It is the end of the year and I am writing at the dining room table in my apartment. The curtains are still drawn and there are dried roses lying slack on the mantel just across from me. I should be working on the last edits for a paper, but it suddenly struck me—as these things tend to when you have a deadline for something else—that I haven’t being very good about using this newsletter. Not good at all—in fact, I haven’t touched it since July.
The reason is not especially interesting—I’ve been writing for money and for a wider audience through continuing to freelance, which occupies most of my spare writing time, and I also started my PhD this fall, meaning that most of what I have to say (when there is anything at all) is directed toward one of these channels.
But sometimes I don’t have much to say at all—on days like today, I just want to share some things that I have done and things that I have found interesting, and reflect on them, briefly. Nothing dramatic. Just asking you to indulge me, if you have the time or interest…
My writing
My public criticism and essays haven’t been as frequent due to the demands of graduate school, but toward the end of the summer and beginning of fall, more opportunities opened up and I gleefully took them. In August, I interviewed Canadian author and designer Heidi Sopinka about her new novel Utopia—a fictionalised dive into the 70s Feminist Art movement—for AnOther. In September, I responded to two new films: Sierra Pettingil’s documentary Riotsville USA for Document Journal and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking for Girls on Tops. The next month, I also created this guide to the works of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and interviewed the brilliant filmmaker Sally Potter in celebration of Orlando’s 30th anniversary (both for Document).
I also have some exciting news—my first print story is on its way! For the cover of Document Journal’s Winter 2023 issue, I profiled Emma Corrin (The Crown, My Policeman, Lady Chatterley’s Lover). We spoke about gender, sexuality, silence, ritual, and reading, among other things; they are incredibly smart and it was a pleasure to speak with them. You can read the full piece online here.
Profile writing
Writing the Emma Corrin profile was a great learning exercise; I haven’t written a narrative profile since I took journalism classes in undergrad, and it requires different muscles than just a pure Q&A. You need to look for ‘answers’ that also come in the form of body language, spatial awareness, materiality, and references, not just direct comments. You need to research widely and come at things from a more oblique, literary angle. After my profile of Emma came out, I was delighted by this beautiful portrait of the actress Taylor Russell, written by Connor Garel for the cover of Dazed. In my opinion, it’s not only a fascinating and elegantly-written piece, but a masterclass in weaving together a subject’s answers with close-readings of their work and creatively-selected secondary materials. This is what I’m aiming for, if I have the opportunity to do some profile writing again soon.
Fraught feminisms
This year—and in particular, in the past couple of months—I have noticed a disconcerting dismissal of, or lack of trust in, feminism. I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to articulate my feelings about this—many criticisms of mainstream feminism are absolutely true, and I’m distressed in particular by the acts of transphobia and racism that are often committed (erroneously) in feminism’s name. But I also feel that shedding feminism itself, instead of working to clarify its commitments, means conceding gender to the right, whose efforts to cement reproductive injustice and traditional gender roles are gaining terrifying ground. And when folks complain about feminism and its failures, I am often struck by the fact that they are mostly talking about pop feminism, about a particular image and brand cultivated by the market and the media, and not about the actual folks building feminist coalitions, politics, philosophies, and ways of living.
That’s why I was drawn to these recent opinion pieces that—rightfully, in my opinion—call out the co-optation of feminism by the right-wing and forces of normativity, and argue that feminism must be reclaimed as a movement against systemic oppression (I’ve always liked Clare Hemmings’ definition of feminism as a “transformation of gender and social relations”). For Dazed, Hamila Jabril cogently mapped out the history of feminism’s mutation into a branding exercise for celebrities, from the Spice Girls to Jameela Jamil. In The Drift, Becca Rothfield writes that:
Pussy hats are embarrassing, but sexism is evil, and the ubiquity of misogyny remains — I cannot emphasize this enough — enraging […] We need a feminism as moving and momentous as its mission — a feminism that rejects corporate sanitization and in-this-house cringe along with it. All of this is to say, we are called upon to cultivate a more robust feminism, rather than to reject the enterprise altogether. Aborting the baby along with the cringeworthy bathwater is not just unnecessary: it is unconscionable.
Perhaps most urgently, for The Baffler, Emily Janikiram writes about the way in which the right has begun to use a pro-woman rhetoric to draw up plans for its oppressive gender politics. As Janikram argues, a nonthreatening, easily marketable, and normie version of feminism “will almost inevitably leave room for opponents of the movement to repurpose “feminism” for their own ends.”
(I would add that the right’s efforts to co-opt feminism and take on a pro-woman brand are also part of their battle over gender more broadly, and their transphobic, anti-queer, hyper-natalist mission to firm up traditional, distinct ideas of man/woman —we’ve seen this in France, for instance, where women who are gender non-conforming or don’t present as ‘feminine’ are branded as anti-feminist, or self-hating, by the right. This twisted logic—aided and abetted by the market/social media/cosmetics industry—says that feminism means embracing [read: returning to] traditional forms of femininity, as opposed to dispelling gender norms altogether. Feminists and trans* folks should ultimately have a shared agenda, but the right is hell-bent on dividing us at this febrile moment in gender politics around the world.)
Bookshelf
I last shared with you my favourite books from the first half of the year, and while I still hope to find time for a full year-long list, I’ll share a few titles that I recently thought were fantastic. Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras was definitely my favourite book of the year, a creative nonfiction exploration of Woolf’s writing and Queyras’ own coming-of-age as a poet and gender nonconforming person; it’s so beautifully written, echoing the fluid sentences and clever imagery of Woolf herself. I also loved Clare Luchette’s novel Agatha of Little Neon, about a group of nuns in post-industrial Buffalo, and Natalie Léger’s short-but-sweet Suite for Barbara Loden. I’m currently delving into Paul B. Preciado’s autotheoretical collection An Apartment on Uranus.
Screentime
Are movies and TV in their flop era? I feel like no one knows how to make things post-COVID; all of our brains have been fried by reality TV and TikTok, so everything has to be so painfully expository and obvious, treating audiences like we need to have our hands held while we try to follow the plot. More or less every character in every TV show or film this year has had to say out loud (or via voice-over) exactly what they are thinking, feeling, or doing. Instead of action, we just get people explaining things at each other—usually uninteresting things! Booooo!
This is perhaps why I liked Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a movie that enlarges its emotional potency through subtle gestures. Small clues trigger seismic epiphanies, all the more powerful because they cannot be captured by language or obvious forms of evidence. In so many ways, this is the precise point of cinema—to impart meaning through movement, colour, line, sound, and feeling. To provoke our sensitivity and make us wonder, rather than spell it all out. For that, Wells should be commended.
On TV, I really liked season 2 of The White Lotus. I disliked much of the first season because the characters were so intolerable—and not in a watchable way—especially, for me, Sydney Sweeney’s character. Season 2 felt more deliberate, like it had been designed to crawl right under your skin. Again, while a lot of people called this a “slow burn,” I think this says more about our twitchy, social media-inured minds and less about the show itself, which deployed suspense and withheld information masterfully to keep me counting down until episode drops each week. It also made me want to re-learn Italian.
Today, I finished Netflix’s Wednesday. Predictably, I love Wednesday Addams (I once wrote a guest post for my friend Winnie’s newsletter about my love of spookiness, a genre/vibe that I would argue is distinct from horror). The show is very well cast—Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday is impeccable (especially the voice), and I even liked Catherine Zeta Jones and Luis Guzman as her parents. I love knowing that Ortega styled Wednesday’s now iconic dance sequence after Siouxsie and the Banshees and Denis Lavant in Beau Travail. I love Wednesday’s clothes. Much of the humor. But I did not go for the plot, which aside from being repeatedly derivative of Harry Potter delivers too much fantasy and action, pulling back from what the Addams family is usually about—the people. Aside from personality gimmicks, much of the focus is on the efforts of teens to both stop a serial killer and deliver their community to safety by fulfilling some kind of ancient prophecy. I’m tired of these grand heroic arcs being shoehorned into every piece of media—as I argued about Euphoria earlier this year, I want shows where cool characters just hang out together and go through life. I don’t need Wednesday to become a magical warrior; I want her to be a funny little weirdo, and that’s enough!
That’s all! I haven’t figured out a charming way to end these things, so I guess I’ll just let you return to whatever more important task was absorbing you before I interrupted with this rant. Byeeee.
Re: celeb feminism (i’m looking forward to reading that Dazed article) but i’m been thinking about this A LOT in regards to Em Rata and her podcast. I think people were sort of talking about this when her book came out, specifically how she uses the personal-as-political as a way to not interrogate her own actions that contribute to maintaining standards of beauty, and how she gets power from being able to use those things to her benefit. With her though, I feel like she uses allusions to bell hooks to, well, get off the hook for not having any sort of analysis behind her beliefs. every clip i’ve seen of her podcast is just her and her guest talking about how men suck, and usually in the context of dating. And it’s like, ??? that’s not the beginning and end of feminism