Bodies Magazine

the STRAND

THE STRAND MAGAZINE | VOLUME 56 ISSUE 10

youth & growth

table of contents

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People I fall in love with on the subway

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What happens next will shock you

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The importance of little bodies

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The body in performance art

death

international bodies

representation

12 (Not) being vegetarian 13 Art History 16

Intercourse in Renaissance discourse

18 Girls on TV 20

The mechanical man

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The cemetery of the Mediterranean Sea

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Shadeism in India

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Body and image on glass

31 Grave robbery 32

Addiction in the public sphere

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Last girl on the dance floor

Photo by Rosalind Deibert

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editors-in-chief

letter from the editors

Patr ick Mujunen Paula Ra zur i Blaire Townshend

We like to think of this maga zine as a body: one that we share with the student communit y. With this maga zine, we hope to explore and explain the ter m “body” and it s var ious manifestations, physical or other wise. We chose to centre our work around the theme of bodies not merely to engage in the cur rent societal discussions of the individual body, but also to explore at y pical inter pretations of the ter m it self. We received submissions that ranged in subjec t from discussions of ar t and gender to political bodies, from labour to disabilit y, as well as to bodies of work. As we found with our maga zine Public Spaces last ter m, the local student communit y has shown the abilit y to take any discussion and vastly expand it s hor izons, br inging significant but underappreciated concer ns to the foreground and introducing their peers to stor ies that do not often get any appreciable press.

We hope that as you work your way through this publication, you will come upon something you haven’t before, and that it will ser ve to spark your interest—and perhaps cause you to consider it s theme yourself, and what it might signif y for you.

-B T

art & design Vivian Che Wenting Li Sarah Crawley

layout Amanda A ziz Anthony Bur ton Emily Deiber t R hianna Jack son-Kelso Emily Pollock Claire Wilk ins Olesya Ly uzna

photo

special thanks

Vic tor ia Chuen T homas Lu

Special thank s to all of our generous contr ibutors for shar ing their talent and personal exper iences, to our dedicated staff for all their hard work and enthusiasm for t y pefaces, and finally thank you to all who submit ted and shared their ideas. You have given us a wealth of unique mater ial to work with, and we are eager to share it with the larger communit y.

copy Mat thew Casaca This is The Strand’s second themed issue of the 2013-2014 academic year. You can contact us at editor@thestrand.ca

Genevieve Blais Vic tor ia Chuen Rosalind Deiber t War ren Goodwin T homas Lu Paula Ra zur i Tina Zhou

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art & illustration

L auren Dineley Chant al Duchesne Jill Evans L auren Van K laveren Reema Kureishy Neil MacIsaac Holly McKenzie-Sut ter Will Pet tigrew Emily Pollock Ian de Rege Braga Catr iona Spaven-Donn

photography

writers

contributors

Vivian Che Sarah Crawley Wenting Li Emily Pollock

PEOPLE I FALL IN LOVE WITH ON THE SUBWAY Chantal Duchesne

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very time I return to the city after being away, I’m always struck by the amount of beautiful people I pass in the street. I’ve noticed it more frequently since I began commuting on the subway.

Public transit has the ability to capture a small microcosm of society for a brief period of time, over and over again. I often find myself with my earphones in, quietly watching strangers for the duration of the trip.

The mundane and repetitive atmosphere provides the perfect backdrop for daydreaming.

It’s easy to fall for people when no crush lasts longer than the ride itself. Sometimes it’s a handsome

young man with impeccable taste in attire. Other times, it’s a mother and her oh-so-adorable child. Last week I saw an elderly man with a cloud of white hair, clutching two canes as he looked at his companion through Art Deco glasses. There is so much pleasure in observing people I don’t know a thing about.

I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that I’ll never know any of these people. It seems like public transit is full of wasted opportunity.

Alternately, I’ve realized that I never wonder what these people’s names are. Meeting them would shatter the dreamlike persona I’ve created in my head. I’m very glad of the unspo-

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ken rule of silence on subway trains.

Without anonymity, this purely aesthetic experience would be impossible.

Anonymity allows us to perceive others from an objective point of view. The opportunity to appreciate a person’s aesthetic without factoring in their character is a unique one: it is only possible in the company of strangers. Appearance signifies connection and disconnection between people who don’t know each other.

The anonymous body is a symbol of unfamiliarity, and the only representation of these individuals available.

Bodies convey identity in public spaces, which emphasizes how little

Artwork by Sarah Crawley and Wenting Li

Concept by Dorothy Anne Manuel

they really tell us about a person.

Rather than lessening the power of an image, distance is crucial to the pleasure it brings us. Without any knowledge of someone’s personality, objectifying others is unavoidable. Bodies become convenient vehicles for escapism. As objects, they allow us to project thoughts and feelings onto them, offering us a fleeting chance to create our ideal person. The concept of the body as a vessel has never seemed more accurate.

This phenomenon is similar to the way celebrity crushes offer an escape. An audience can perceive a celebrity’s physical presence and

mannerisms without knowing what they’re really like. As a result, people attach significance to what they can see and imagine the rest according to their personal preferences. As objects, celebrities become perfect entities in the mind of the fan. As people attempt to relate to famous people, they impose their favourite qualities onto them.

Strangers can have a brief but significant impact. A commute provides time for imagination, and the people in someone’s vicinity are conveniently positioned to play a part. Public transit is an intermediary space. A train ride offers a break from real life, and unoccupied time

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is a rare and coveted thing in a busy city. As soon as someone arrives at their destination, personal responsibilities return. It seems only natural to imagine what it’s like to be someone else for a bit, even if we are merely imposing our desires onto an unknown entity.

Commuters usually keep their gaze straight ahead, eager to get to wherever they’re going. Thousands of people pass through a subway station every day, and most people are unremarkable at first glance.

Those who are intriguing are little daily gifts. So why not briefly fall in love? It’s such a nice way to pass the time.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WILL SHOCK YOU My experience as a 12-year-old colonoscopy patient

ART BY WENTING LI

Neil MacIsaac

Seven years ago, my parents drove me roughly five hours to the IWK Children’s Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, and began treatment that would put me on the road to recovery. I was 12 years old,

weighing in at around 60-65 pounds, and had spent the last two or three years in poor health. It may not sound like it now, and it didn’t sound like it then, but it was probably the funniest experience of my entire life.

Crohn’s is an inflammatory

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bowel disease that can cause intense pain, nausea and diarrhea to those who have it. Thankfully, it can be treated with a number of drugs and procedures that leave a person relatively normal. The caveat is that you have to know you’re treating

Crohn’s, something the first couple of doctors I went to didn’t. I was tested for allergies, lactose intolerance, and gluten intolerance before a gastroenterologist named Dr. Mohsin Rashid told me he was confident that I had Crohn’s disease and he could treat it.

He just needed to be sure.

His method of being sure was problematic.

He told me that I would have to undergo a colonoscopy, which he explained gingerly as a procedure in which they use a special camera to examine my bowels. To 12-year-old me, the pitch seemed reasonable enough until it was further explained that I would have to be unconscious during the whole thing and that the camera would be going up my butt.

I would also not be able to eat anything for 24 hours prior.

I figured that was the most reasonable part; I didn’t totally grasp why they needed to put a camera in me while I slept, but I could grasp that it would be close quarters in there and they would need all the space they could get.

So I arrived at the hospital, having only consumed water for 24 hours. I was feeling all right that day, eager to figure out what was wrong with me. For so long it had been assumed the problem was what was going in my body; the twist that my body itself was the problem had a sort of “the calls are coming from inside the house”-type appeal. When asked if I was sure I hadn’t eaten anything by a nurse, I replied, “As sure as Snape killed Dumbledore!” because that was the other big shock I was still reeling from. She then politely explained that I would have to come

with her so that I could have my enema.

Now, I had no idea what that word meant and was under the impression that I had completed all the steps of preparation. It turns out that not eating for a whole day is like tidying up your whole house, house here being a metaphor for your bowels. Comparatively, an enema is like taking a fire hose into that house and just unleashing it until everything has been blasted out the back door.

As an added bonus, it was also administered via the butt using a turkey baster (but like, a more sanitary one). Upon explaining this process to me using different terms, for the first and final time in my life I thought to myself, “I’d so rather be knocked unconscious right now.”

The room I was in looked like a standard examination room with an adjoined bathroom. Now clad in a hospital gown, I had about 2.5 meters separating the table where the enema would be administered and the toilet where the enema’s fallout was to take place. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I was struck by the recent memory of my older brother trying to explain vectors to me. After one meter, I figured the force of my legs pushing me forward and my bowels pushing me upward would send me hurtling into the upper corner of the bathroom like Wile E. Coyote with a rocket on his back. After one and a half meters, my movement would be less like Looney Tunes and more like the climax of Return Of The King; a heroic walk that would nearly sap my remaining humanity. At two meters it became The Two Towers, when the Ents open the dam at Isengard.

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To be clear, I didn’t freeze while it happened: I made it to the toilet.

But I did need a new gown. And the area around the toilet needed to be cleaned before I could have a second enema (which, I am proud to say, went better).

After having my psyche incontrovertibly changed, I was wheeled off on a gurney to an anesthesiologist. I remember her telling me not to think I was crazy if I saw dwarves when I woke up; that was just the mural in the recovery room. She also pulled the classic “count back from 100” joke, knowing full well I would get to about 93 and be dead to the world.

I assume that joke never gets old for them.

Upon waking up I had the first introduction to existentialism in my life, totally unassisted by any literature. I thought to myself “The people that love me most, my parents, just let me get knocked out and probed. The people that are helping me most had me poop on the floor before probing me. The thing that is hurting me most is myself.” The world had stopped making sense, and it would never really make a lot of sense anymore.

Your own body betraying you is a powerful thing. We like to believe that our body’s urges and desires come from some kind of well of reason; at the end of the day, the body has to have its own best interests at heart. But it doesn’t, at least not always. It can turn on itself and destroy itself. It can’t survive isolated; it needs the help and support of other bodies. Which is funny, if you think about it.

SMALL BODIES BIG REMINDERS

Holly McKenzie-Sutter Little kids are probably the most disgusting group of people on earth.

Nobody has as unreserved a physical presence as a small child. And I couldn’t be more grateful to have them in my life. We need the little people to remind us that people in general can be disgusting, exhaustingly enthusiastic, and great and lovable regardless of all that.

Truly, people reach a certain point in their lives (past age 11, maybe?) where the idea of expressing the Self physically becomes undesirable, uncool, and unimaginable. Kids are the only group of people who aren’t occupied with any of that.

My baby brother B. was born when I was 11, and since then I’ve

been a first-hand observer and participant in the unavoidable sagas of bodily necessity that come with accommodating a growing kid. He was born six weeks premature, and at one point during his first week, a bunch of alarms in his hospital room went off. The nurse came in and reassured us that “it’s okay, sometimes the premature ones just forget to breathe.” Until that moment, I had never considered that remembering to breathe regularly was something that I took for granted.

Baby-duty doesn’t allow for any squeamishness around bodily functions. Changing diapers just becomes something you do. An added bonus is when the kid has acid reflux

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and vomits milk curd on other people probably upwards of ten times a day. A frequent trip down memory lane with family members is “remember when we had to change our shirts several times a day because they all had baby barf on them?”

And the thing is, it’s hard to be mad because babies are so goddamn tiny and cute and they laugh and smile at you while you change their shitty diapers and look up at you with sparkling cartoon eyes after barfing on your shoulder the third time that day.

When they get old enough to leave their formula diet behind and be spoon-fed, they decide that they’re just going to clamp their mouths shut and refuse to eat. At

the importance of kids in our lives

PHOTOS BY PAULA RAZURI

one point the only way we could get B. to eat was by saying “Tina, eat the FOOD!” in Napoleon Dynamite’s voice so he would laugh and we could use the moment to shove food into his mouth. Babies forget to breathe, refuse to eat, and basically almost refuse to live. Reminding them to give their bodies regular sustenance becomes a necessary chore but a delightful, hilarious, and refreshing one.

B. is eight years old now. When he gets excited he screams and runs around and hits things. Probably one of the most theatrical people I know, he will openly and tragically weep in his room until I come to help him resolve his personal issue by lo-

cating the single Lego piece that fell under his desk. He still brings up that one time two years ago when I had to assist him in blowing his nose, resulting in probably one of the most magnificent and horrifying boogies I’ve ever witnessed. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider it a truly legendary moment in our lives. In the adult world, laughing at boogies isn’t always socially acceptable, and I’m glad to have a space in my life where it is.

I love that I have a person in my life who is in-your-face about his physical presence. And the best thing about having a small person in your life is that they are in-your-face about the importance of your pres-

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ence as well. The last time I visited home, B. reportedly told Mom that he was going to sleep so well that night knowing I would be in the room at the other end of the hall.

Kids won’t hesitate to remind you that they’re physically there, and do the additional job of reminding you that you are physically there, and your there-ness is important. I know I need to hear that every once in a while.

Kids are great and necessary.

They will give you a hug, which will turn out to be a guise for wiping their nose on your sleeve, and will then laugh hysterically about it. You will be mildly annoyed but you will laugh, too.

WORKING TOWARDS A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE ...

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The art and body of Nina Arsenault Ian de Rege Braga It was a sort of dingy gallery on Queen Street West— ding y, but noticeable for the “W hore of Babylon” neon sign just begging for an audience. Once you entered, you really started to appreciate how an artist can turn a dull, whitewashed old storefront into a thing of beauty. “Dingy” didn’t come to mind anymore; maybe “baroque” did instead. Ornate antique furniture, lit candles everywhere—sometimes in the shape of the female body, sometimes phalluses, depending what night you were there—and music, Philip Glass, and opera, created an ambiance you’d never experienced before. It was kind of scary, but you kind of wanted to stay there forever.

At least, until the small hours of the night—the gallery closed around four in the morning.

Such was the work of Nina Arsenault, acclaimed transgender artist, and her contribution to 2012’s SummerWorks art festival: 40 Days and 40 Nights: Working Towards a Spiritual Experience. And the installation/performance itself was only the tip of the iceberg. For nearly a month beforehand she was engaged with her own creation by fasting, not sleeping, living in celibacy, and other undergoing various other preparations for the intensive piece that would finalize the experience.

The walls were covered with art, scrawls, poetry—all the more beautiful, and tragic, when you realized that once the show was finished they’d be covered over with white

paint in preparation for whatever was to happen next in the building.

There was a birdcage hanging from the ceiling with a couple of finches or other small birds, chirping occasionally. Three large photographs of the artist depicted as different religious icons hung on the walls, and you could also see a sculpture she had made out of a ruptured breast implant injected with blood. It sounds weird, but it was really beautiful and somehow poignant.

Nina was there too; in various stages of undress, sometimes on an exercise bike, self-flagellating in front of a mirror, or drawing, or writing, or mediating. Or recreating the classic performance piece, “The Artist is Present,” originally by Marina Abramovi, which was like this: she sat in one chair, you in another.

You stared into each other’s eyes until you started crying, started seeing ghosts, having a spiritual experience.

It was incredibly intense and incredibly powerful.

If you were there at the right time of night, she would sit down in the front of the gallery and tell you a story. It was called “The Ecstasy of Nina Arsenault” and it was about a recent trip to a Mexican plastic surgeon. She explained, in gory, beautiful detail, how she stayed awake during the procedure of a face lift and experienced the divine. Gods and ghosts came into play as the scalpel cut away at her body, forming some deeply holy and yet slightly erotic connection between herself

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and the doctor.

This journey also took her to a cathedral in Guadalajara, an experience described in her monologue and various wall writings. “There is not transphobia in the cathedral,” scrawled among the drawings and blood, prompted a deeper understanding of what connections may lie between sex, gender, the body, and the holy.

Nina is well-known for the fact that her body is as much a work of art as any. Like countless trans people, she’s had some surgeries to change her body’s secondary sex characteristics; unlike many, she didn’t stop after that. With over sixty believed cosmetic surgeries over the years, she has transformed herself into a feminine ideal, a Barbie doll (really though—she has a show about being hired to play Barbie for Mattel’s anniversary), a goddess, and as always, an artist.

While she is hardly the only trans artist to use their body in their work in these ways, she is one of the best-known. She’s been in the news every now and then for scandals not related to her art, but this isn’t the point here. Her work is transformative and edgy, intense, powerful, and successful. It sometimes feels strange to write about the body of another person this way, but in many ways this is the point of her work.

There is no medium as personal as this one, and there is perhaps no one who does it this well.

HOW NOT TO BE A VEGETARIAN In the spring of last year, I decided to start eating vegetarian. It seemed so easy. A lot of my friends were doing it. They were excited when I told them about my choice. It felt like I was joining a special, righteous club.

Being a vegetarian gave me a free pass to tell strangers about my political beliefs. “Why are you vegetarian?” Everyone always wanted to know, and I got to talk about how I didn’t want to buy into animal cruelty, how I was avoiding unhealthy, over-processed food, how I wanted to eat local.

By the time the summer ended, my hair had started to fall out. I was dizzy, walking up stairs exhausted me, and I was sleeping 11 hours a night. Too tired to go out of the house, I sat around staring at the television, feeling inexplicably nervous and wondering why I couldn’t focus on reading or find the energy to go anywhere. At this point, I hadn’t eaten meat in about four months. The persistent fear I began to feel was a message from my body—it was telling me to go eat a hamburger, fast.

The threat of anemia was suddenly so obvious that I was embarrassed it had never occurred to me before. I thought I ate well. I made sure to get enough protein, and I had

started taking multivitamins. How could this have happened to me?

When I went to get my blood tested, the nurse looked at my nervous face and said, “Are you alright? You look really pale.”

Later, my doctor read me the results of the test. “You’re not anemic,” he said, explaining that anemia is a medical condition which occurs when a person’s iron levels become so low that the body stops producing red blood cells properly. Because my red blood cell count was still normal, I did not have medical anemia—only an iron deficiency. But the level of iron in my blood had dropped to about 20 percent of what it was supposed to be. My doctor prescribed a year of iron supplements, and I went home and ate some chicken. After only four months, I had failed at vegetarianism.

I share this story not as a cautionary tale of why vegetarianism should be avoided, but rather to demonstrate the total necessity of doing your research before you change your diet in a drastic way. When I decided to start eating vegetarian, I knew almost nothing about nutrition. I didn’t realise that the non-heme iron contained in dark green vegetables was more difficult for my body to absorb

Jill Evans

than the heme iron in meat. I didn’t know that calcium intake can inhibit iron absorption, making it still more difficult for vegetarians to get enough iron. I did know that women are more susceptible to iron deficiency, but I just didn’t think about that.

I thought, as healthy young people tend to do, that sickness was something that happened to other people.

Although I ended up deciding vegetarianism wasn’t worth it for me, I do know a load of healthy vegetarians. However, despite what these friends told me last spring, being vegetarian is not easy. People who don’t eat meat stay healthy by carefully keeping track of the food they eat to get the vitamins and minerals they need, and get regular medical check-ups.

My brief foray into vegetarian eating taught me that it’s not for the lazy or the faint of heart. My body turned out to be much more fragile than I had ever realized. What seemed like an insignificant dietary change completely overturned my entire nervous system and left me nervous, weak, and exhausted for months. I pay much more attention now to what I eat, and my diet is definitely better now than it was before or during my vegetarian phase.

Photo by Tina Zhou

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ART HISTORY

by Genevieve Blais

A r t History attempts to transgress hegemonies regarding gender and sexuality through the appropriation of iconographic imager y. Viewing the tropes repeated throughout the lexicon of Western visual culture as emblematic of societally situated axioms constitutes them as a fertile ground for critique. Through this framework, historical works of art become a discourse; denoting relational power and control from the institution from which it emanates.

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Genevieve Blais

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SEXY TIMES INTERCOURSE IN RENAISSANCE DISCOURSE

Megan Tangney

ART BY VIVIAN CHE

All right, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I pretend to be famous.

You know how it is, seated on that big red couch as Graham Norton leans in, eager to hear about your latest project. You pause before you reply, taking a casual sip from your apple juice (the audience and those familiar with the show’s format will assume that this is an alcoholic beverage—wrong). Then you begin.

This never happens to me. Not simply because I am not famous, but because I am never likely to become famous. I can’t sing or act. I’m not a political science student (everybody wants to discuss the European Union). I’m an Early Modernist, which means that I study the Renaissance.

Some of you may be surprised to learn that the Renaissance is the place (and time) to be for much of our recent pop culture. Television shows like The Tudors and The Borgias, among others, have seized on the beauty and the violence of the

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period. The viewer quickly becomes accustomed to the sight of blood pouring out onto marble floors. But to what degree are these programs concerned with entertainment more than factual accuracy? In some cases, sexuality definitely appears to be privileged over scholarship.

Let’s analyze in greater detail one of the programs that I’ve introduced. Starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII, The Tudors ran from 2007-2010 and chronicles Henry’s descent over the course of his reign from the promising, athletic, well-educated monarch to the not particularly beloved corpse.

The premiere episode is supremely and almost sadly ironic. We are well aware that all of Henry’s talk of just kingship will come to naught as his accomplishments are overshadowed by his series of doomed marriages.

The show recognizes this and emphasizes the sexual politics of Henry’s court. He and Queen Catherine of Aragon have produced a single living child and not the desired male heir. In a brief scene in which Henry states, “I’ve been thinking about my brother” and the Biblical justification that will serve as his grounds for leaving his wife and remarrying, the most striking image is his priest’s fleeting look of panic.

By heavily foreshadowing the decision that will change the course of English history, The Tudors offers one explanation for scenes depicting sexual acts that define the series as a whole and dominate its premiere.

For Henry, young king and head of a young dynasty, sex is just as much about practicality as it is about pleasure. One generation after a brutal civil war, Henry must have a son to maintain peace and consolidate his family’s future. In this way, sex

serves a very specific function.

Beyond this is the question of representation. We have many portraits of Henry VIII; his image is part of our cultural consciousness. However, The Tudors indulges in a trend of “sexing up” historical figures that is identified by Canadian artist Kate Beaton. In a parody illustration satirizing an episode of “Sexy Tudors: History blows unless it’s sexy!”

Elizabeth I will not allow her advisor to deliver important news until he strikes a provocative pose. Beaton adds, “Someone needs to build a time machine and go tell William Cecil that he may have been a crack statesman, but if he wants us to give a shit about him, he better start hitting the gym.”

This juxtaposition of work and play is also present in the television show, as Henry prepares for his encounter with the king of France by carefully questioning an ambassador. Rather than emphasizing diplomacy or military strategy, Henry’s focus strays and the conversation shifts instead towards grounds for physical comparison between the two rival rulers. He asks, “What about his legs? Are his calves strong like mine?” and is duly assured “Your Majesty, no one has calves like yours.”

In comparison, Hilary Mantel’s two Tudor novels display an interest in psychological realism in combination with an intense physicality. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are not as concerned with re-hashing Henry’s history as they are with telling the story of Thomas Cromwell, who becomes one of the most powerful men in England on the basis of experience and ability. Mantel’s writing has generated such interest that her books have been adapted for the the-

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atre (they are currently being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company) as well as a television series that is in the process of being cast.

Mantel’s Cromwell is a character of incredible depth. In a recent “pen portrait” for the National Portrait Gallery in London, Mantel’s brief description culminates in the statement “He doesn’t care what you think of him. No man more immune to insult. Truth is the daughter of time. Time is what we haven’t got.”

The Gallery also houses Cromwell’s portrait in paint, which is addressed briefly and humorously in the opening pages of Bring Up the Bodies.

Mantel writes, “When he saw the portrait finished he had said, ‘Christ, I look like a murderer’; and his son Gregory said, ‘didn’t you know?’”

Each of these examples highlights aspects of the same history, albeit in different media and for different audiences. This is nothing new. Just as we seek to indulge our interest in the Renaissance, Henry VIII and his contemporaries were also looking back, in their case to the Classical period. So what’s the problem? Perhaps, as Beaton argues, we are struggling to reconcile ourselves with the idea that we have framed the fact that “Sexy people did live in the past, and they had sex!” as some kind of revelation.

Therefore, I am reluctant to conclude by imposing a hierarchical value judgment on The Tudors, on Beaton’s art, or on Mantel’s books. Created to entertain, and even occasionally instruct, all three are resounding successes. After all, if humanizing history leads to establishing connections with historical figures, this can only be beneficial for the viewer or reader. Some of my best friends have been dead for hundreds of years.

ART BY SARAH CRAWLEY

GIRLS AND REALIST NUDITY ON TELEVISION Lauren Dineley

At the Januar y Television Critics Association panel for the HBO series Girls, Tim Molloy, a television repor ter from TheWrap, inquired of the show’s creator and star Lena Dunham, “I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity on the show—by you par ticularly.” Molloy went on to say, “I feel like I’m walking into a trap to say no one complains about the nudity on Game of Thrones, but

I get why they’re doing it. They’re doing it to be salacious. To titillate people. And your character is often naked at random times for no reason.”

The manner in which Molloy posed his “question” (more of a rambling statement to be honest) to Dunham was undoubtedly tactless, but the context for his remark deser ves investigation. When is nudi-

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ty in television deemed appropriate and inappropriate? What purpose does it ser ve? Who decides?

The standard way to answer these questions involves looking into the rules that govern depictions of nudity on television. The governmental bodies that oversee the various national television industries are the ones to impose these rules, but television networks themselves

abide by them without much complaint via internal standards and practices depar tments. This lack of complaint can be attributed to conditions of the broadcast licenses and the need to please adver tisers who, more often than not, do not want to be associated with content that is considered controversial.

These rules differ from countr y to countr y, but are generally similar across Nor th America. Television shows on broadcast networks— meaning those readily available and accessible to all—do not and cannot feature sexualized nudity. The presence of nudity is limited to brief shots with no explicit connotations.

Therefore, nudity on broadcast television is primarily clinical in nature.

Shows on basic cable are allowed to show more nudity, but oftentimes refrain from doing so before midnight for fear of alienating potential adver tisers. Pay or premium cable, which do not sell adver tising time as their money is made from subscription fees, are free to show as much nudity as they wish, an allowance they tend to capitalize on.

Although the rules imposed by state regulators, such as the FCC in the United States and the CRTC in Canada, provide a framework for understanding what is considered appropriate in regard to nudity in television programming, it is in the ways in which these rules are compromised and questioned that the intersection between perceived purpose and propriety of nudity on television comes to light.

The nudity permitted on widely accessible television channels is seen in brief, desexualized instances of nudity that are usually associated with journalistic or doc-

umentation of the body or, in the case of scripted material, medical or criminal situations. On the more adventurous basic cable channels (FX in par ticular) and premium cable channels (Showtime, HBO), the presence of nudity leans more towards the explicit and sexuallycharged.

As Molloy alluded to, this is the type of nudity on Game of Thrones.

Now don’t get me wrong, Game of Thrones is a fantastic television show. It is aesthetically spectacular and the plot is engaging, but there is also what some might call an excessive amount of nudity—yet there are no complaints from the likes of Molloy. Even Saturday Night Live spoofed this element of show, creating a sketch in which Andy Samberg as a 13-year-old boy plays a writer for the show who requests that there are instances of nudity in vir tually ever y scene because he wants to see naked girls. In shor t, nudity has generally been accepted on television as long as it operates within institutional and cultural frameworks that have been established. So, what’s Molloy’s problem with Lena Dunham on Girls? It is the type of nudity, one I will call “realistic nudity”, in which Dunham’s body is not sexualized and is simply there.

Like Game of Thrones (and virtually ever y other show on premium cable past and present including Sex and the City, Weeds, Shameless, and Hung), Girls has the kind of sexualized nudity that has become the norm for the likes of HBO and Showtime. What makes Girls different is the presence of this realistic nudity. There are several scenes in the show in which you see Dun-

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ham’s Hannah naked in her apar tment—on the bed, in the bathtub, in the kitchen—for what Molloy calls “no reason.”

Molloy’s statement is not entirely wrong; the nudity does appear to be something of an addition. Hannah does not need to be in the buff for these scenes to work in the narrative. She could be wearing pajamas in bed, the scenes that take place in the bathtub could take place elsewhere, why be naked in the kitchen—there are hot and dangerous things in there! But as Dunham describes it in response to Molloy’s previously quoted inquir y, “It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive.”

In shor t, she’s nude in the show because sometimes she’s nude in real life. Molloy questions the legitimacy of the nudity on Girls because it does not fit into the institutional and cultural frameworks of what the media has deemed appropriate for nudity on television.

Dunham’s nudity on the show—even if “random”—ser ves an impor tant purpose. It challenges these established frameworks in an attempt to undermine the ignorance and misogyny that is quite per vasive in the media, an ignorance and misogyny exemplified by Molloy’s comment. What we need in the media landscape are more bodies like Dunham’s—ones that are not hyper-sexualized or clinical in nature. Television is one of the most per vasive and accessible enter tainment mediums and because of this status, has something of a responsibility to ref lect the society that it ser ves. The presence of Dunham’s body on Girls does just that.

BODY of WORK / Thoughts Will Pettigrew me·chan·ics: noun plural but singular or plural in construction \mi-’ka-niks\ 1: a branch of physical science that deals with energy and forces and its effect on bodies me·chan·i·cal: adjective \mi-’ka-ni-kl\ 3a: done as if by machine; seemingly uninfluenced by the mind or emotions; automatic me·chan·ic: noun \mi-’Əka-nik\ 1: a manual worker: artisan -Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Cleopatra

Now, Iras, what think’st thou?

Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown In Rome, as well as I. Mechanic slaves With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths, Rank of gross diet, shall be enclouded, And forced to drink their vapour.

Iras

The gods forbid!

-Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2, 207-213

nce, if I remember well, I had soft hands. The kind of hands that get one into particular colleges, the kind of hands that get compliments, that turn coffee-stained pages in second-hand books. The kind that shrink back, aghast, at the slightest sliver from a spiteful leaf to then be sucked sheepishly with secret, cheekbitten masochism.

O

These hands, of course, are the bodily extension of the mind, the physical medium of the oh-so-precious thoughts, the dexterous conveyances of dexterous commands, tick-tack-typing away at the paid-for punishment of a liberal arts education. The mind...

a terrible thing to waste, I’ve been told. The mind...

the body is merely a vessel, a bell jar.

The mind is a one-way ticket to organic love.

Because it’s never work if you’re doing what you love ...right?

These hands, of course, are coarse now;

shattered and scarred.

Grease and carbon fill the cracks like an inked Instagram iPhone, except no twee credibility for the work-boot wearing.

Maybe it’s the imaginary (or real) smell, or the morbid fatigue in the body language.

The slumped over sleepy subway rider does little for morale, after all.

Hell is probably frozen over ‘til April this year, but no matter. I’ve learned to keep my body warm— layer after layer I pull away my second, third, fourth skin and get a fluorescent glimpse of my body of work.

Every day another nicotine splotch, another coagulated leak, another pleasant how-did-that-happen on my way to the salty fount.

A chill in the bones is a hard one to shake with early morning freezing rain clinging to coveralls made metallic and glassy by the howling (o, how it rings in my muddled ears), the howling breath of one too many missed classes.

There’s no chim-chiminey charm to swallowing a mouthful of fear five hundred feet in the air.

Fate’s sulphuric chalky kiss comes upon one like a boyish blush in the world of men but alas, what can you do when you work in a flue? there’s a certain ductility to the ductility of aluminium for a metal it has the mouth-feel of a chewy poem but steel, on the other hand, is sharper than wit and tends to leave more non-metaphorical scars but can be cut with that certain hot-butter satisfaction including a light peppering of embers to the face the skin sated with spicy sensation but were anything to slip were the disk to skate away...

Everything is heavy the first time around, most famously metal, but to drag rails with a rebar hook, to bear-hug an eight-foot pounder (and as it floats for an instant you feel for Newton’s head)

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to feel every sinewy muscle twist apart and stretch like fresh manila as you run up the hoistway stacking them staggered (fish-plates down with this outfit), spud in hand for a quick thrust and levered tweak, bolts at the ready: eight in all to, with a few flicks of the wrists, fastidiously fasten thirty-two feet of steel together (a pair of fifteens is for five-eighths, snug them up or reef on them with all your might to get them tight) to pull the ropes up hand over fist from off the pipestands on the platform down under the sheaves and up to the shackles and hammer the heart in without forgetting the hockey sticks all the while the governor hangs idly by, waiting to save a life to come along with a come-along,

a lever, my imagination and I have convinced myself that there must be more to this body of work.

Dreams of that body hanging in a picture frame became dreams of that body hanging in a hole in the sky.

My imagination and I have convinced myself that there are poems in this place too, that there are poems in every click of a ratchet.

In every nut and bolt there’s a little left of my body of work before the rest goes in the ground, before the inevitable obsolescence sets in and these hands are left only able to turn coffeestained pages in second-hand books.

There are poems in this place too; I have felt them in my body of work.

It’s time for me to start listening.

to have your body wrapped in a chainfall carrying those that carry tonnes, all while learning another language that is what makes my body of work, and one must take pride in one’s work. one gets the hang of stripping travellers after two or three times St. Christopher, patron of the first subway of the morning is the guide you start with the insulation then the sock being careful all the while not to cut too deep the strainer is in the middle of all the strands you need to get it out to crosby it around a teardrop now if you could pardon my English (always my lowest grades) you then weave a horsecock around said traveller and tug it up the shaft then grab on with all your might and heave until it’s hitched and thus it dangles there limp and between pants you let a sigh of relief (I am no poet; I couldn’t make this up) Somehow, whether it be a regret lodged deep in my chest (infection kept at bay with self-prescribed poisons) or the real realization that for the third consecutive generation my body’s worth in this world is that of ART BY WENTING LI

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“They ask me, how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer than the land.”

—‘Conversations about home (at a deportation centre)’ Warsan Shire

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BODIES IN THE CEMETERY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA Catriona Spaven-Donn The words “refugee” and “asylum-seeker” are not unfamiliar. We associate them, perhaps, with a headline quickly scanned about Syria, Sudan, or Somalia, or else they resonate no further with us than Angelina Jolie’s bio, or the half-understood lyrics of a popular Manu Chao song.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are 45.2 million forcibly displaced people in the world. These may be refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people, or asylum-seekers (the small percentage who have applied for asylum to another country).

While the US, Germany, and France receive most asylum applications; the Mediterranean is increasingly becoming a “hub” of major migration routes.

And these migration routes most often consist of leaky boats, extortionate under-the-table price tags, illegal traffickers, and desperate people who have travelled across the African continent to reach Libya and neighbouring countries, where they hope to make the treacherous sea crossing to Europe.

In 2011, 1500 people were confirmed to have died while making the journey towards the southern coasts of Spain, Italy, and Greece. In 2013, over 32,000 people were thought to have made the crossing in the first eight months of the year. Then, October came and suddenly

these quietly established clandestine migration routes were brought to light.

Before the fateful shipwreck of October 3rd 2013, news of Eritrean immigrants drowned off the coast of Italy was not unheard of for Europeans. Pictures would surface every so often of bikini-clad tourists circled around exhausted, dehydrated African migrants who lay on the sand, literally washed up by the waves.

There would be a flutter of response from EU and government officials talking about the necessity of doing something while not doing anything. Then life would continue: tourists would return to their towels and sun cream and migrants would be sent back to detention centres and torture in Libya, or kept in overcrowded holding pen reception centres in Europe for an illegal amount of time.

On October 3rd of last year, a boat from Libya heading to Lampedusa caught fire and capsized close to the Italian island’s coastline. There were over 500 people onboard, of which only 155 people survived. 364 bodies were recovered from the water and from the hold of the boat, where divers say that the bodies were packed so tightly together that they were still on their feet, arms raised above their heads as if calling for help.

Amongst this “wall of bodies” found in the boat was

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migration a crime punishable by up to 10,000 euros.

Amnesty International has highlighted the need to treat migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers with dignity at borders. Their campaign, “When You Don’t Exist,” aims to shine a light on human rights violations against those people detained and mistreated when they arrive in Europe hoping for a better future.

Their campaign states that: “the desire of some European countries to prevent irregular migration… has undermined safe and timely rescue at sea.” Indeed, survivors of the crossing have described military boats passing and ignoring overloaded migrant boats clearly in distress, in danger of capsizing, and with people who have gone without food or water for days or even weeks.

Just a few days after the tragedy of October 3rd, another boat capsized near Lampedusa. In a BBC report, a Palestinian survivor who had set out from a refugee camp in Syria, described how the boat they were in was fired on by Libyan boats (some claim they were coast guards, while others say traffickers or militia groups) all the way into Italian waters. Some of the passengers were shot. The boat was leaking. The Italian Red Cross was called, but they said the boat had to contact the Maltese Red Cross. The Maltese Red Cross said they would come “in a while,” according to the report. They

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said they would be there in thirty or forty minutes, but an hour and a half later, the boat had sunk and people were in the water before any rescue teams had arrived. A plane, however, had been overhead, filming the ordeal of these passengers desperately trying to get to safety.

These tragedies in October brought to light an ongoing situation in which the inequalities of this world have been laid horrifyingly bare. As Amnesty’s “When You Don’t Exist” campaign states: “People on the move have their rights violated, often out of the public eye. They are effectively made invisible.”

However, the plane saw those people. And the Italian government sent officials to see the hundreds of coffins lined up in an aeroplane hangar in Lampedusa after the boat carrying 500 people capsized on October 3rd. And we can see the news reports and read the testimonies of survivors who will never forget the trauma of their Mediterranean Sea crossing.

The sea is becoming a cemetery.

People hardened to war, poverty, and cross-continental migration are becoming mere statistics of those “made invisible” on their quest for a better life in a different place. Many of the women, men, children and families attempting the crossing are now no more than bodies: they are sacrifices to the sea, erased of their past and deprived of their future.

Photos by Paula Razuri and Warren Goodwin

a baby boy. He was still attached to his mother, thought to have been about 20, by the umbilical cord. Renato Sollustri, a police diver who was one of the team who recovered the bodies, said that it was at the moment of this discovery that they lost their detachment. He said to The Guardian, “in the many years that I’ve been doing this job, I have never seen anything like that.”

In fact, the scale of this tragedy is something that the whole of Europe had never seen nor experienced. Suddenly, the commonlyused and rarely-reported migration routes of thousands of people were exposed.

In the last few years, many of these men, women, and children who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean have been from Syria. Forced to flee their homes due to the civil war, the number of Syrians in boats like the one which capsized off of Lampedusa, has risen exponentially.

Many of the 900 people crowded into the reception centre at Lampedusa, which has an official capacity of 250, have therefore lived through war, bombings, and chronic poverty before facing deadly waves, ignored calls to the Red Cross and hostility from the European governments they had viewed as beacons of hope.

The very night after the capsizing, an amendment was approved by the Italian senate which made illegal im-

Skin fairness and shadeism in Indian media

FLICKR/KRITTIKA.SINGH

by Reema Kureishy

I

remember watching a TV advertisement in India about a popular skin lightening cream. It shows a darkskinned woman being scoffed at by employees of a “beauty company,” simply for not being pretty. Her father gets angr y at this treatment of his daughter, and proceeds to concoct an ancient skin remedy from traditional Indian medicinal plants. The daughter uses this cream, her skin tone lightens, and she goes back to the beauty company. She draws the attention of an attractive (and ver y fair) male employee, flips her hair for added effect, and walks out with a job, greater self-esteem, and prospects for an allround fantastic life.

And all thanks to the ancestral recipe that is now conveniently packaged

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and sold in stores near you.

This was a fairly recent ad, but definitely not the first of its type. The fairness cream that was being marketed, “Fair & Lovely,” is a wildly popular item in Indian stores, and the company has been churning out similar problematic ads for years.

Two issues can be identified here.

First, “shadeism”—where someone is discriminated against because of skin colour—is a widespread problem in India, and leads to various societal pressures. Second, Indian media continues to depict dark skin as undesirable, while fair skin becomes the solution to all problems—be it marriage, career, or self-esteem. This narrative heavily affects the mindset of the general population, and

is amplified when many celebrities and actors also endorse the skinlightening products, adding to the product’s appeal.

The causes for the fairness issue in India have been discussed for many years, and fingers are pointed at the usual suspect—colonialism.

Because of the light-skinned colonizers in India, fairness became the idealized standard of beauty— in a countr y predominantly having darker skin tones. Many argue that the problem today stems from the internalized racism remaining from colonial times. While the issue might originate from there, what upholds this detrimental structure today is the discourse around skin lightening products, especially ads like the one described above.

Why are skin-lightening products any different from other beauty products? One could argue that they both work to enhance attractiveness and increase confidence. However, fairness products do have some qualities unique to them. For instance, fairness product ads often dictate that your en-

tire life will change once you use the product, which is slightly different from advertising beauty that can be enhanced through makeup. As well, chances are that you would not be judged immediately if you are not wearing lipstick or hair gel, whereas the overbearing attitude against dark skin is specifically focused on blatant judgment on skin colour. It becomes a matter of compulsion rather than choice. On the brighter side (pun intended), at least these ads are becoming more progressive. Before, dark-skinned women in ads only had to handle marriage rejections. Now, they get rejected while tr ying to find work, too!

For men, there’s “Fair and Handsome”— and the ads are just as bad, if not worse. Prominent Indian actors, who enjoy an almost godlike status in India thanks to the popular movie industr y, endorse this product. In order to differentiate it from the cream for females, these ads take a heteronormative turn. In one ad, actor Shah Rukh Khan puts down a young man for tr ying to use “Fair and Lovely,” and tells him that it cannot do any-

FLICKR/EMERSSON

BEFORE, DARKSKINNED WOMEN IN ADS ONLY HAD TO HANDLE MARRIAGE REJECTIONS. NOW, THEY GET REJECTED WHILE TRYING TO FIND WORK, TOO

thing for a man’s “tough” skin. Why choose that option, where there’s the more macho “Fair and Handsome”?

It is also important to acknowledge, however, that there is resistance against shadeism. An awareness campaign called “Dark is Beautiful” was started by the group Women of Worth (WOW) in 2009, and questioned this societal bias in India. It started receiving a lot more attention when Nandita Das, an Indian actor, endorsed this movement. Das had often been asked how she achieved success while being dark-skinned, which led her to speak out against the deprecating nature of shadeism.

This is not only a problem in India, of course. Shadeism exists globally, in countries like Nigeria and the Philippines, and again becomes a widely accepted societal truth. Media plays a huge role in influencing these biases, and in India the dominant narrative still tells the population that they need to be lighter. Campaigns like “Dark is Beautiful” may not reverse this mindset, but they can bring much needed dialogue and criticism against the fairness issue.

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A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

Figure 1. Error-prone replication in digital imaging.

IMAGES BY THOMAS LU

The original image was sequentially scanned and printed using conventional techniques. Image quality progressively declined following each consecutive treatment. To what extent can objects be reproduced and when do we draw the line between a body and its representation?

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DECAY PHOTOS BY VICTORIA CHUEN

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Roman physician Galen wrote a treatise on anatomy in the second century that would be influential for the next several hundred years.

However, the majority of Classical anatomical studies were based on dissection and vivisection of animals, not humans, and were therefore incomplete.

Beginning in the middle ages, scholars at the Italian University of Bologna, one of the oldest institutions in the world, began to perform human dissection. Leonardo da Vinci, among his other talents, was trained in anatomy, and contributed to the field. Around the Age of Enlightenment, medical schools were frequently established in Europe and America, and with the constant study and demonstration of human anatomy came a huge demand for cadavers.

While in the 18th century there

was an abundance of cadavers readily available in Europe—the bodies of executed criminals—a decline in the use of the death penalty in the early 1800s led to a drastic decline in available bodies. Demand also grew.

The Science Museum of London’s records tell us that 1831 offered only 11 bodies—to be used by nearly a thousand medical and anatomy students. Some ghoulish opportunists took advantage of the demand and made serious money selling recently buried corpses; these so-called body snatchers or “resurrection men” often sold them to medical professionals.

In early 19th century England body snatching was not a felony— though grave robbery was—and therefore was able to thrive quite well for some time. After funerals, families of the deceased would sometimes stand watch over a new

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grave to deter thieves, and many older graveyards today have burial lots covered by iron bars or other ways of deterring robbery, a remnant indicative of the past frequency of body snatching. As medical schools in America grew in prominence to catch up with those in England and the rest of Europe, body snatching supplied the demand for cadavers there as well.

While cases of body snatching for the purposes of anatomical study are unheard of today, digging up the dead still happens for other reasons. Grave robbery, in which the goal is not to collect human remains but rather any items of value the deceased may have been buried with, has lived on. Certain religious or superstitious traditions sometimes use human remains in their ceremonies, which has been linked to grave desecration, like the practice of post-

RESURRECTION MEN AND ANATOMICAL MURDERS

by Ian de Rege Braga

humous marriages. Marriages after one partner has died often use only a photograph as stand-in, but sometimes, as with what are called ghost marriages, actual human remains are used.

When criminal cadavers or body snatching wasn’t enough, doctors sometimes turned to purchasing the bodies of people recently murdered for this very purpose. In 1828, William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants working in Edinburgh, Scotland, murdered over a dozen people in order to sell their bodies to Doctor Robert Knox, a Scottish anatomist.

Hare was offered immunity if he testified against his partner, an opportunity he seized, and Burke was sentenced to death. After his execution his skeleton, rather fittingly, was put on display at the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomy Museum.

Afterwards, the term “Burke” or “Burkers” came to be used in popular culture to describe someone who committed anatomy murders.

Theirs is perhaps the bestknown case of such killings, but it is not the only one. In 1831 a group known as the London Burkers came to public attention for luring victims to a house in a derelict part of London, where they then drugged and murdered them in order to sell their bodies. Gruesomely inspired by Burke and Hare, they had originally only been body snatchers, not murderers, stealing newly-dead corpses from fresh graves.

John Bishop, a leader of the group, eventually confessed to stealing and selling several hundred bodies during this time. They turned to murder when upon inspection the body of a young boy sold to a group of anatomists appeared

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to have never been buried. This incident prompted police investigations, which revealed evidence of multiple murders.

The Burke and Hare and related cases were what brought the crisis of medicinal science’s lack of cadavers to light, leading to the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832. The London Science Museum’s medicine website explains how, in 1832, the Anatomy Act in Britain provided a solution to the growing problem of anatomical murders. Instead of only executed criminals, anatomists and doctors would now be given unclaimed bodies of people who died but had not family or friends to attend to funerary matters. This greatly helped anatomists fully understand the workings of the human body, and put an end to the anatomy murders that plagued early 19th century England.

THE CELEBRITY CATALYST

ADDICTION, MEDIA SPECTACLE, AND THE DRUG EPIDEMIC

Since Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered dead of a drug overdose in his New York apartment, the media response has oscillated between resembling a storm, to forgetting about the frailty of human life to talk about trivial things like the Superbowl. Dying alone in an apartment with a needle still stuck in your arm is a grisly image to have in one’s mind, neither glamorous nor romantic. The dust from the whirlwind media spectacle that engulfs his wake is just beginning to settle, but the occasional article about the details of Hoffman’s estate or the mystique around his diaries, salacious rumours and all, still garners some attention.

Hoffman follows the tragic tradition of many artists who have succumbed to a drug overdose, a hell unimaginable for those who have never been under the spoon and needle. Cory Monteith’s death from an overdose in a Vancouver hotel room just last year is still fresh in the public consciousness. But there was no anger when he died, despite the fact that he left his partner to mourn him. People reacted respectfully when Heath Ledger died, although his daughter had lost her father. Yet, the resentment and general apathy in reactions to Hoff-

man’s death was palpable. So what makes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death different? Usually, when reports of a public figure’s death from a drug overdose, the reaction is mostly remembrance and honouring the person’s memory—nationwide debates about drug policy are not commonly rehashed or brought to the forefront. But the reactions to Hoffman vary significantly, and many of those reactions are vehement and angry. Debates about drug policy and legalization are more important and relevant than ever before, and Hoffman may have become the catalyst for the discussion. A call for change may just be what the doctor ordered.

Of course, Hoffman was beloved by fellow actors and members of the film industry, and the sadness and respect from admirers of his incredible body of work manifested in Internet blogs, newspaper articles, television broadcasts, and video tributes. But in the mix of these respects, there were public displays of entitled disrespect and apathy. Actor Jared Padalecki published a tweet on the same day Hoffman’s body was discovered, calling his death “senseless” and “stupid.” Then there was Drake’s ridiculous twitter tirade about feel-

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ing cheated because Philip Seymour Hoffman’s image graced the cover of The Rolling Stone instead of his own, which had apparently not been according to plan. But death is never planned. Overdosing on drugs is often not planned. In a more nuanced response, several journalists published pieces on feeling angry about Hoffman’s passing, but mostly because they felt the world had lost an irreplaceable talent. And many, myself included, agree.

In his piece for The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott called Monteith’s passing “sad” because “Cory was a kid struggling with addiction,” while Hoffman “was an artist, and his death forecloses so many possibilities, roles never played, characters never created, ideas never expressed.” But Cory Monteith was 31 when he died, which made him a fully accountable adult, just as Hoffman was. The body of work Hoffman left behind was certainly more impressive than Monteith’s, and to other young actors who have overdosed in recent years, but does that mean Hoffman had a responsibility to stay alive to satiate the performing arts community? Perhaps instead of projecting irrationally towards Hoffman, we should genuinely consider and try to understand the highly misunderstood battle he fought.

In a sense, Philip Seymour Hoffman was “winning” his battle for 23 years—in that time, he maintained sobriety and revealed his brilliant talent to the whole world. He played his characters with total honesty and imbued them with a raw vulnerability, and was awarded an Oscar for his excellent portrayal of Truman Capote.

But addiction does not discriminate. Even successful and inspirational people can succumb to a hell larger than them and suddenly be gone from the world. Even though Philip had managed to stay clean for a long time, he wasn’t in the clear. He wasn’t magically exempt from the possibility of relapse, because his brain, like the brains of many addicts, had already been re-circuited towards that urge to keep using. So when he began to use drugs again, the reaction was less than sympathetic because he appeared to have everything going for him—career, family, highly respected artists in his industry calling him a friend—but this is just the highlight reel. We were not inside his head every time he took pills, or plunged a needled into his veins.

The relapse rate after entering rehab for drugs is

pretty dire. An analysis funded by National Institutes on Drug Abuse found that between 25 percent and 50 percent of substance users resume drug or alcohol use within two years after finishing treatment. The possibility of relapse for former heroin users is between 70 to 80 percent. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have reported a 75 percent increase in heroin use between 2007 and 2011. The war on drugs is clearly failing.

Could legalization be the future for American drug policy? Switzerland implemented a HAT (heroin-assisted treatment) program in 1994 that enabled drug users to take controlled doses of heroin under medical supervision. Other countries like Canada, Spain, and Germany have conducted similar studies that have been largely successful, yet there has been no action to implement HAT into a regular treatment system. A huge reason why many Americans are increasingly dying from heroin use is because batches have been cut with chemicals like lactose and fentanyl, which is a pain medication for cancer patients. The drug Naloxone, known by the trade name Narcan, blocks the effects of opiates like heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl, codeine, and methadone and has been reported by various news outlets as having revived heroin users who overdosed. Currently, EMS responders, including firefighters, are allowed to administer Narcan, but a small amount of police departments in states across the US are legally allowed to use it.

When famous figures die of drug overdoses, there is an opportunity to create visibility for the thousands of drug-users who die each year. Philip Seymour Hoffman is missed and will continue to be missed, and his death will always endure as a reminder that addiction can overpower just about anyone—even your heroes.

We cannot forget that at the heart of this current national drug epidemic, these are human lives being lost at a rapid increasing pace. Discussion, de-stigmatization, and compassion are desperately needed to win this battle.

Lauren Van Klaveren

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LAST GIRL ON THE DANCE FLOOR

THE PRIVILEGE (AND PERIL) OF PASSING 34

I take awkward dancing to a new and sublime level. If you ever need to find me at a party, just follow the wide circle of astonished and mildly-concussed onlookers.

Think Matt Smith in high heels.

Now that my academic overlords no longer force me to take gym class (thanks for nothing, elementaryschool basketball), dancing is one of the few times my physical awkwardness is obvious. The rest of the time, my exciting double identity as a disabled person stays secret.

I found out that I was disabled when a grade-school teachers told me I was “doing really well someone with a disability.” The specific diagnosis was Non-Verbal Learning Disorder, which is also known as “Huh?”, “What?” or “Oh come on, that’s not even a thing.” It causes a wide variety of exciting side effects, like a complete lack of physical or social co-ordination, rubbish math skills, and the aforementioned inability to dance.

The interesting thing about my disability is that it doesn’t manifest itself physically (unless you ask me to catch a baseball). In a world filled with subtle discrimination against people with visible disabilities, I’m able to pass as “normal,” whatever that means.

“Passing” is when someone is seen as a member of a dominant social group they aren’t part of. The term originally described biracial people who “passed” for white in 18th century America, and has been adapted for other minority groups (like trans* people). People who can “pass” generally don’t have to put up with as much silly bullshit, and I’m no exception. Being able to pass means that, unless you see my IEP, I’m allowed to present myself however I want. When people don’t know that they’re supposed to treat me like a Disabled Person®, they end up accidentally treating me like a person person. And that, in a world where people can be pigeonholed by labels, is a grand and glorious freedom.

Except.

Except my disability’s still there, waiting for an opportunity to embarrass me, like that relative who insists on showing your baby pictures when your friends come over. When I lose things, or can’t do simple math, or display infomercial levels of clumsiness, I know I could easily explain it by mentioning my disability. But here’s where passing gets complicated—being able to look like normal means that I’m supposed to be normal.

When disabilities aren’t physical, they’re considered to be “disability-lite,” disability without the calories.

In other words, not quite real. There’s a long-standing, glorious tradition of complaining about how our generation is a bunch of overmedicated, coddled kids who use

fake learning disabilities to get undeserved benefits like “the academic help they need.” Alternatively, university kids are a bunch of drug fiends who make up disabilities to get Adderall, which apparently all the cool kids are snorting. I wouldn’t know—my friends and I mostly just snort our crushed dreams as we weep over our exam marks.

These attitudes are not only annoying as hell, they’re damaging to kids with disabilities. I really shouldn’t have to defend my Accessibility Services accommodations, but after the seventeenth person tells me that I’m sure “lucky” that I get extra time on my exams with a little knowing smirk, I really just want to tell them that they’re “lucky” they get to write their tests with a pen and paper. These attitudes make it very uncomfortable to be honest about my disability—I don’t want people to see me as cheating the educational system. So when the topic of disability comes up, I’d rather just dance awkwardly around it.

The first rule of Disability Club is you don’t talk about Disability Club. Leaving aside the question of who the hell would want to join Disability Club (“Apply now, and get a lifetime of backhanded compliments FOR FREE!”), people are terribly uncomfortable talking about learning disabilities. I may be socially awkward, but even I’m embarrassed on behalf of the people who say (in a painful attempt at a compliment) “Wow, you seem so normal!” The dirty secret of disability passing is that if we can pass, we’re supposed to make ourselves disappear. That’s why I loathe the term “differently abled” unreservedly — it glosses over the fact that being disabled can make life harder in a myriad of small ways.

It’s another way of saying that our problems aren’t real, and if disabled people tried hard enough to be normal then we could.

But I’m 300% done with trying to be someone else’s normal. It gets tiring, and it means that I can’t do things that might embarass me, like dancing. And, trust me, a life without dancing isn’t worth it.

So, if you want to come dancing with me, you’re always welcome. There’s plenty of room on the dance floor for us to flail our limbs in a kind of cautious pride.

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BY EMILY POLLOCK