,” all of them have followed Marcello’s example and adopted a secondary Italian persona. Don’t be fooled—Mariano, Riccardo, and Donnato are just Steve, Mark, and Henry doing Tony Soprano impressions. From my research, which has primarily consisted in rifling through old Motif articles and tinkering with La Gondola’s Weebly website, I have deduced that the number of gondoliers on staff has nearly tripled in the last six years. The way things are going, they might run out of Italian alter egos by the end of the decade. I suggest that the company pivot strategies, and make all of the guys be Marcellos, at risk of anybody getting stuck with a less archaic and stereotypical Italian persona.
To guarantee a true Italian experience, the Gondolas themselves—which get their own bios on the company website—are mostly real Venetian artifacts itself. Their newest recruit is a refurbished Venetian wedding gondola, brought to America 30 years ago to be “used by an event coordinator for Italian-themed events.” I am too appalled to ask, so I am forced to imagine. In my mind’s eye I see a giant meatball-cutting ceremony at a park in the Midwest, a marinara wrestling competition at a The Godfather-themed bachelor party. If I let my imagination wander too
loosely, I inadvertently imagine a militant flag-waving ritual reminiscent of the Mussolini years. I frequently marvel at America’s passion for the commemoration of Italian nationhood, a tradition which until recently had been healthily stamped out in its mother country through a gradual process of repentance for fascism.
Oh Italia Mia!
On that ill-fated day when “Bella Donna” captured my attention, I stayed by the riverbank watching wistfully as the Pietros, Marcos, Angelos, and Rafaelos of Rhode Island sailed by me on her long, oblong body. She seemed to me oppressed by their WASPy-ness. A racehorse ridden by ammatures. Dumbed down and ridiculed as the craftsmanship and tradition built into her very fiber was overshadowed by skinny twinks in cheap sailor uniforms. The longer I sat, the more I spiraled. I let myself go crazy. I devised a plan. I had no choice but to hijack the “Bella Donna,” rescuing her from a life of thankless service at the hands of brutes.
My plan would be quite simple, really. I would go undercover as a prospective La Gondola customer—a woman stood up for a special occasion or another. I would come down to the dock at Financial Plaza, plausibly disheveled, putting on a brave face. The gondolier, with an unmistakable Ashkenazi face, would introduce himself as Carlo, his name card reading Pietro. He would offer his striped forearm to me as I board. I would bow, or curtsy, say grazie mille, and step onto her daintily, feigning unfamiliarity with her game. Aboard, he would offer me a glass of Narragansett, my drink of choice, which I would have had to buy myself at a nearby liquor store, having kept it lukewarm in a plastic bag inside my bra.
Losing his balance a little, Pietro Carlo would curse under his breath—le-like-a-this-a-merda-merda-eh-ah as we would push off from the bay. I would stomach my aversion, sitting peacefully and overlooking the water. Never let them know your next move. Pizza-pasta. Bitch. At first, I would engage with the tour earnestly, asking questions about the Superman building and the river pollution. Slowly, I would gain his trust. He’d let the accent slip. Big fucking mistake. In this scenario, everything can be used against you. Somewhere down the river, in the middle of a rendition of Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore,” I would fly off the handle, anger bubbling over like a big pot of alfredo sauce. From one minute to the next I would be at the oar, and the gondolier would be on the ground, begging for mercy.
With the crew and vessel hostage, I would row us all eight miles down the Providence River and into the Narragansett Bay. Past the shipyard and the gentrified warehouses, past the pedestrian bridge with the kids wearing light-up sneakers and the Brown students fucking up a four step swing, past the First Baptist Church, past Antonio’s, Fellini’s, and Francesco’s. Past One Financial Plaza, past Fleet, past the Metacomet Golf Club and the riverfront enterprises of Mclinnis Cement. I would row vigorously, steering bravely. I would let my hair down, waving at onlookers on the bike-path, and at the seagulls circling above my head.
Once in the Bay, we would inevitably capsize. I would push the gondolier deep into the water while clamoring up onto the gondola myself, gasping for air. After regaining my balance, I would sigh, take a deep breath, and start my journey. It’s a long way to row across the North Atlantic.
Bella, baby, we are taking you home. Viva Italia!
MARIA GOMBERG B’26 Fucking Hates Boats.
c Welcome to Ocean Falls, British Columbia.
In a video titled “Canada’s Famous Abandoned City. Remote and Untouched. | Ocean Falls | Destination Adventure,” footage of the ferry ride from Bella Coola, BC to Ocean Falls embodies the sublime: Ice-cold waves lap against the edges of rugged snowcapped mountains, disappearing into the pale winter sky. Mist rises along the mountains’ spine, disguising an expanse of pine trees.
As the host of Destination Adventure walks down the street, the company town comes into view. Oncepaved roads buckle and crack under tall grass. Creamcolored buildings with gray roofs are tucked behind a sprawl of bushes and trees. The old boardwalk in the distance, once linking residential buildings, is now a pile of crisscrossed struts, toppled over like dominos. Cut to a close-up of the boardwalk: Winter sun dapples through the dry branches onto the mossy, deteriorated surface.
The host enters one of the residential buildings. Behind a blanket of dust, the rooms brim with colorful cabinets and wallpaper. Bay windows frame a view of the harbour, hugged by mountains. The living room is vacant.
In this video and others like it, Ocean Falls seems like a ghost town. Land clearing and development began in 1906, transforming the area into a bustling company town, home to a pulp mill, sawmill, and paper house owned by the pulp and paper company Crown Zellerbach. The paper industry relied on the unique geography of the falls and the town’s proximity to the clean surrounding lakes. “The quality of the water coming out was just incredible. It’s so pure that they did not have to filter it to make white paper, which is unheard of,” said Les Marsten, the present day owner of the Old Bank Inn. “The falls afforded the opportunity to generate electricity here, themselves, [which] made it possible for the paper mill to exist.”
Although heavy year-round precipitation always made life in Ocean Falls challenging, the community of workers and their families remained tight-knit. In 1965, a deadly landslide knocked out the power lines, destroyed multiple buildings, and injured or killed many of the town’s residents. Faced with disaster, the residents gathered together in recovery efforts, sharing breakfast during the power outage, housing the displaced, and holding funeral services for the dead. “During, and following last week’s crisis, both the strength and weakness of our make-up showed up,” wrote Dorothy Buchanan of the Ocean Falls Advertiser. “Many people rose to the occasion, the list of which is a long one. I am at home all day and would like to receive your phone call telling me WHO helped you, WHY they helped you and HOW they helped. In this way we can find out a little more and tell the complete story.”
However, the decline of the paper industry made it increasingly difficult for the small community to sustain itself. After Crown Zellerbach ceased production in 1972, many residents were forced to leave. Eventually, the town was sold to the British Columbia provincial government. In 1985, with the population dwindling, the government decided to demolish the town. The remaining residents protested the demolition, which meant that only some of the buildings were ultimately destroyed. At the 2021 census, the town still had a permanent population of a few dozen people, largely retired workers of the paper plants and their families.
Today, far away from the residential remains, nestled amidst logging debris and new forest growth, is a boxy gray and blue building: a new crypto venture powered by the historic hydroelectric dam.
Ocean Falls Technology, a cryptocurrency mine and AI server host, operates today by renting the dam from Boralex (the Quebec-based energy company
that owns the hydroelectric dam) and selling fractional ownership of its machines’ capacity.
In two YouTube clips posted by Ocean Falls Blockchain Corp, the building hosts aisles of shelves lined with cylindrical machine units. A loud, highpitched rhythmic humming persists in the background. Wires coil between the gaps of the shelves. Blinking green LEDs line the tops of units in rows. At the end of the room, 10 fans form a symmetrical, almost decorative pattern in the wall. Surrounding the muddle of shelves, empty space dominates the room.
The mainstay of Ocean Falls Technology is cryptomining—the issuing system of cryptocurrency. But in essence, it’s a competition of computing power. To start, mining machines are connected by blockchain, an information verification system where data is decentralized across every machine in the same network. In this network, every machine races to be the first to answer the same question set by the algorithm of a specific currency. The first machine to get the answer, verified by every other machine in the network, earns the coin. This question and answer is frequently described as ‘solving complex math problems,’ but it’s more accurately brute-forcing many combinations of numbers as quickly as possible to guess a certain sequence. To increase their odds of earning the next coin, investors can either make their machines go faster (which takes time, research, and resources) or simply own more machines, which consumes more power.
Running a number-guessing machine nonstop takes a lot of energy, and Ocean Falls Technology prides itself on its commitment to clean energy. Oded Orgil, the co-founder of Ocean Falls Technology and president of the Canada Israel Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview with TodayStocks that “It’s very important to us. It’s also hydroelectric power; it’s renewable energy. We’ve also identified a
number of other locations in British Columbia and across North America. We see [crypto]mining as an important part of our business and our core platform going forward.” Orgil also stresses the involvement of the company in the revitalization of the Ocean Falls township. “The community’s been amazing. Kevin [the company’s chief technology officer] has to a large extent embedded himself in the community. He purchased a home up there. [...] And in working with them [the community], we have tried to bring a little bit more revitalization.”
While the residents in Ocean Falls, including Marsten, are receptive to the presence of Ocean Falls Technology, actual revitalization efforts seem to be nothing more than industry-focused plans with little effect on the community. Much of the effort to preserve life in Ocean Falls is organized by people like Marsten, who host fundraisers and share archival pictures of the town on Facebook.
But what does it mean to “revitalize” a place that was never abandoned?
“Hí lṇtxv gvúkvḷa la gaxv la ǧiálayáxi: We, the Haíɫzaqv Nation, have been here in our wáxv:wuísaxv since the beginning of time. Our núyṃ affirm that we have been on this earth at the beginning of time.
The Haíɫzaqv Nation belongs to the wáxv:wuísaxv, and the wáxv:wuísaxv belongs to the Haíɫzaqv Nation, we have been in this relationship since time immemorial.
Our existence is tied to the well-being of wáxv:wuísaxv, and we protected it since the beginning of time. Our ancestors passed on this fundamental principle through intergenerational knowledge transfer. We acknowledge in each Ha íɫ zaqv generation the strength of our yimas, w ú maqs, n í n ú aq ḷ a, sás ṃ and the gv ú kv ḷ áut y í s Ha í ɫ zaqv.
The Haíɫzaqv Nation has never ceded, surrendered or extinguished our inherent right to govern the Haíɫzaqv people and our wáxv:wuísaxv.”
– HAÍⱢZAQV CONSTITUTION, 2025
Before crypto, mills, and dams, there was Liak.
Ocean Falls is situated on the traditional, unceded territories of the Haíɫzaqv Nation (sometimes anglicized as Heiltsuk). Before the construction of the hydroelectric dam, the waterfall bore the Haíɫzaqv name Liak, and was home to a seasonal village.
The construction of the hydroelectric dam—the core infrastructure of the paper industry decades ago and the cryptomining facilities of Ocean Falls Technology today—altered the flow of the water, forcing out the Haíɫzaqv. Ocean Falls resembles many industrial ventures across the West Coast; combined with the establishment of the reservation system, it forces many Indigenous nations out of their own lands, separating them from their own food source.
Although Ocean Falls is portrayed as a ghost town by adventure vloggers and Ocean Falls Technology, the land was never abandoned. Despite generations of colonial and corporate violence, the Haíɫzaqv Nation, guided by Ğvíḷás (cultural laws), stands firm in their way of life, a heritage rooted in the stewardship of their ancestral homelands. But repairing the damage done to their ecosystem while actively adapting to the climate crisis is no simple task.
The paper industry devastated the surrounding ecosystem. Clear-cutting, the first step in building a new town and sustaining the manufacturing of paper, destroyed the old-growth forests that surrounded Ocean Falls. The rapid loss of trees and root systems increased the frequency of landslides in the 1960, though a second growth forest has slowly emerged since the end of paper production. In addition, paper and pulp produces a tremendous amount of chemical byproducts, including dioxin, polychlorinated biphenyl, nonylphenol, chloroform, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and heavy metals. Pumped into the environment, these chemicals continue to pollute the water and the soil, seeping into the tissue of animals such as herring and salmon.
Although most members of the Haíɫzaqv Nation
currently resides in Bella Bella on Campbell Island (not in Ocean Falls) a central part of their restorative mission is to revitalize the salmon population across their territory. Salmon plays a vital role in Haíɫzaqv ancestral stories and their way of life. Protecting salmon from commercial fisheries and restrictive government policies asserts Haíɫzaqv land sovereignty and food security.
Despite the Haíɫzaqv Nation’s continual presence on their ancestral lands, projects of commercial exploitation repeatedly deploy the narrative of ghost towns to infringe on indigenous sovereignty. One such case was in 2003, when Norwegian company Omega Salmon Group Ltd. attempted to build a commercial hatchery in the name of “revitalization” in Ocean Falls. Besides constructing the project without consulting the Haíɫzaqv and neighbouring nations, commercial fisheries such as Omega Salmon degrade the surrounding environment. The antibiotic-filled pellets used to feed commercial salmon generate a high volume of toxic waste streams. The lack of genetic diversity in commercial fisheries makes the hatchery population prone to resilient and highly contagious diseases. Escaped salmon from commercial hatcheries introduce mutated diseases to natural populations—populations without immune resistance—increasing the risk of extinction for an already-overharvested fish population. In protest, the Haíɫzaqv Nation and the Nuxalk Nation formed roadblocks to stop the construction of the fishery, spoke at the Norwegian consulate, and filed a lawsuit against the British Columbia Government and Omega Salmon. Although Omega Salmon does not currently operate in Ocean Falls, it is disheartening to see Mowi, a U.S.-based salmon company, operating a commercial hatchery directly outside the township today.
Continued corporate destruction, however, has not deterred the Haíɫzaqv Nation’s mission.
In a YouTube video by the Wild Salmon Center, at the Koeye River in the Great Bear Rainforest, winding branches loom over the grassy banks. Wiggling upstream, the salmon swim near the surface, their fins peaking above the water. They leap over the stepped regions of the riverbed, diving into the waves.
To steward salmon, coastal Indigenous communities use weirs, wooden fences that block the salmon’s path without disturbing the flow of the water. A small opening in the weir allows the salmon to swim through, and as they pass through different segments of the river, communities can count and observe them to diagnose both the health of the fish and that of the ecosystem. The construction of weirs is both an ecological and political act. The 1868 Fisheries Act outlawed weir construction, enabling unrestricted salmon harvesting for commercial canneries and hatcheries.
Today, Haíɫzaqv leaders such as William Housty, the associate director of integrated resource management for the Haíɫzaqv Nation, work with the Wild Salmon Center and Simon Fraser University to meld indigenous technologies like weirs with digital tools. Solar-powered cameras installed in the openings of weirs stream live footage of salmon via satellite to SalmonVision—an artificial intelligence program developed collaboratively between nations and research institutions. SalmonVision is not a commercial or generative AI program. Its function is to count how many salmon are passing through a given weir 24 hours a day and to identify different species of salmon, creating a data stream of salmon health owned and operated by the respective nations in the region. Indigenous communities use the realtime data to forecast how many salmon will return, influencing their decision on how much to harvest. According to Housty, the Haíɫzaqv completed their first full season with SalmonVision at the Koeye River in the summer of 2023. After years of development, the Nation was able to confidently harvest and distribute around 500 fish into the Haíɫzaqv community for the first time in years. “If we can utilize this sort of technology to
better manage sockeye salmon ourselves, it’s going to lead to [the] long-term sustainability for salmon populations that is so desperately needed,” Housty told The Narwhal a Canadian enviormental magazine. Data ownership and collection infrastructure also help to advance the fight for indigenous autonomy and sovereignty. With digitized weirs, the Haíɫzaqv Nation currently holds the most accurate information about its streams, more accurate than even Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), the government institution responsible for managing Canadian oceanic resources. “Having high quality, in-season data should put the nations in the driver’s seat,” said Will Atlas, a salmon watershed scientist at the Wild Salmon Center and long-term collaborator on the SalmonVision project. “Knowledge is power when it comes to fisheries decision-making. For the nations to have these tools at their disposal—I think it’s a big game-changer.”
The hydroelectric dam of Ocean Falls Technology and the weirs of the Haíɫzaqv Nation are two infrastructures standing in the ever-changing tide of what defines a computing device.
Perhaps cyberspace is a landscape.
It might seem slick and frictionless to traverse, but real materials power every calculation and transaction: deep sea cables outstretch the internet, rare earth minerals constitute every machine, hydroelectric dams power servers. Cyberspace is inseparable from landscape, haunted by the history of indigenous stewardship.
Ocean Falls Technology has never acknowledged the Haíɫzaqv Nations as stewards of the land. The very premise of Ocean Falls relies on seeing the Haíɫzaqv Nation as a ghost nation. To create supposedly conscionable energy for cryptomining, Ocean Falls Technology must purge the exploitative operation costs of the hydroelectric dam. They might pay lip service to the workers and families whose labor and lives were taken, but not much more beyond that.
We must acknowledge ownership and stewardship of energy infrastructure as being part of indigenous ecologies. Projects such as digitized weirs and SalmonVision are new tools in the Haíɫzaqv Nation’s long fight for sovereignty. The DFO’s authority to shape policy is validated by their chokehold on fish population health data. By developing their own means of data production in cyberspace, the Haíɫzaqv Nation is able to harness bargaining power, proving their expertise in making stewardship decisions.
When we tell ghost stories, we risk misprescribing narrative death. But life is not exclusive to the stories being told. When the rain falls and the trees grow again, so too will the salmon return.
CINDY LI R’26 sees the irony in critiqing the paper industry in print.
c Perusing the Weeaboo Stories blog on Tumblr reveals the weeaboo as a filthy figure that transgresses social norms. Weeaboos are “heinously fat,” “dirty,” “greasy”; they impinge on personal boundaries via “glomping attacks,” a lunge-and-pounce maneuver that ends in the “glomp”-er aggressively embracing the victim. The overt revulsion to weeaboos within these posts is drastic, but not out of place. Weeaboo Stories was, after all, dedicated to archiving rants and horror stories about weeaboos up until its deletion in the 2010s. Offshoots of the now-defunct blog proliferate online even today, perhaps indicating how unfavorable perceptions of weeaboos persist in Western public imagination.
Specific definitions of weeaboos compiled on Urban Dictionary (the internet’s most reliable source of information) are laced with vitriol: The weeaboo, according to these entries, is an individual who has an “unhealthy obsession with Japan,” talks in “butchered Japanese,” and looks like a “complete idiot.” The etymology of the term weeaboo can be traced back to 4chan during the early 2000s. There, the term wapanese was born; fused from the words wannabe and Japanese, it was used to denigrate anime-obsessed individuals of the era. The term later evolved into the weeaboo Western audiences know now. Today, weeaboos are individuals (typically Westerners) who love Japan to a point of excess—an excess which is lambasted in online chronicles of weeaboos.
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In a post submitted to a revival of the Weeaboo Stories Tumblr blog, an anonymous author who calls herself “Tats” details an encounter with a weeaboo named “Crayon,” who “molests” the original poster’s boyfriend and “sexually assaults” Tats in front of a crowd of people. Tats begins the story by describing a day of fun for herself and her (Korean) boyfriend as they spend time cosplaying at an anime convention, drawing admiration from the crowd around them. Crayon’s abrupt arrival, however, disrupts their idyllic day: She materializes in front of them wearing “way too much eyeliner” and with “hair [...] so greasy it was practically stuck to her neck.” She also smells terrible and is “overweight to the point [where] her stomach [sticks] out and her thighs [are] a little on the jello-side.”
When Crayon sees Tats, who is waiting alone for her boyfriend, Crayon without hesitation throws her arms around Tats in an “attempted glomp” and shouts “OH EM GHEE, USAGI-CHAN IS KAWAII DESU,” but the encounter crosses a definite line when Tats’s boyfriend returns and Crayon “begins kissing him” and calling him a “Japanese bishie” even though Tats attempts to explain to Crayon that her boyfriend is Korean. Things escalate: Tats attempts to intervene, Crayon calls Tats a “Communist American whore,” and Crayon ends up exposing Tats’s bare chest to an audience before the story concludes with Crayon “in juvie hall.” Weeaboos such as Crayon, in Western
imagination, are individuals who do not shower; who violate personal space; who do not know how to function socially. There is nothing sympathetic in Tats’s portrayal of Crayon, who even ends up in jail by the end of the tale. Users reacting to the stories express their unequivocal condemnation of weeaboos. “Christ, these stories make me wish I could projectile vomit on command, just so I could do so when I’m around these sorts of people,” one user wrote in response. If we take this tale at face value, a disdain for weeaboos—while in this case manifesting as extreme hatred—is justified. Crayon not only harasses the original poster and her boyfriend, but also physically assaults them to the extent that her actions, as it turns out, warrant literal imprisonment. Moreover, patterns of intrusive behavior are persistently reiterated in online weeaboo circles; on the original Weeaboo Stories, users like Tats describe how weeaboos have assaulted them (one even details how a weeaboo in their life hugged them with so much force that they broke the poster’s ribs). In spaces such as r/weeabootales, others discuss with distaste how weeaboos flatten Japanese people and Japan into rigid stereotypes to preserve the purity of their idealized vision of Japan. For example, stereotypes of the domestic, sexually submissive Asian woman are reinforced through the genre of harem anime dedicated to portraying hordes of women grovelling for a male protagonist’s affection. Weeaboos often latch onto these ideas, allowing misogynistic portrayals of anime women to seep into their treatment of real-life Asian women, with one Reddit user discussing weeaboos spending time in Japan solely to search for “their dream Japanese waifu.”
The term waifu itself—the English word wife modified to fit Japanese phonology—seems to confirm the fact that misogynistic stereotypes warp the ways that weeaboos, and especially male weeaboos, view Asian women in real life and outside of forum stories. Weeaboos use waifu to refer to any anime woman that they admire or find attractive; notably, waifu identifies female characters only in capacity for proper wifehood, thus enforcing gender roles that figure women as sex objects and even motivating some weeaboos to move to Japan to find their perfect waifu. Moreover, weeaboos often buy body pillows and figurines of their so-called waifus—one clip featured in a weeaboo “cringe compilation” on Facebook documents a man singing “Happy Birthday” to a framed photo, a mouse pad with breast-shaped hand rests, and a laptop monitor all plastered with the face of a beaming anime girl—further configuring (fictional) women into objects. And although women in anime are not real, they are often coded as Asian, meaning that the objectification of women in anime plays into longstanding stereotypes of Asian women as dominable beings.
Generalizations emerge from Weeaboo Stories only if these stories are taken at face value; realistically, many weeaboo-related posts are probably fake, formulated to generate upvotes or clicks. Concrete evidence disproving these stories may not exist,
but it is also highly unlikely that there is a weeaboo out there capable of shattering someone’s ribs with one hug. There is also, of course, the fact that fake, sensationalized stories masquerading as the truth constitute an entire genre on platforms like Tumblr and Reddit. Moreover, to draw a clearer distinction between common perceptions of weeaboos such as the ones in Weeaboo Stories and weeaboos in real life, it is helpful to turn to weeaboo “cringe compilations” published on YouTube, which are collections of videos wherein weeaboos are socially inept and act outside of a generally accepted norm. These compilations are drawn from various sources and serve a similar function to blog posts deriding weeaboos, but their medium makes it inherently difficult to lie or exaggerate, making their materials more noteworthy: In them, the weeaboo is often simply dancing to a song, making a video alone in their room, or running around in an anime character’s garb. Weeaboos in these videos are certainly still very problematic—with one girl stating she is Japanese because she enjoys sushi, alongside a video of a man dancing with his merchandise of anime women—but they are ultimately far from the rib-breaking assaulters found in online weeaboo stories.
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The hatred of weeaboos online also seems to arise mainly from Westerners as opposed to actual Japanese people. One 2016 Facebook video posted by content creator Japanese with Yuta seems to support this notion: Yuta’s video shows Japanese people reacting to a weeaboo cringe compilation, where the weeaboos in the videos dance to Japanese songs, show off their anime merchandise with uninhibited glee, and speak in English-accented Japanese. When the Japanese viewers are shown the videos, they react with apathy and even mild amusement. The compilation cuts to a man dancing in a skimpy anime costume, and the woman watching simply remarks, “His Japanese is good.” The interviewer goes on to ask the group for their thoughts on the statement that “Many people have [a] strong disdain for [weeaboos] and accuse them of disrespecting Japanese culture, speaking incorrect Japanese [and] misrepresenting Japan.” The interviewees are surprisingly accepting: One says that “it’s their choice [...] in Japan, there is a whole industry for that.” Another tells the interviewer: “As a Japanese person, I am actually grateful that they love Japan.” “When you want to adopt something from other cultures, people tend to criticize,” a respondent says. “But if you don’t give in [...] it will eventually be recognized as a new culture. So they should not worry about criticism.”
So if most extreme weeaboo stories are likely fake, and it is hard for us to ascertain if Japanese individuals truly object to ‘cringey’ but otherwise innocuous weeaboo behavior, then why do we, the Western audience posting about weeaboos in English, imagine the weeaboo the way that we do, and why do we care about their cringey acts? Why do we deem them
words. In fact, descriptions of weeaboos speaking poor Japanese infiltrate countless old posts archived from Weeaboo Stories (in one entry, a weeaboo screams “OH MY GOD YUKI-CHAN YOU ARE SOOO KAWAII DESU”); this tendency is similarly represented in the aforementioned Urban Dictionary definition, where the weeaboo is condemned for speaking in “butchered Japanese.” Such wording implies that the weeaboo violates Japanese language and culture. But this notion of the weeaboo as a cultural corruptor assumes that there is, in fact, a pure, ideal Japanese culture that can be violated in the first place. In constructing and condemning weeaboos who supposedly defile Japan and its perceived customs of politeness and modesty—by “butchering” its language or screaming at inappropriate times—these online Westerners uphold the idea that Japan exists as a being with stronger moral values that the West may taint. We care about weeaboos’ actions because their obtrusive acts (or at least, the acts we imagine as theirs) desecrate our perception of Japan as more inclined toward pacifism and social harmony. It makes sense, then, that the weeaboo is always retold as dirty and socially undesirable, a conventionally unattractive and overweight individual; often, posters even deem weeaboos “hambeasts,” calling attention to the fatphobic tones that undergird each story. The weeaboo’s beastly smell or appearance sullies each scene they inhabit; so, too, do they contaminate the purity its Western critics imagine as inherent to Japan.
This idealization of Japan is not without precedent. Religions in Japan in particular may have played a role in shaping how we have come to imagine the nation; for instance, Zen, a Japanese school of Buddhism that arose in the 12th and 13th centuries—noted for its emphasis on discipline and frugality—has grown in popularity to the point where the word zen often colloquially replaces “peaceful.” Meanwhile, although Confucianism originated in China, it quickly rose to prominence during the 17th century in Japan, diffusing values that promoted peace, stability, and loyalty. Japan’s posited virtues have helped form an idyllic image of Japan in our mind.
We can also look to the American academic and Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa as a precursor to the weeaboo phenomenon. Fenollosa, who lived in Japan as a cultural ambassador during the late 19th century, was one of several Americans who helped bridge the
that, without Fenollosa’ adaptation of Eastern art to “Western tastes,” it is possible that American society would not have recognized the significance of “previously inaccessible” Sino-Japanese art—which would have precluded the obsession with Japanese art and culture symptomatic of the weeaboo fandom today. Fenollosa’s perspective as an early “Japanologist” might also serve as a framework for us to understand the West’s vision of a pristine Japan as juxtaposed to the filthy West. For example, in a poem titled “The Separated West,” Fenollosa decries Western attempts to “poison the peace of the far Japanese”; this wording implies that the East embodies a kind of cleansing power. Fenollosa may have seen his vision of Japanese ideals as something to emulate, but this emulation in excess, as modern weeaboos might exhibit, would lead to the perversion of the “original” principles. We might even view Fenollosa as a 19th-century precursor to those disgusted posters on the Weeaboo Stories forum.
Though many Western haters of weeaboos are well-intentioned, delineating the West from Japan while upholding Japan as a paragon of purity carries its own problematic implications. This kind of East-West dichotomy downplays Japanese peoples’ agency and erases histories of Japanese imperialism: It both assumes that Japanese people lack the discernment to condemn weeaboos for appropriating their own culture and downplays the intentionality with which Japanese media targets Western audiences in order to obfuscate its legacy of imperialism and expand its soft power over other nations. The researcher Tengku Intan Maimunah, in his study of imperialist ideas in Japanese animated films, writes that Pokémon “projects a soft and friendly image” of Japan to children around the world. In the same vein, most post-WWII Japanese media tends avoid depictions which connect the nation to the atrocities of its past—Japan was also an active militarized imperial power between the mid-19th century to the end of WWII; notably, in 1937, Japanese forces raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese civilians over several weeks during a siege now referred to as the Nanjing Massacre. After reviewing five “Japanese war animation films,” for example, Maimunah concludes that all five films avoided depicting
efface Japan’s role as aggressor.” And to the point of the weeaboo’s objectification of women, degrading portrayals of women exist in the first place because of anime studios’ choices—as an interviewee in the earlier Facebook video notes, there already exists an “industry” in Japan that caters to the masses. Harem anime exists because it sells. Fanservice runs rampant in anime because it sells. Body pillows of animated women in compromising positions exist because they sell. But then again, these commodities sell because there are consumers that buy them. Ultimately, there is no singular figure to blame within this endless feedback loop of consumption. What remains relevant is that mass media is not a neutral object produced
without ideology or a political project: Even if an observer consumes these productions without a second thought, mass media leaves a taste in the mouth and writhes in the stomach.
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Returning to Crayon’s story, it is notable that Tats calls attention to the fact that Crayon calls Tats a “Communist American whore.” Crayon’s fault is not only that she misappropriates Japanese language and perceived culture—in degrading Tats for being American, she also rejects her own American identity in favor of another ethnicity (as demonstrated in Tats extensive account of Crayon’s attempts to copy Japanese mannerisms.) Perhaps, then, it is not only weeaboos’ fetishization or cultural appropriation that unsettles us; perhaps our discomfort also lies within the fact that the weeaboo fandom exemplifies modern media’s power over supposedly fixed norms in our life, such as the idea that our nationalities define our character. Their individual transgressions become a microcosm for the whole project of weeaboo-ism in society’s eyes: the weeaboo, in their unadulterated love for the Japanese culture put forth by mass media such as anime, shatters our perception of ethnonational boundaries as static and of racial identities as inherent divisions rather than constructed categories. Of course, I am not arguing in favor of transraciality; I am only encouraging us to consider the potential that weeaboos represent for forms of grouphood that extend beyond coalitions based on race and ethnicity. Consider, for instance, the philosopher Pierre Lévy, who argues—perhaps unrealistically—that today we are caught in a transitional period. According to Lévy the “deterritorialization” of knowledge and the “emergence of the new knowledge space” via the internet will create groups formed not along national borders, but from shared interests—a phenomenon we might see modeled in communities like the weeaboo fandom. Using Lévy’s idealistic framework, the formulation of these groups disassembles socially constructed barriers and represents mass media’s ability to erode the nation-state’s monopoly over its citizens’ senses of collective identities. The reader cringes when the aforementioned Crayon calls Tats a “Communist American whore” and when she mistakenly believes a Korean man to be Japanese because she misinterprets and redraws cultural boundaries. In that sense, maybe weeaboo fandom can truly “be recognized as a new culture,” as one interviewee from the Facebook video put it.
But then again, further complicating the conception of weeaboos as a “new culture” is the fact that weeaboos themselves are also dedicated to an imaginary, one-dimensional conception of Japan, which they embrace through commercialized products and customs regurgitated through mass media. Viewing weeaboo culture through this lens reveals that the weeaboo replaces national parochialism not with transnational unity but with transnational mass consumerism. A more developed form of the potential for global solidarity within weeaboo culture might then unexpectedly arise in the international movement advocating for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, especially as facilitated through the internet. For example, Palestinian journalists and ordinary individuals in Gaza who chronicle their lives on social media use the internet to shed light on the horrific conditions they endure, fueling outrage and further motivating for the global resistance to the genocide. The internet has also been a place where activists have organized fundraising campaigns and protests. Many of these activists wear keffiyehs and chant in Arabic, representing the transnational solidarity marking the movement to end the genocide in Gaza—with the internet acting as a significant channel for their resistance.
Yet the perspective that online communities can deconstruct national borders remains utopian. The internet can be radical—but it can also radicalize. Online spaces can also be co-opted by powerful forces to advance national interests; think of Godzilla, or even Pokémon. Of course, Japan is not the only entity to use globally-circulated media to shape our beliefs. In 2004, the political scientist Joseph Nye’s assertion that the “resources that produce soft power […] as the values an organization or country expresses in its culture” prophesized the digital revolution to come. Today, digital technology allows for instantaneous engagement with an international audience, making the act of expressing a nation’s cultural values as simple as pressing a button, or, in this case, airing an animation. Mass media and the organizations that distribute it already act as powerful shapers of ideology; in the political theorist Noam Chomsky’s words, mass media inculcates populaces “with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior” that best align with the beliefs of those in power. This effect is compounded as we surf through content on the web, where we are forced to navigate through fragments of color and noise that overwhelm our senses, thereby satiating our desires to experience (and, in a sense, simulate) a new form of reality. But this mediated reality is too
contained and too easy to control; it is, moreover, too simple to create algorithms that dictate how we inhabit cyberspace, resulting in self-censorship or echo chambers. After all, the same forces of digital community-building which enable lovers of anime to form online collectivities that break down national boundaries can also lead right-wing extremists to storm the Capitol.
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Within the nascent knowledge spaces flourishing across the internet, there is a possibility for revolutionary change and resistance; we can see in weeaboos a deconstruction of national boundaries that may also spell a future of solidarity stretching beyond societal delineations born directly from the internet. Rethinking our automatic aversion to weeaboos, therefore, may be necessary to actualize this utopian view of internet-wide collective knowledge spaces. In the future, perhaps we can even see this utopian view fully realized in the movement to free Palestine. Regardless, there are lingering and extremely valid reasons to criticize weeaboo culture: Among other issues, weeaboos disseminate misogynistic perspectives, perpetuate Orientalism, and can even spur on the erasure of Japan’s imperial history. I argue that these dual conceptions of weeaboo culture—oscillating between revolutionary in its potential and damaging in its execution—can coexist and in fact reflect our position on the knife’s edge between revolution and regression in the modern internet age.
ANDREA LI B’28 enjoys anime a normal amount.
c Rhode Island is no exception to the United States’s failed healthcare system. Although the state’s rate of uninsured individuals (2.2% in 2024) remains below the national average, residents still confront barriers in health insurance access. Out-of-pocket costs, for instance, are of rising concern: 7.8% of families in 2024 used most or all of their savings to pay medical bills, compared to 5.9% in 2022. The Indy explored two Providence clinics that operate on a community-oriented model about their efforts to create linguistically- and culturally-sensitive care and challenge medical stigma against this backdrop of financially inaccessible care.
“Healthcare isn’t just about having services available. It’s about making sure people can truly reach them, understand them, and feel respected in the process,” said Doha Maaty, an alumna of the Brown University School of Public Health who worked to reestablish Amal Clinic last year. The clinic, which was originally founded in 2010 to provide free medical services to Greater Providence’s South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2024, Maaty and other medical students and faculty treated over 50 patients in just three hours at the Ramadan Health Fair, which inspired them to revive the clinic. “That experience highlighted a significant gap in healthcare access for South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African communities in Rhode Island,” said Maaty. Four months later, Amal Clinic officially reopened.
In line with its original model, Amal Clinic operates as a ‘clinic within a clinic’ in partnership with Clínica
Esperanza/Hope Clinic (CEHC), a nonprofit that provides free medical services, primarily to Hispanic and Latine residents. Through this partnership, Amal Clinic is able to offer CEHC’s wide variety of services, including gynecology, psychology, and dermatology, to its patients. Both aim to provide healthcare that serves patients from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. CEHC primarily works with bilingual Spanishspeaking staff and volunteers, while Amal Clinic has bilingual staff who speak languages such as Arabic, French, Pashto, and Urdu.
Amal Clinic has seen firsthand how this structure facilitates accessible healthcare. “Patients often came to us because they couldn’t get care elsewhere, either due to language barriers, lack of insurance, or simply not knowing where to go. Even when resources exist, they’re not always accessible,” said Maaty.
Language-inclusive care has been a key focus of the clinic’s medical providers, who seek to address a widespread gap in healthcare access. “Having in-person interpretation has been especially impactful, allowing patients to leave appointments confident that they understood what was discussed, rather than feeling uncertain,” said Maaty. She added that Amal Clinic’s patients know that “they have someone in their corner advocating for them.”
Unlike CEHC, Amal Clinic’s medical providers are entirely volunteers, primarily sourced from students and community members. Since its volunteers tend to have demanding academic schedules or shifts at other hospitals and clinics, Amal Clinic operates on a smaller scale than CEHC. Whereas CEHC is open Monday through Friday, Amal Clinic currently only has the capacity to
c When I first started working at Project Weber/RENEW (PWR)’s drop-in center, I felt as if I was entering a different world. Clients walking into the center were greeted by their first names, staff checked in on family members, and case workers welcomed clients with a level of friendship and love that felt surprising for a health and social service space. “I understand what it feels like to be on the other side of humanity—the struggle, the system barriers, poverty, being in survival mode every day,” said Evan Timbo, an overdose prevention specialist at PWR, at the opening of the organization’s Overdose Prevention Center. He added that the aim of his work is that “everyone who walks through the doors feels love, comfort, and safety.”
The staff—many of whom have experience navigating homelessness, substance use disorders, or engaging in sex work—aim to make clients feel accepted regardless of their background. Working at the center, I have
host evening clinics about once or twice a month from 5 to 8 p.m. Still, the volunteers’ “energy and commitment are what keep the clinic running,” said Maaty.
In addition to its volunteers, community support and the CEHC partnership have been integral to Amal Clinic’s operations. “Clínica Esperanza/Hope Clinic has been instrumental in this effort, generously providing space, resources, and guidance from their staff and providers,” said Maaty. When Brown students reopened the clinic in collaboration with CEHC, they were able to use CEHC’s existing legal infrastructure to fast-track the clinic’s reopening. After relaunching in June 2024, the clinic relied on the Rhode Island community to inform residents about its services. “Local community organizations—religious, educational, and recreational—have played a key role by sharing our resources, spreading the word to potential patients, and encouraging volunteers to get involved,” said Maaty. The clinic now receives regular calls from community members seeking care.
As Amal Clinic continues to refine its operations, its leadership team is working to hire full-time staff and secure a sustainable source of funding to expand their services throughout the state. “In the meantime,” said Maaty, “one of the most impactful ways the community can support this initiative is by helping us build stronger volunteer networks, both across Rhode Island universities like Brown and RISD, and within the communities we serve.”
LAYLA AHMED B’27 wants you to email amalclinicpvd@gmail.com to learn about how you can get involved with Amal Clinic.
spoken with clients who came in frustrated after encounters at the nearby Rhode Island Hospital. They often express feeling dismissed, disrespected, and as though they have been denied access to proper treatment based on their appearance.
PWR aims to challenge this stigma and eliminate barriers to receiving care. They work alongside VICTA, a privately-owned outpatient healthcare program that offers addiction treatment across Rhode Island, including medication-assisted treatment, counseling, and psychiatric care. In addition to their main center on Elmwood Ave, VICTA recently opened a clinic inside PWR’s new Providence drop-in center, located within the Hospital District.
At the center, people can feel part of a community and access care without the stigma associated with homelessness, sex work, or drug use elsewhere. Clients are not expected to fill out extensive intake forms, maintain sobriety, or adhere to a strict appointment schedule
in order to receive the center’s services. The drop-in center also functions as a community hub, where anyone is welcome to have a snack, watch TV, take a shower, or do laundry.
Case workers at the center don’t have typical offices. Instead, they spend much of their time sitting in the communal area, which allows conversation to feel more like talking with a friend than meeting with a provider. VICTA’s clinical staff often hang out there as well, stepping outside their offices to build relationships with clients. This model transcends the barriers found in the traditional healthcare system, creating a safe and comfortable environment for people to access the services that they need. In addition to medical care, the center offers group wellness art sessions, grief groups, and ear acupuncture. Care at PWR and VICTA is not just clinical; it’s defined by the needs of the community.
This approach is critical. Due to issues ranging from a lack of insurance, inflexible scheduling, and poor access to culturally competent care—many of VICTA’s patients have lost their trust in the traditional healthcare system. In the face of these challenges, the PWR staff have built the area as a safe haven for their clients to access care.
As Cathy Schultz, the director of the governor’s Overdose Task Force, said at the center’s opening: “We know better by listening to the voices of those we serve. When you listen, you can do better by creating choice […] Listening and creating choice gets us to equity.”
The sentiment that healthcare is not something that must be earned, but something that anyone should be able to access safely and with dignity, defines the center’s work and stands in sharp contrast to a healthcare environment that often fails to provide people with the care they need.
KAVITA DOOBAY B’27 wants you to email brownharmreduction@brown.edu to learn how you can support PWR’s work and harm reduction efforts across Rhode Island.
c For the last couple of days, the setup of a joke has been bouncing around the empty space between my ears. It goes something like this:
On his first night in the underworld, Charlie Kirk goes up to the blind prophet Tiresias and says, “Hey man, you were considered a pretty smart guy in your time. Now that we’re both down here, I have to ask: how would you define ‘a woman’?”
I admit—there are quite a few issues with this bit. It lacks a punchline, is in more-than-semi-bad taste, and relies heavily on a listener’s knowledge of deceased right-wing demagogues (Kirk’s “Prove me wrong” debate style and fondness of posing the question “What is a woman?” to dyed-hair college kids) and relatively niche Ancient Greek mythology. Tiresias, in addition to his blindness and clairvoyance, is known for having been turned into a woman by an angry Hera after whacking a pair of copulating snakes with a stick, then back into a man seven years later. (In another telling, he was originally a woman, turned into a man by a spurned Apollo, then into a woman, then into a man by Hera, then into a woman by Zeus, then into a man, then into a woman by Aphrodite, and then into a rodent! The classic FTMTFTMTFTMTFTMouse.)
Today, one no longer has to rely on smashing serpents with a staff to metamorphose from a man to a woman, or a woman to a man, or any sex to any number of interstitial identities. Through the consumption of testosterone, estrogen, antiandrogens, and puberty blockers, we can and do change our bodies to a staggering extent. We also amend ourselves surgically; think not just bottom and top surgery, but also procedures to feminize, masculinize, or neutralize the jaw, nose, legs, throat, brow, hairline, ad infinitum. Sex has never been as fluid and amendable as it is today.
Yet despite this dizzying and sublime spread of bodily options, more bountiful now than ever before, there exists a mushrooming insistence on the immutability of biology. Sex, many proclaim, is fixed from birth and even after death. (One common, if not particularly urgent, anti-trans argument runs along the lines of: “In 500 years, when archaeologists dig up your skeleton, they’ll know you were really a man/woman.”)
Because sex is represented as natural and constant, trans bodily practices that challenge its supposed immutability are imagined to coalesce around a hard core of distress. For anti-trans movements, attempts to change one’s sex in the face of implacable biology are akin to mutilation. Take articles like “Sex Reassignment Doesn’t Work. Here Is the Evidence,” by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. Take J.K. Rowling’s response to the 2021 Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order Act—which included transgender identity among its protected categories—insisting that it “placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness […] than on the rights and freedoms of actual women” and acclaiming “the reality and immutability of biological sex.” Take the Trinity
Broadcasting Network’s hour-long show, “Identity and Gender with Charlie Kirk,” in which Kirk and his guests repeatedly declare their loyalty to “material reality” as opposed to “transgenderism.”
These people and organizations consider trans bodies and biologies the progenitors of distress: for the individual transsexual, for those close to them, for their communities and societies and nations. If a man came up to you wanting to cut off his hand, you wouldn’t sedate him and perform the operation, or even give him a saw and the go-ahead; you would prevent him, at all costs, from doing so. Although it may make him irritated now to not cut off his hand, surely its removal would cause him much greater distress in the long run. Why should it be any different if the hand wasn’t a hand, but any other body part?
Trans people and allies also employ this distress-enmeshed understanding of trans bodily practices. Unlike anti-trans constituents, allies predominately locate the distress of transness not in the act of medically transitioning, but in the distress of dysphoria: when one’s sexed experiences do not match one’s internal identification. To return to our metaphor, many cissexual allies view trans people the same as they would a man with his arm trapped by a boulder, 127 Hours–style. In this circumstance, you’d likely support his opting for hand-removal— but you’d still consider the action itself unfortunate and deeply distressing.
Allies’ advocacy for the provision of gender-affirming care by the state-medical apparatus demonstrates their twofold association of trans bodily practices with distress: both as a means for reducing dysphoria and as a potential vector of distress if recipients experience complications or regrets after transitioning. The medical anthropologist Paula Martin, in “A ‘hard question’: Gender affirming care and gender distress in a social world,” describes how distress in medical settings “continues to be used to distinguish between those for whom gender affirming interventions are indicated, and those who should not receive them.” Only trans people who would experience intense distress without hormones and surgeries can access them. Other individuals, who might want transitional care but not enough, or not for the right reasons, or not in the right way, can be roundly denied. Thus, people seeking transitional care must experience—and often actively perform—intense agony to have their desires treated as legitimate by medical professionals.
As a trans man who commenced his bodily reconstitution young, yet not young enough to avoid the rigamarole of surgical intervention, I recall Zooming into my gender therapist’s office from high school study hall and being asked to rate my distress with my chest from 1–10. “Six,” I said, after a confused pause. He blinked at me impassively.
“And how much would it be if you were told you could never get top surgery?”
“Oh—like a 10!”
This higher number—this performance of his expectations of my dysphoric, distressed transness, which I had to meet to be deemed worthy of medical
transition—satisfied him.
Despite the vagueness and ephemerality of distress—what does it mean to feel a 10 of mental agony, versus a seven or five or two? How can we possibly compare the pain felt by one person to that of another, and determine which is worthy of amelioration?—it remains a deciding factor in the distribution of transitional care, as well as a core pillar for many arguments in favor of gender-affirming care as a concept. The pro-trans constituency largely abandons questions of the actual mutability or immutability of sex, yielding that field to transphobes and the dubious, in favor of the inward-facing discourse of gender identity and the alleviation of dysphoria. It does not seem to matter anymore whether one can truly become male or become female, or whether these concepts are useful to begin with; what matters is a utilitarian reduction of dysphoria.
Trans people settle for this support, founded on the power of pain. It seems easiest; it gets (some of) us (some of) what we need (some of the time). We agree to locate trans practices not in the body— not in sex—but in the mind: in ‘gender,’ and ‘gender identity.’ We become trans-gender, rather than trans-sexual. Gender is fluid, we hear, shouted from the rooftops. Below these words, in a nearly inaudible murmur: But sex is not
I am far from advocating for the return to the 20th-century understanding of gender and sex, in which one gets the infamous ‘sex-change operation’ and wakes up a brand-new man (or woman). However, shirking considerations of the material world leaves us with no compelling response to the conservative barb, “Well, if you already identify as a man/woman/non-binary, why do you need these surgeries/hormones/etc.?” We retreat into a discourse of ‘feeling like’ a man, woman, or neither; of managing individual pain; of barricading trans bodily practices from individuals who fail to adequately perform their distress or identify in ways that are not orthodoxly ‘trans enough.’
Yet we must begin, as Eve Tuck, an Unangax scholar of Indigenous and critical education studies, wrote in her masterful “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” to “consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken.” We must take a critical look at conceptualizations of transness centered around distress. In her piece, which is focused on Native, urban, and other historically disenfranchised communities, Tuck illustrates how damage-centered research and narratives falsely flatten their subjects into their ability to feel pain— into their ability to be wronged and deprived and distressed. These narratives have implications not only for the way the outside world sees these communities, naturalizing their pain even while they seek to exhibit it, but for how these communities see themselves. What does it mean to view oneself as innately without? To understand one’s life as coalesced around distress? These questions, I argue, are imminently and immanently applicable to the contemporary trans community and our understanding of trans bodily practices.
( TEXT EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION NAN DICKERSON )
What if we refuse the pretense that ‘sex’ is discrete and unchanging, while ‘gender’ exists in a Cartesian mind removed from the body; or that transness can be understood as a utilitarian flee from pain? But what can replace these ideas? How can we get what we need if we give up our tenuous grasp of pain-based provision?
Abscond from this transgenderism of distress in the face of immutable biology; let us consider, instead, a wondrous transmetabolics of desire
Transmetabolics includes traditionally understood gender-affirming care (surgeries, hormones, and so on) and other changes on the bodily plane (haircuts, electrolysis, voice training, you get the drill) but extends to the spoken, the social, the intellectual and cultural practices through which we use our bodies to chase our gendered desire. Transmetabolics is expansive; it is open to interpretation and participation; it is even open to those of us who do not necessarily consider themselves transgender but nonetheless wish to access some of that blind Tiresian augury for themselves.
Transmetabolics opposes both the outwardly and inwardly distressing mutilation invoked by the antitrans constituent, and the simultaneously distress-alleviating and distress-generating gender-affirming procedures of the contemporary pro-trans movement. Transmetabolics insists that sex and biology are not beyond change; they are change.
Our reconfiguring cannot be as simple-minded as dragging the compass needle of transness from ‘distress’ to ‘happiness’ and holding it there through sheer force of will. I am not here to merely advocate for centering ‘trans joy’ rather than ‘trans distress.’ In my experience, pure utilitarian pleasure is strikingly lacking in most transmetabolic processes. Surgery sucks. Doing my T shot hurts. Binding and taping my chest, as I did from ages 14–18, totally blew. While lifting weights at the gym—which is, for me, a decidedly transmetabolic practice—grants a certain grim corporeal glee, it’s difficult and time-consuming and leaves me sore. But does this matter? Are trans bodily practices worthy only after a disinterested weighing of happiness and unhappiness, utility and disadvantage? I say no; what matters—what should matter—in the distribution of and engagement with transmetabolic processes is not pain or pleasure, but desire.
“Desire,” Tuck writes, “yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore […] Exponentially generative, engaged, engorged, desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking.”
Or, in the words of the literary critic Andrea Long Chu in her aptly named New York Times opinion piece “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy”: “Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it.”
Transmetabolics is not a flight from distress or even toward happiness; it is a flight toward that which one desires, regardless of its utility.
‘Gender,’ for me, is not a staunch identity in my mind, a ‘feeling like a man’ as opposed to ‘feeling like a woman.’ How could I possibly know what ‘being a
woman’ feels like? I have never been one. I have never sensed that I was ‘born in the wrong body,’ or ‘a man’s brain in a woman’s form.’ For that matter, neither have the vast majority of trans individuals I’ve encountered. I only know my desire to move toward masculinity and maleness (take this statement with a grain of salt—I am still a relatively capital-G Gay man who prides himself on his interior decorating skills and musical theater expertise).
I prefer to understand gender as directionality. It is a star by which I orient myself, and sex is the ship I take toward it, and transmetabolics is my own steady hand on the helm. I am not a man—in my conception, neither is anyone else—but a constantly becoming–man. I am Tiresias, blind and divinatory. I cannot see what I am, only what I will be, what I am always in the process of bringing into being.
While transmetabolics is not without moments of distress or comfort, I argue that its defining emotional state is profound, transcendent wonder. As I transition, I move toward a wonder that is all the more rarefied for
its seeming impossibility. Wonder like sitting silently in a Quaker meeting and sensing, for a single moment, the divine in everyone there. Wonder like reading the poem “Gravel,” by Mary Oliver, or the ninth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Wonder like turning over in bed and seeing again—a domestic miracle!—an irresistible boy you wanted and never thought you’d have. Wonder like my desires have coincided with those of the universe. Wonder like: How could this beautiful thing have happened to me? How can I be its keeper? Because that is what transmetabolics can give us: something we’ve desired, seemingly hopelessly, for very long and very deeply, finally emerging all around us in full verdance—a slow spring, but a sweet one.
EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS B’28 always feels weird when someone compliments him for “passing,” but he says “Thank you!” anyway.
pandemic in 2020, Weinrobe and Lenker produced instrumentals, in what Weinrobe called “a solitude space.” So when it came , they had “a real desire to make it with a group of people and build a band, build a group of friends that we trusted and loved,” Weinrobe told me. “So that was really the concept going in: how can we find the right combination of people in the right time that lets us play music for a
Lenker pulled together three musician friends— Josefin Runsteen, Nick Hakim, and Mat Davidson— and hunkered down in New England, in a house in the woods. “We had a lot of fun doing it,” said Weinrobe. “Cooked a lot of good meals, lot of good laughs, lot of good walks in
with death and sickness. But her language is often gentle, even joyful. She invites the listener to remember stars that shine like tears on the night’s face, evoking the cosmic and configuring sadness into something divine. The language becomes explicitly mystical in the second verse:
I wanted to be an inventor, collected scraps to make a portal / I wanted so much for magic to be real.
Here, magic functions as an escape from the horrors of living and dying.
This feeling flows into the second track, “Sadness as a Gift,” in which Lenker describes profound grief. When she sings of needing to let go when the old man beats his crooked cane and of time brimming with a majesty, she situates death, being, and emotion in the realm of the metaphysical, of what cannot be defined with reason but must simply be felt. The magic Lenker yearned for as a child becomes real, evident in blue skies, in the ability of another person to hear the music inside my mind, in even the passing of seconds (time spells emit, who can see it? she asks on track seven, “Evol”). Her use of metaphors to describe the ineffable suggests a model for feeling that sits outside of intellectual reasoning and is rooted, instead, in images and sensations. Such beautiful language also invites us to experience firsthand the album’s central theme: we are lucky to be able to feel, even if what we feel is sadness. In this way, the mysticism that drifts through the entire record—lyrically and sonically—is not only an aesthetic choice, but a thematic one.
This through-line was not planned in advance. Rather, Weinrobe said it was “an emergent quality of a very intentional process.” At the height of the
track, “wake me up to drive (outside),” Lenker pulls back the curtain on the walks in the woods that Weinrobe describes. A voice asks, “Do you walk through that?” Lenker replies, “Well, you can!” We hear crunching footsteps as the two whistle toward her dog, Oso, and marvel at the near-full moon. Lenker tunes her guitar and begins to sing: Wake me up to drive, wake me up to drive, even if I’m tired, I don’t wanna miss the ride.
The idea that walking in nature kindles creativity is not an original one. In her essay “Building the House,” the poet Mary Oliver writes: “For many years, in a place I called Blackwater Woods, I wrote while I walked. That motion, hardly more than a dreamy sauntering, worked for me; it kept my body happy while I scribbled.” Listening to Bright Future feels like a dreamy sauntering. Throughout the album, Lenker takes us into the wild field behind her childhood home, to one kitchen with a hot stove and another where she cooks beans and rice, to the clarity of black space and to a spot so deep and green / With wild raspberries and apple trees / And rocks to climb between. In her music everything is in motion: moths and angels, water like a washing machine, a moon that sails away, and Lenker herself, who is running, swimming, and walking downhill with the dogs
That sinuous quality is a product of the process. “The goal was to just set up this zone of possibility. And then what happens inside of that zone of possibility […] that’s not so planned. Once it’s established, you just let it live,” said Weinrobe. In other words:
have time to write […]
I couldn’t just do it on weekends or at home at night. And so I said, ‘I’ve got to get up in the morning and do this before I go to work,’” he reflects in his essay “The Right Way.” His employer offered him a “special desk” where he spent early mornings “mostly filling notes at first, sometimes doing sketches, and discovering [his] way as [he] went along.” Eventually, he moved out of the home with his wife and children and into a cheap apartment where he could write from two to four every morning. The zone of possibility, then, was not only a physical space—a desk of his own, then a room—but also time. To form a zone is to suspend the noise of daily living, of a family, of the news.
But a room of one’s own, and free time, for that matter, is a rare and spectacular gift—a luxury. The necessary work is making sure everyone can access these tools that sustain creativity. However, the lack of these tools does not altogether impede creative work. Many artists have been forced to fit their creative work into just slivers of free time, have crafted with scrap materials, crafted with nothing.
Solomon Williams, an enslaved blacksmith, could only work autonomously at his craft between hours of in which his craftsmanship was exploited to sustain the very system that enslaved him (he was likely made to forge “shackles, neck irons, balls and chains, and thumbscrews that could have been used on members of his community, National Museum of African American History & Culture.) With his limited spare time, Williams crafted ornate grave markers for enslaved people in his community. For his wife’s grave he made a hammered metal cross with thin swirls extending from each arm and bulbous diamonds at the ends. Williams carefully sharpened and and age in even serif letters. The grave marker shines with grief and reverence. It is a testament to the potential of a zone of possibility to fit within and expand against bondage.
+++
Once inside a zone of possibility, craftsmanship is exploration. Our work is most authentic when we let our creativity run wild. Of the process of building a small house, Oliver writes: “I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery.” Indeed, in the process of making Bright Future, everyone was equally empowered to do “what they felt was the most exciting and natural thing to do on these songs,” said Weinrobe. In “lady midnight i’ll tape you back together” (Live at Revolution Hall), we hear Lenker messing around, layering plucked strings that squeak and rattle. Several notes are out of tune, and Lenker giggles.
There is certainly play in writing, and more so in editing. Pirsig, holed up in the early hours morning, produced an outline for his book by writing each chapter on indi vidual slips of paper and laying them out to order and re-order them. “This partic ular form gave me the advantage of being able to expand in the middle, of being able to reorganize at any time, so I had a flexible outline that could grow as my understanding of the story grew. I was never limited. I was free to throw away where I had been and restart again, over and over again, with what was coming in new,” he writes. “I think the advantage of this particular device was that it always kept me open, it always kept me flexible, it always gave me a kind of hollowness, so that I could constantly be refilled with new things that were coming in.” This receptivity is fundamental to craft. Young children are so successful at play because they have not been taught the rules. The sky can be purple; dolls can be sharing tea and, moments later, visiting the doctor or taking a bath. Openness to our own imaginations makes our work unique. Weinrobe describes the unorthodox tools and techniques used in the making of Bright Future: old upright pianos, 1980s-era digital signal processors, a rubber bridge guitar, and crystals that a bandmate brushed against guitar strings to make ethereal sounds, perhaps the ones at the start of “Candleflame” which are very much reminiscent of a wavering flame. Making Bright Future, the team had an end goal, but the process was nebulous, and it could not be replicated from past projects. “The [producer’s] job is to make a thing, and the vagueness of that requirement means that the way you go about doing it is going to be different every day and every minute,” Weinrobe told me. “There’s not a single thing you can point to as a job to make a record. To make a chair is, you know: you have a woodworker, they turn the leg, someone else cuts the pieces for the seat, someone glues them together. They’re very defined jobs. But the job of the producer is not very defined, because it’s a moving target.”
Indeed, George Nakashima, a renowned Japanese American woodworker known for his chairs, speaks of his process in this algorithmic way. In “The Soul of a Tree,” he writes: “First we hollow out the areas to be fitted with the butterfly-shaped piece with a router. Then we fit the joint with a flat chisel and clean out the corners,” and so forth. Still, I think Nakashima would reject Weinrobe’s procedural description of the woodworking process. He also writes: “What a personality a chair has! [...] These [spindles] can be beautiful, however, and the error of just a sixteenth of an inch in the thickness of a spindle can mean the difference between an artistically pleasing chair and a failure.” Different crafts require different steps and levels of precision. I’m not sure if a folk song can ever be a ‘failure’—they are often rambling and out of tune, and beloved all the same. What matters, in both cases, is function—whether the chair seats a person, whether the song produces an emotional effect. Still, this idea of error is fundamental to craft. In his seminal book The Nature and Art of Workmanship,
the furniture designer David Pye writes that what defines craft—as opposed to, say, manufacturing— is risk. Workmanship, he says, necessitates that “the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works.” A machine and its operator cannot be craftspeople, because each item they produce is destined to be the same: perfect. In craft, though, there is always a risk that the hammer will slip. The stitches will inevitably be crooked; there will be a brief moment in which the voices do not blend. Because we are human, we cannot replicate creative processes exactly, and we cannot create a perfect craft.
For instance, Weinrobe recalls worrying that the group didn’t record a decent take of “Sadness as a Gift.” In this case, the potential for error arose from the fact that their zone of possibility in New England was finite. At some point, the band needed to go home and tend to their daily lives. Likewise, Pirsig could not indefinitely sequester from his wife. No craftsperson can tweak forever, and this finitude heightens the risk of error, or it reduces our ability to fix it.
My interview with Weinrobe had to come to an end, and there is still so much I now wish I had asked. What did the house where they recorded look like, and what meals did they cook? What did they hear while they walked? I would have asked Weinrobe how he felt in that room filled with music and poetry by the woman hailed by The Sunday Times as the “heir to Dylan.” But in my craft—writing, which is also interviewing—there is risk of error. I made mistakes. Of course! +++
The best we can do, whenever possible, is to build an environment that invites creative thinking, and invite the people who draw out creativity in us. It is okay, maybe even productive, to stare at the blank canvas, but only when the circumstances for productivity are right—yes, when our workspace is clean and there is a breeze (if we may be so lucky), but more importantly, when our minds are readied to work. A zone of possibility need not be cleaved out of daily life. A zone of possibility can be a blip in time. Unfortunately, the zone often coexists with periods of extraordinary suffering. In Gaza, a musician teaches children to harmonize over the constant buzz of Israeli drones. He sings: Woe to the oppressor. Woe to him from God. I will stay up under the night stars calling him. In this way, craft sustains life, and the only true condition for its creation is life itself.
Entering a zone of possibility is less a carving-out of physical space than of mental space—it’s about making room to think.
We must also come to the zone prepared with our tools. Lenker had all of her songs fully written before beginning the craft of recording, and Weinrobe brought the instruments necessary for play. Let’s be generous with our definition of tool: sometimes what we need to be creative is a warm meal, good company, or a break (after all, care is essential to the creative process). But the hardest task is to trust our creative instincts and remain open to those that surprise us.
Even if the risk of error is very high—make something. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Or, as Mary Oliver puts it, “It has an undeniable value: it exists.”
TALIA REISS B’27 is collecting scraps to make a portal.
Maddock
that I have enough distance to write my story into being. In the months since my visit, I’ve figured out nothing, other than that something happened to me related to my desire.
I’ve begun with a scene of masturbation, which is, in fact, a scene of interruption. There is a vagueness
I knew, in that moment, that my uncle was always going to be more interesting than my mother. He makes unreasonable exceptions for himself, but it doesn’t matter, because he really is exceptional. My uncle is a historian of everything that involves him, and a lot of people know nothing about history.
He’s gotten himself outside of the embarrassment of desire by never not having the thing he wants. The thing he wants is desire, not-having, and he knows there’s always been not-having in history.
I’ve gone to Provincetown almost every summer of my life. This time, I’m telling you, it was different.
Commercial Street was as narrow as Maddock remembered. It’s a special kind of street, he thought, because pedestrians are more important than cars. As a boy, he’d walk out in front of cars. His mother trailed behind him as he’d cross showily back and forth on the way to Uncle Georges’s apartment. Maddock reflected now on the difference between his flashy Provincetown gait and the ordinary way he’d walk down the hallways at school. The comparison, of course, does not mean that Maddock was somehow repressed at school. He had a lot of friends, was even popular, and felt himself to be special. In fact, Maddock suspected that it was his zig-zagging Provincetown strut that indicated insecurity.
Today, he walked alone down one side of the street and considered his own excitement. Provincetown, Maddock thought, is not particularly interesting: rainbow flags, touristy shops, gay men who are old. But the open end of Uncle Georges’s text: a weekend jaunt. This could mean anything. It certainly feels like an accomplishment.
Maddock has been repeatedly disappointed by his generation’s lack of sexual creativity, which doesn’t mean he’s insecure about his own sexual fitness. People simply aren’t interested in finding sex in unexpected places. Inasmuch as Uncle Georges’s invitation was a question mark, Maddock was vaguely aroused. How rare, he thought, to stumble into an erotics of indeterminacy.
Everyone, really, looked exactly the same to Maddock, the streets overwhelmed by waves of the same. Most of the men wore cross-body bags and button down shirts with vertical stripes. How, Maddock wondered, can all of these men stand to commune with themselves? At least Uncle Georges is a wiry and ill-postured independent scholar of ships and seafarers.
Maddock himself has abs, but he doesn’t often notice them. He has a butt, too. His body is an easy fact that he thinks about rarely. It’s like, he’d been thinking, a coat rack, a thing on which to hang one’s clothes. Maddock was hung, this summer, in increasingly repetitive outfits: hoodie, jeans, and flip-flops, mostly. He approached the apartment in such an outfit, not, as he walked, thinking much about his body. It’s hot, he thought, to not think of one’s body.
Uncle Georges lived in many rooms above a bar called Brest on the far side of town. Maddock went up to the apartment, the stairs a set of wood steps and a rope railing attached to the exterior of the building. The living room is the first room, Maddock remembered, right behind the front door.
“You’ve made it to the ends of the Earth!”
“How come you never just say Provincetown?”
“Because I’d like to at least pretend to have a secret.”
Maddock let his uncle’s ingenuity wash over him.
The apartment is cavernous, Maddock thought. There was room after room. Uncle Georges was getting a kick out of calling them chambers. In this first chamber, there were clapboard walls, a white couch, a corduroy armchair, and a blue shag carpet. One wall of windows looked out onto the harbor, the pier, and the jetty. Maddock remembered his uncle teaching him the name for the scattered assemblage of sailboats. As he glanced across the living room, all these years later, the name came to him: a mooring field.
Uncle Georges has never owned or operated a vessel.
“Maddock, I was hoping to talk to you about a book project I’ve been working on.”
Just then, a cautionary beeping drew all attention to the other side of the room, the street-side of the chamber. A boat floated by, right down Commercial
Street, and Maddock felt grateful because this was something he couldn’t quite believe. The day was already overcast, but as gear and equipment moved across the windows, the light in the room darkened, and then lightened, darkened, and then lightened again. As if a flood had filled the streets, as if the streets were canals like Venice, a boat sailed the narrow strait that Maddock had so recently walked by foot. Maddock thought briefly of Death in Venice, a book he almost enjoyed. He liked to imagine the younger boy in the sailor outfit was the narrator all along.
Approaching the window, Maddock realized what really he must have already known: the boat was not floating by, it was being pulled down the street by a truck. Uncle Georges had only invited him to talk about his book, the book he’s been working on for most of Maddock’s life.
Boys down below made way as the big white boat was towed slowly, beeping.
“Unusual to see that this far into the summer. Especially with crowds like this.”
“It is so terribly crowded.”
“You know, I sort of like the crowds.”
“Oh, interesting.”
“How have you been?”
Maddock sat down on the couch, into the closure of the weekend’s ambiguity. Uncle Georges had invited him to talk about his book.
“I’m pretty good, I’ve not been doing a whole lot.”
“Ennui is our chronic affliction.”
Maddock slid his feet out of his flip-flops and rested them on the coffee table. He wondered to whom Uncle Georges’s “our” referred. Then, he remembered why he’d been invited. Uncle Georges’s book, the last Maddock had heard of it, was a kind of archaeology of desire. It contained auto-ethnographies of Grindr and micro-histories of cruising practices among sailors. Maddock knew already he’d be subjected to questions about being young and gay.
“So, I’ve been hard at work on this book. I’m not sure if I’ve told you about it.”
“Is it the one, not to be too simplistic, about sailors and desire?”
“Yes, precisely! And Grindr.”
“Oh, interesting.”
The afternoon passed, and the night passed also. The two gossiped about Maddock’s mother over caesar salad, which was dinner. After dinner, they read on the deck. Maddock read attentively because his uncle was boring him by acting the same way he always did. It must have been that Maddock was bored in general, because he feels time quickly through boredom. It’s a strange, but helpful thing. And it meant the morning soon arrived, which was when the two really got to talking.
Maddock sat on the cushioned surface of the knee-height bookshelves that lined the windowed wall, Uncle Georges across the room in the corduroy arm chair. The light was as bright as it’d be all day, which makes good sense.
“I’m going to take some notes, if that’s alright.”
“Sure.” Maddock appreciated the ability, if even erroneously, to gauge his uncle’s interest by the movement of his pen.
“I have a number of things I’m thinking about more abstractly, but I think I’ll start somewhere concrete. Are you and your friends on Grindr?”
Maddock was not embarrassed. “Not really.”
“Is there a reason for that?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“My worry, in my writing, is that I’m just this one nerdy, old-school dude at the end of the Cape. I want, I think, to be at least conscious of more popular sexual activities.”
Maddock remembered that his uncle’s brilliance was always also a lack of self-awareness. Maddock didn’t think of his sex as being particularly popular.
“Why are you and your friends not on Grindr?”
“I’m not sure about anyone else, but I guess it’s just not really that exciting to me. It’s so mediated, so
much interruption. You’re always being interrupted by an ad. Which, I mean, could be interesting. The discontinuity of the interruption.”
Uncle Georges made a note on his yellow legal pad. Maddock, of course, had never been on Grindr at all, but a comment on its interface seemed correct.
“But how is it not exciting?”
“I guess it’s just so obvious what everyone is on there for. But I guess it’s obvious what everyone wants in the real world too.”
“Which is what?”
“Sex, but in such an easy way.”
“Easy how?”
“Everyone just wants their stupid desires fulfilled.”
“What do you want?”
“That’s the thing. I know what I want. It seems like everyone else is just milling about all the time. It’s so disappointing.”
“What is?”
“My generation’s lack of sexual creativity.”
Uncle Georges laughed, which gratified Maddock. Maddock laughed too.
“What does creativity matter?” Uncle Georges placed his notebook aside.
“Surely you think creativity matters. You’re writing an entire book historicizing your desire.”
“What do you mean by creativity?”
“I think I mean trying to find something different. Or, dressing your desire in something different.”
“Maddock, I write mostly on sailors. They all wear the same thing.” Uncle Georges rose, excited, and approached the bookshelf with an arm reached forth.
“You’re judging your peers dangerously, Maddock, which, I understand, is what we’re wont to do.”
“It is. I want to do it.”
Uncle Georges reached between Maddock’s legs and extracted a slim volume from the bookshelf.
“But I think you’re missing something. You’re reminding me of these instructions from the end of this Barthes essay on the Nautilus. I’ve been writing about this for my blog. These are the words!”
Uncle Georges flipped through the pages, landed on the passage, and read, “‘The Nautilus, in this regard, is the most desirable of all caves: the enjoyment of being enclosed reaches its paroxysm when, from the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a large window-pane, the outside vagueness of the waters, and thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite. Most ships in legend or fiction are, from this point of view, like the Nautilus, the theme of a cherished seclusion, for it is enough to present the ship as the habitat of man, for man immediately to organize there the enjoyment of a round, smooth universe, of which, in addition, a whole nautical morality makes him at once the god, the master and the owner (sole master on board, &c.).’ Okay, skipping some, here, ‘The object that is the true opposite of Verne’s Nautilus is Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, the boat which says ‘I’ and, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration.’”
I didn’t realize then what I’m beginning to realize now. I’ve been narrating the visit entirely incorrectly.
BENJAMIN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 wants to be gay / like every lark.
c “Does someone use drugs?” “Is there pedophilia?” “Are there clowns?”
These are some of the pressing questions that bring people to the site doesthedogdie.com, a digital catalogue of trigger warnings for popular media. Its domain name refers, of course, to one of the most universally-dreaded plot points in the history of storytelling: the notorious Dog Death. More so out of curiosity than concern, I went on the site and looked up Earthlings, a 2005 documentary that exposes the abuse at the heart of animal agriculture (as well as the clothing industry, the animal entertainment industry, and scientific experimentation). As you might guess, in Earthlings , the dog does die. So do many other animals, in various gruesome ways.
In response to the question “Are animals abused?,” user GhostDog writes:
“It is real life and shows real animals being killed for food, for leather, furs, dog and cat abuse, etc. It is intimately graphic and is not really suitable to watch unless you just want a reason to go vegan or vegetarian” (emphasis my own).
It’s true: the film is graphic and hard to watch. But to suggest that a documentary exploring the very real, standard processes through which our food, clothes, and other everyday commodities are produced should only be watched by those in search of a “reason to go vegan” strikes me as a bad-faith assertion. Instead of viewing the horrific nature of the film as demonstrative of an urgent problem, such comments align the violence in Earthlings with the realm of the fictional. The film’s difficulty then becomes an optics issue, where consumers whose worldviews may be challenged by the film are excused from sincere engagement with it because of the emotional harm it may cause them. This, in turn, allows them to continue supporting systems that materially harm animals.
Veganism is currently a sort of persona non grata in public discourse. It is dismissed as the concern of sanctimonious, privileged youth rather than a serious political issue—one that powerful stakeholders of animal agriculture wish to suppress. Vegans are frequently painted as overly sentimental, finding a depth of misery and injustice in our treatment of animals not founded in objective truth.
One of the unanswered questions on the doesthedogdie page for Earthlings : “Is an animal sad?” You’re really left to wonder.
Last semester, I took a transformative compara-tive literature course called Culture, Climate, and the Anthropocene’s Others. (Shoutout Claire Climer!) In the class, we discussed a number of readings on anthropocentrism, ecology, environmentalism, and colonialism—the most influential of which, for me, were Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, and The Lives of Animals, a metafictional novella by J. M. Coetzee.
In Das Kapital, Marx puts forth his theory of commodity fetishism, a term he uses to describe our alienation from the concrete labor and social relations that generate the products we buy. In practice (praxis), Marxists understand that the production process can obscure the exploitation of laborers and advocate for the organized boycott of companies known to perpetuate such abuse. After all, Marxists believe that, following the laws of supply and demand, consumers have the power to disrupt the system of capitalist oppression. But ask the Marxist to apply this same principle to the animals we kill to enrich our palates (for it is not nutrition that compels us to choose cruelty over benevolence; the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has assured us that plantbased diets are suitable for all stages of life), and all logical consistency flies out the window. This is, of course, the result of anthropocentric prejudice.
Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals revolves around a guest lecturer at a university who, rather than speaking about literature as expected, delivers a speech about the atrocities mankind commits against animals. This narrative uncannily mirrors Coetzee's first presentation of the novella: when invited to speak at Princeton in 1997, Coetzee shirked discussion of his previously-published work, instead orally delivering The Lives of Animals in its entirety. Both Coetzee and his protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, are vegetarians; the lines between them are intentionally blurred, and it is up to us to determine how much of Costello’s argument comes from Coetzee’s own philosophy. With this framing, Coetzee anticipates the outrage of a prospective meat-eating audience, positioning readers far enough from reality to engage thoughtfully with these claims, but not so far as to dismiss them entirely.
In her speech, Costello tells of Sultan, an ape who was a subject of 20th century German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler’s research on animal intelligence. To test Sultan’s critical thinking skills, Köhler’s
team stops feeding him. Days later, they hang a bunch of bananas out of his reach and toss three crates into the pen.
Costello takes us through Sultan’s potential thought process.
"One thinks: Why is he starving me?
One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me?
One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought."
Eventually Sultan stacks the crates on top of each other, climbing them to reach the bananas. The experiment repeats: Sultan is starved, and this time the team leaves crates filled with heavy stones. He empties the crates and makes another tower. Again: Sultan is starved, and a new obstacle is thrown his way. Always, the options are the same—think the “right thought” or suffer.
Costello traces Sultan’s life experience for a glimpse into his psyche: “Although his entire history […] leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics toward the humbler reaches of practical reason.”
Here we see the fallacy of human judgments of animal interiority. We guide these creatures to ‘learn’ through punishment and deem them unintelligent when they struggle to fulfill the inexplicable objectives we set for them, even as we debilitate them with fear. We then claim that because they cannot think like us, depriving them of their lives is morally neutral. This justification is a non sequitur—the harm we inflict upon animals has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with emotional and physical pain. Many nonhuman animals even have emotional capacities and responses comparable to those of humans. More than a fallacy, this logic is an excuse.
Both Das Kapital and The Lives of Animals forced me to confront my complicity in animal abuse, and I soon realized that empathy, compassion, and equity—the leftist values I claimed to hold—were not reflected in my actions and purchases. I came into the class an agnostic omnivore, came out of it strongly considering vegetarianism, and entered my next semester vegan.
Initially, it feels wrong to conceptualize the way we treat animals as a form of oppression. Terms such as speciesism (bias toward some animals over others) and carnism (the belief system supporting meat consumption) are far from mainstream, and they often garner scorn when invoked by animal rights activists. The belief that violence against humans and violence against animals are fundamentally incomparable was voiced numerous times in my comparative literature seminars, where my peers would deem any analogy between speciesism and racism “dehumanizing.” Besides its obvious irony, this reaction reflects just how deeply ingrained anthropocentrism is in our society. Such parallels do not serve to minimize the trauma of human oppression, but rather to call attention to the similar injustices animals are subjected to, which often go unnoticed and unchallenged.
This phenomenon is also salient when we consider the question of climate change. Experts who warned of environmental destruction back in the 1970s—when nonhuman organisms were the most directly affected—were deemed alarmist; no definitive international policy changes were implemented until 1997. Only now that the extinction of our own species is a looming threat has climate change become a wider leftist issue; even then, many refuse to become vegan despite the UN consensus that lowering the average individual carbon footprint will “no doubt involve changes to our food system and diet.” It’s not just that veganism is a proactive response to climate change—
the longer we remain nonvegan, the more profitable animal agriculture becomes, thus exacerbating greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, immigrant exploitation, and animal death. It’s time we put our money where our mouths are (and, perhaps, our praxis where our theory is).
A different way of framing nonveganism is as a violation of consent. Broadly, animals have no idea why we treat them the way we do—why we mutilate them, imprison them, exploit their bodies, put them in gas chambers, or slit their throats. They obviously cannot consent to this treatment, and even if they could, they would not, as they (like all sentient beings) wish to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. We don’t have to communicate with animals to understand this. They should be entitled to bodily autonomy—it is wrong to sexually exploit them, even if forcible impregnation is common practice in dairy production. Such exploitation is not an exceptionally cruel case, in the same way that macerating fully conscious male chicks is standard in the egg industry, and in the same way that all animals born into animal agriculture are slaughtered prematurely. At what point do the ends no longer justify the means? In the words of the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham:
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
I think, even now, many will respond that yes, factory farming is cruel and yes, we should work to get rid of it, but this doesn’t mean we should abolish the entire animal agriculture (and entertainment and experimentation and cosmetics and clothing and furniture) industry. If animals are raised and slaughtered humanely, what’s wrong with us taking advantage of the enjoyment that their bodies bring us? Cognitive dissonance is at the heart of this response. In the U.S., 99% of all meat, dairy, and eggs comes from factory farms. In the same way that people may point to instances of ‘harmonious’ relationships between cops and civilians, we as leftists can acknowledge that the systems which exist now are fundamentally broken and violent and must be abolished.
And yet, we refuse to apply this logical framework to the exploitation of animals, whom we deem lesser lifeforms.
In a society where oppression is based on the perceived subhumanity of certain people,animals—those who are objectively nonhuman and subjectively subhuman— are the lowest of the low.
We claim that because they cannot tell us how they feel, we cannot know how they feel, pretending that we, with our superior intelligence, have no clue why they scream, why they thrash, why they fight, why they flee. Still we try so desperately to preserve our ignorance, to shamelessly reap the benefits of their subjugation without regard for those victimized for our enjoyment, convenience, or comfort.
I don’t mean for this to sound like a personal indictment—the commodification of animals is so normalized in our society that it takes a great deal of reeducation to even begin interrogating one’s devaluation of nonhuman life. Nevertheless, the widespread refusal to even recognize animal consumption as a problem deeply troubles me. Although the left champions empathy as a political cornerstone, it is evident from our actions that we have not fully challenged the assumption that empathy is reserved for those who are, at least somewhat, like us. For conservatives, empathy is reserved for those like them in terms of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality. Leftists generally add on fewer qualifiers, but empathy is still limited: to their fellow humans, and, to a lesser extent, animals—namely, dogs and cats—that are cherished and therefore easily anthropomorphized. As complex as it may seem, the thrust of veganism is this: regardless of intelligence or genetic makeup, all sentient life deserves moral consideration.
(if you try anything on his dog, though, he’ll kill your entire family)—meanwhile, the wimpy, effeminate soy boy cries after stepping on an ant and is hurtling toward full-body muscle atrophy. Ironically, even if phytoestrogens did increase human estrogen levels, the vast majority of soybeans grown in the U.S. are fed to livestock, which make up the entirety of the carnivore diet. The left has certainly taken notice of this extreme meat-mania, but it has failed to look inward and examine the ways in which it, too, has fallen victim to carnist propaganda.
There is no real leftist argument against veganism. Those that do come up boil down to four points: the idea that eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice, also known as the 4 Ns. None of these excuses hold any real weight once we acknowledge that what we do to animals—especially in the U.S., with our plentiful alternative food options—is neither necessary nor morally justified. To live as an omnivore while espousing leftist values is, to me, a crucial and tragic contradiction—how can one claim empathy while inflicting suffering on innocent, sentient beings, even indirectly? We may not see this suffering, but we know that it is there, and it is unfathomably immense. Simply put, if there were no market for animal products, animals would no longer be killed for our ultimately frivolous desires. By recognizing veganism as a political issue, we begin to break down the apathy that has been instilled in us since birth, and with that the broader idea that some lives matter more than others. In times of desperation, it may be necessary to make these kinds of assessments, but the majority of us are nowhere near desperate.
I’m not asking you to change your behavior immediately. Really, all I ask is that you continue to engage with the issue of veganism earnestly and with an open mind. If you identify as a leftist, it’s always valuable to stress-test your own moral code and reevaluate potential blind spots in your compassion, even if it might not result in a complete upheaval of your life. I don’t know. Just some food for thought.
CAMERON CALONZO B’28 is for the animals.
ILLUSTRATION
Ok so things are really kicking in. Socially, this fall is shaping up to be equally thrilling and treacherous. As I wander the hallowed grounds of College Hill for the 51st semester in a row, I find myself asking: Who are these people? Where did they come from? And most importantly, do any of them think I’m cute?
The good thing about new faces is that they are inherently interesting. It’s interesting to see someone you have never seen before, especially if they’re at least sort of hot if you squint a little and, for one electrifying moment, you exchange a meaningful glance or something like that. And when they subsequently disappear without a trace, they become a little bit hotter (because of the yearning and Mystery. Something just out of reach, etc.). All this is heightened by the fact that fall itself is mysterious. Fall is fun. Fall is flirty. Fall is also the golden gateway to #cuffingseason. See where I’m going with this?
Indie has always been a natural matchmaker, like Emma Woodhouse except actually good at it. I have a 67% success rate at setting people up. I’m single-handedly responsible for three relationships, two gay awakenings, and one shockingly operational polycule. Only one such scheme thus far has ended with humiliation and strife. My secret formula has to do with pheromone compatibility, drinking habits, and a certain bespoke list of approximately 36 questions. But, even for a maestro like myself, it’s kind of hard to make matches when one half of the match is… missing.
This week, dear readers, I am your newspaper-shaped megaphone, through which you can scream your woes and wishes into the void/ Providence, Rhode Island. May your missed connection scream right back. Not, like, at you. Just out of excitement and joy and requited desire and maybe even a little lust, if a word of that sort can be printed here. Mmm. Yeah.
When I saw you reaching for the Trader Joe’s sparkling orange espresso tonic, I knew I had to find you. One peek in your shopping cart (not in a weird way) sealed the deal: mini mochi rice nuggets, Taiwanese scallion pancakes, horchata ice cream, arugula. I should’ve asked for your number or dropped mine in your cart. I hope it’s not too late. Let’s go together sometime? wemetatBattleoftheBandsin end.someone’sbasementlastweeklearnedyouboughtmeabeer.inever yourname.you’revaping friendinthebackgroundofaphotomy tookandikeeplookingatit.
Me: blonde, tatted, carries a green canvas messenger You: the really hot scarf-wearing grad TA in the poetry class after my M/W/F 10 a.m. in the same classroom in Sayles Every time we’ve passed each other after my class ends, I swear I catch you looking; am I right?
I had a lighter but no cig; you had a cig but no lighter. We shared it outside GCB last Wednesday. I’ll return the favor next time?
the really pretty brunette boy with brown headphones and glasses: every day during reading period last semester i went to the basement of the rock to study because i knew you would be there and during my pomodoro breaks i would walk around just to get a glimpse of you and it would be like a reward. just wanted to let you know i met you in that pub in kreuzberg during my german girl summer. you got a non-alcoholic beer. we were both with friends and we went to a späti then when the number of people got uneven you sat on my side of the table and we just kept having group conversations until eventually your arm was around me. we all got on the bus at 4 a.m. and when you got off two stops before me you told me to go to your bar on the river but i never did because it had really odd hours. if you ever happen to read southern new england’s largest alt weekly, come to america. i’m waiting for you.
Cowboy boots, green skirt, big necklace. You were looking bisexual on Main Green and that caught my eye immediately. I was playing spike ball very coolly and casually, and also wearing jorts that go past my knees a little. We lost the ball (not my fault), and you so kindly returned it to me. I swear I felt a spark when it passed from your hand to mine. Your sunglasses were so large. I’d like to find out what’s behind them.
looking for the girl in front of me in line at ceremony who got a hot hojicha with soy. you told the barista your name was beyoncé. i liked your weird shoes and how chinese your order was. if you see this, i’ll be there on saturday at 10
Think one of these is about you? (Or: Deeply in love with Indie and finally ready to admit it?) Email dearindyemail@gmail.com. I’ll make sure someone gets a ring within 4–6 months.
( TEXT
To the guy belting that song from kpop demon hunters while walking down dean st: i’m sorry i almost hit you with my car but in my defense you distracted me with ur angelic singing. Pls reply and continue serenading me forever. I promise i’ll never almost hit you with my car again
)
Good
Friend.
admission Food Trucks at Flames of Hope 2025 October 4, 5:30–10 p.m. 1 Finance Way Free RI Mission of Mercy Free Dental Clinic October 4–5, 5:45 a.m. (first come, first served) Providence Community Health Centers Inc, 335r Prairie Ave Free Greenhouse Jazz October 5, noon–2 p.m. Roger Williams Park Botanical Center, 1 Floral Ave Free RI Latino Arts “A Taste of Mexico” October 9, 6–7:30 p.m. Ma í
Plz $15
2
Tom Comitta w/ John Cayley September 28, 6 p.m. Riffraff Bookstore + Bar, 60 Valley St Suite 107A Free The Providence Eye presents “News media in the Misinformation Age”, lecture and community conversation September 29, 6 p.m. Knight Memorial Library, 275 Elmwood Ave Free Discussion and Reading — Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman w/ Sasha Wiseman September 30, 7 p.m. Riffraff Bookstore + Bar, 60 Valley St Suite 107A Free The Rocky Horror Double Header Derby Bout, Providence Roller Derby October 4, 2:30
and
—
[From Lauren’s GoFundMe]:
“Lauren is a low-income Resumed Undergraduate Education Student at Brown University with a four-year-old daughter. She is ineligible for different public assistance programs such as the Child Care Assistance Program due to her connection to Brown, but apart from her annual scholarship refund of $20,000 and a $4,000 total childcare subsidy the university provides her, she receives no other income or support from Brown—forcing her to rely on the grace of other s to survive. If possible, please donate what you can to help Lauren and her dau ghter feel more financially stable this semester.” To donate, scan the QR code.
“The family of Reinaldo (also known as Feinho) is asking for help during an extremely difficult and unexpected time. Reinaldo is a dedicated husband, loving father, and a union worker at J. F. White, a construction company that undertakes projects for the City of B oston. He has always followed all the rules, renewing his work authorization annually and supporting his family with effort and dedication. Recently, dur ing a routine immigration status renewal, Reinaldo was unexpectedly detained by ICE due to his non-permanent status. His wife and daughter are now facing significant financial difficulties without him, as he was the primary provider for the family. Donations are being requested to help: Pay rent, bills, and basic expenses for his wife and daughter, ensure legal representation to defend Reinaldo, and cover other costs related to his detention and legal process.” To donate, scan the QR code.
[From Reinaldo’s GoFundMe]:
