Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

December Links Roundup: Season of Outrage

It’s December, and you know what that means–the War on Christmas has begun. As opposed to, you know, actual war, which is A-OK. Fox News’s latest outrage cycle brings us this spectacular headline from the Green Bay Press-Gazette: “U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher aims his ire at The Satanic Temple tree at National Railroad Museum”. Poet and journalist Natalie Eilbert reports:

As part of its Festival of Trees this year, the nonprofit museum included a tree from The Satanic Temple of Wisconsin, decorated in red lights, pentacles and ornaments extolling LGBTQ+ pride, bodily autonomy and the power of reading.

Gallagher, R-Green Bay, said it’s “impossible to overstate how offensive this is to Christians,” and equated the temple’s participation at the Festival of Trees with “waving a Hamas flag in a synagogue.”

The temple’s mission is “to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits,” according to its website. The National Railroad Museum is a non-religious, private organization focused on the history of locomotives…

…The exhibition at the National Railroad Museum is an exercise in optics. Take, for example, the event name itself: It is called The Festival of Trees. Nowhere in its description does it explicitly refer to the trees as Christmas trees, which invites all sorts of creative interpretations.

Speaking of that Hamas flag, I’m getting pretty fed up with right-wing Israel supporters waving the bloody shirt of anti-Semitism, when the biggest threat to Jews in America comes from white supremacists in the Republican Party. The memory of the Holocaust gets literally weaponized to justify ethnic cleansing of our Palestinian siblings.

According to a damning new report from +972 Magazine, the high civilian death toll in the current war was avoidable and arguably intentional. If you’re not familiar with this publication, their “About” page explains:

+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine. The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.

Yuval Abraham’s feature story, “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza”, was released yesterday.

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

Inside sources told +972 that Israel’s new artificial intelligence system identifies precisely how many civilians will be killed by bombing a target. The current campaign intentionally hits high-rise apartment buildings and other heavily populated areas with low military value, on the pretext that a Hamas member is inside or has lived in the building recently. These sites, called “power targets” by the Israeli military, are hit without warning the residents to evacuate, a change from previous policy.

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it…

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

This is absolutely grotesque. If this is the price of a “Jewish state,” I don’t want it.

You know who would be fine with it? Henry Kissinger, who went to his eternal reward (good luck with that) this week at age 100. May we all live in such a way that our obituary is less salty than historian Erik Loomis’ headline at Lawyers, Guns & Money: “Kissinger is Dead, Finally Something Good Has Happened in 2023”.

One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt.

Where to begin? The unnecessary prolongation of the Vietnam War to get Nixon elected, the bombing of Cambodia, replacing Allende with the dictator Pinochet in Chile, or backing Pakistan’s massacre of civilians during Bangladesh’s bid for independence? The only good thing I can say about Kissinger is that his longevity gives me hope that I’m not over the hill. I was feeling kind of down this week because I received an AARP magazine with Ringo Starr on the cover.

Let’s close on a hopeful note with Major Jackson’s poem “Let Me Begin Again” on the Academy of American Poets website. Oracular and colloquial by turns, this poem urges us to keep choosing wonder and joy, because our disintegrating world may depend on it.

…This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season.

Hat tip to Sarah Sullivan, our 30 Poems in November fundraising coordinator, who sent this poem as one of her daily prompts for the writers raising money for the Center for New Americans. It’s not too late to donate to my page. I’m at $446 as of December 1–help me reach my $500 goal!

November Links Roundup: Angels and Dirtbags

The monthly link-o-rama is on the late side because I’ve been busy writing 30 Poems in November as a fundraiser for the Center for New Americans, an immigrant literacy and job training nonprofit in Northampton. I’ve got another $134 to go towards my target amount. Chip in today and receive a cute picture of my cat Theodore in your inbox, plus a handmade thank-you note (USA addresses only).

In this month’s issue of The Baffler, Joshua Craze examines the pitfalls of foreign humanitarian aid in “The Angel’s Dilemma”. Why have conditions not improved in war-torn, impoverished South Sudan despite billions of dollars in aid since 2011? The NGO industry creates a permanent underclass of refugees who are not allowed to migrate where the work is, let alone have a say in how donors’ money is spent. Craze challenges the aid community’s assertion that their work is apolitical, noting that American disaster relief was a major instrument of foreign policy to create client states during the Cold War. Later, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NGOs became a shadow government in destabilized countries, answerable to the US or the EU rather than the locals.

While helping my son research a history project on Henry Ford, I discovered historical novelist Allison Epstein’s hilarious Substack, Dirtbags Through the Ages. In the irreverent style of Daniel Lavery’s Texts from Jane Eyre or Dr. Eleanor Janega’s Going Medieval, Epstein adopts a gossipy modern voice to talk trash about notable figures from the past. “The Dearborn Ultimatum”, Her post on the spiritual forbear of Elon Musk is subtitled “The Top 10 Reasons I Would Punch Henry Ford in the Teeth if I Saw Him in the Street and Nobody Would Blame Me”. Besides his notorious anti-Semitism, Ford is “why work sucks so bad”:

Henry Ford’s auto factories were pioneers of the assembly line, which took us from an artisan-based economy where skilled workers could perform fulfilling labor to a dehumanized system where you do the same repetitive task over and over until you want to drown yourself in the sea…

The assembly line is also to blame for mass production and by extension consumer culture. What I’m saying is, it’s Henry Ford’s fault that companies are hounding your every breath trying to make you buy things you don’t need, and that there’s an island of garbage in the ocean three times the size of France.

And don’t get her started on his square-dancing fetish!

Electric Literature recently shared an excerpt of editor Zeke Caligiuri’s intro to the prison writers’ anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). A former inmate at Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison, Caligiuri describes how a writers’ group thrived and revived itself behind bars, despite opposition from the authorities

It was exhilarating, until decision-makers in the facility realized the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business. After only a year and a half, the group was disbanded. It was my first lesson in how easily good things in prison get discarded. Watching art and culture go away can create a bleak and hopeless landscape that will jade and obscure a person’s faith in creative community. It was a pattern shown to us repeatedly…

[The Stillwater Writers’ Collective was] created because our small cohort agreed that, at some point, someone or something was going to come along with opportunities that we had been waiting for throughout the long stretches of our collective incarcerations. There was agreement that as a community we would need to be ready so that the blessing we felt was supposed to be ours wouldn’t get passed along to somebody else. We believed it would be a crime for the story of writing in the Minnesota state prison system to be told, or written, without us. Just as the foundations of these old structures had been laid by the hands of the imprisoned, we were trying to lay a new literary and intellectual foundation.

…Time in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency. Incarcerated writing communities provide for us what we can only assume they offer to non-incarcerated writing communities: peer support, friend- ship, competition, rivalry, and shared stakes in the success of their members. These communities offer reminders of time and the emergencies time represents. Classes get canceled and cut. In 2005, our whole education department shut down for months and every computer in the joint was wiped and scoured. Stories, essays, poetry, and even an anthology of our work disappeared from the universe. There are lockdowns, seizures of materials, intentionally, and sometimes collaterally. There are surprise transfers that leave us without computer access, and we must figure out how to keep the things we need most. We, who are working hard to mend some of the wounds in the social and familial fabric of our lives, live with a stopwatch to create evidence that will show something redemptive within us.

Nigerian-Canadian writer Vincent Anioke’s flash fiction “At World’s End” in Fractured Lit fulfills the promise of its unbeatable first line: “I’m giving Kayode Last-Name-Pending a pretty accomplished blowjob in the back of my rented Subaru when Jesus Christ returns.” That’s all I’m going to say.

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, so get inspired by OutHistory’s “Introduction to Transmasculine People in the U.S. Press, 1876-1939”, provided by Emily Skidmore, author of True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 2017).

The Trauma of Israel-Palestine

I had a bunch of links for the monthly roundup, but nothing seems as important as babies dying in incubators at bombed hospitals in Gaza. So I’m going to add my two shekels to a topic that is provoking volleys of cancellations and counter-cancellations in our current discourse. I used to commend my Jewish heritage of Talmudic polyphonic debate as a superior alternative to Christians’ winner-take-all orthodoxy wars. It seems like those days are over, for the time being.

I am culturally and ethnically Jewish, though my current spiritual path is witchcraft. I had a serious Jewish phase in my 20s when I kept a moderate form of kosher (no bacon cheeseburgers) and attended a spectrum of synagogues from Modern Orthodox to Reform. (Full disclosure, the Orthodox stint was entirely about meeting single guys under 40.) Ever since my Episcopal years have come to a close, I’ve circled back to appreciating the ways that Jewish folklore and values shaped my upbringing. I was brought up to believe in education, truth-telling, and fighting for the underdog. I didn’t take it for granted that the American empire fully included me.

Secularized, assimilated Jews of my generation, and possibly my parents’ generation too, coalesced around Zionism as a substitute for the ritual observances that used to define Jewish identity. I didn’t know anything about what Palestinians’ lives were actually like. I didn’t think about the legalized segregation and discrimination that are required to maintain any country as being “for” one group of people. Israel’s “right to exist,” and its right to enforce a two-tier system of civil rights, were–and still are–conflated.

Following the horrifying attacks and hostage-taking by Hamas on October 7, everything that liberal and moderate Jews have criticized about Netanyahu’s repressive right-wing government has gone out the window. Now it’s taboo to talk about why some Palestinians were desperate enough to commit war crimes. Or, on the lefty side of the debate, it becomes even more difficult to hold space for the simultaneous observations that Jews are beneficiaries of apartheid in Israel and an oppressed minority elsewhere in the world. Anti-semitic violence in America is real–though it is largely perpetrated by right-wing Christian white supremacists, not Arabs or Muslims.

Sure, some kind of military response to a terrorist attack makes sense, but it defies credibility that the world-class Israeli intelligence service has no better way to “find” Hamas leaders than by flattening the entire Gaza Strip. One has to be deliberately obtuse to deny that Israel is taking advantage of the situation to force Palestinians en masse out of Gaza, and even the West Bank, which is not connected to the Hamas attack.

I haven’t signed any of the pro-Palestinian open letters circulating in the literary community because they didn’t seem nuanced enough for me. I have no gripe with the people who did sign them. It’s clear to me that they’re motivated by compassion for the Palestinian victims of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, not by Jew-hatred. (More about this in a moment.)

A document I would feel comfortable endorsing is this eloquent letter by students at Brown University. “An open letter from Jewish students” was signed by “a collective of anti-occupation Jews” and published in the Brown Daily Herald on Nov. 7.

Zionist institutions purport to be representative of all Jews, often using us as a rhetorical shield to support the unconscionable actions of the state of Israel… We stand in solidarity with Brown Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Caucus in the pursuit of the liberation of Palestinian peoples. We know intimately that Jewish struggles are necessarily bound up in global struggles for freedom.

…Every single author of this piece has lost ancestors to state-sanctioned anti-Jewish violence. We have all grown up grappling with the intergenerational ripples of such atrocities. There is no question that antisemitism exists.

But we do not accept a Jewish ethnostate as the solution to our struggle. By using the Shoah and our collective traumas to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the Israeli military project insults the memory of our ancestors. We will not allow history to repeat itself; “never again” calls for the protection of everyone — Jews and non-Jews alike — from genocide.

If we cannot acknowledge and reject Israel’s indiscriminate killing of thousands and forced displacement of over 1.5 million Palestinians, then we have failed to learn from our history.

We want to illustrate a distinction that many Zionists attempt to obfuscate: First, there is the spiritual entity of Israel — as Jacob’s alias, as the Jewish people, as a word that features in many of our prayers. Then, there is the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948. Even the nomenclature of the state of “Israel” serves to confuse political Zionism with Judaism and Jewishness. This conflation is dangerous and ignores a long and ongoing history of Jewish opposition to Zionist nation-state ideology. We hold our opposition to the state simultaneously with our connection to the amorphous spiritual entity. 

One impetus for this letter was an Oct. 25 missive from the Anti-Defamation League and Brandeis Center to some 200 American universities, urging them to “investigate the activities of your campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine…for potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization” (i.e., Hamas).

Seriously…the leftist Jews who were blacklisted by McCarthy are turning in their graves!

Meanwhile, another casualty of the schism in American Judaism may be the venerable Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Jewish Currents reports that the Poetry Center’s programming is on hold since it tried to impose a Zionist litmus test on the writers who spoke there:

That legacy now appears to be in jeopardy following the Y’s abrupt postponement of a planned October 20th Poetry Center talk by the professor and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who had signed an open letter in the London Review of Books two days earlier calling for an end to “the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.” The Y, which released a statement pledging support for Israel the day after Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7th, has long been an officially Zionist organization—sometimes to the frustration of employees who disagree with this stance—but has generally left subsidiaries like the Poetry Center alone to book whatever speakers they choose. However, in a comment to The New York Times, the Y acknowledged that the decision had been made due to Nguyen’s “public comments on Israel.”

The postponement soon led to a cascade of Poetry Center event cancellations and staff resignations. On October 21st, the writers Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe announced on X (formally known as Twitter) that as “anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial thinkers,” they had pulled out of their upcoming talk; the critic Andrea Long Chu, poet Paisley Rekdal, and writers Chris Kraus and Hannah Gold also canceled their respective events. The next day, Chihaya and senior program coordinator Sophie Herron—two of the Poetry Center’s three employees—resigned from their positions. By October 23rd, the Y confirmed to the Times that the Poetry Center had postponed its reading series. The future of the literary institution is now uncertain.

…In late October, the Y added a new policy to its website stating that it will continue “welcoming people who are critical of Israel, as long as they have not and do not actively call for the destruction of the State of Israel or question its legitimacy,” a move that could exclude a broad swath of potential speakers, both Jewish and not, who identify as anti-Zionist or support a political vision for future coexistence in the region that does not include Jewish statehood.

The article notes that similar conflicts are playing out within other American Jewish institutions, such as the campus ministry network Hillel International. The younger generation is no longer willing to abide by its elders’ taboos.

It’s encouraging, meanwhile, to read about the rabbis and Jewish leaders who are joining protests against Israel’s assault on civilian targets. This CNN story from Oct. 25 describes one such sit-in for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill. Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow are leading the charge to redefine Jewish identity around supporting human rights for everyone in Israel.

“As Jewish people whose ancestors went through the Holocaust, when we hear Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant use words like ‘the children of darkness’ and ‘human animals’ to describe Palestinians, we feel the resonances of that in our bones,” said IfNotNow political director Eva Borgwardt, referring to recent comments made by the Israeli officials.

“We know exactly where that language leads, and we are here to stop what they clearly intend to be a genocide. We will come to the doors of our lawmakers, we will be at the doors of our lawmakers for as long as it takes.”

Readers may recall that the U.S. House censured Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) last week for using the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a Palestinian liberation slogan that critics interpret as calling for the eradication of Israel. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress.

Following the vote to advance the censure resolution, Tlaib delivered an emotional speech on the House floor and argued that her criticism of the Israeli government should not be conflated with antisemitism.

“It is important to separate people and governments. No government is beyond criticism. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation,” she said.

She grew emotional and had trouble speaking after she said, “I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable.”

…A censure resolution is one of the most severe forms of punishment in the House, which has historically been saved for the most egregious offenses such as a criminal conviction. A censure does not remove a member from the House and carries no explicit penalties beyond a public admonition.

I find this treatment of Rep. Tlaib to be pretty offensive and hypocritical considering how many election deniers and fake-news-spreaders there are in Congress. For background, I recommend this Jewish Currents article from 2021, “What Does ‘From the River to the Sea’ Really Mean?” Palestinian-American historian Yousef Munayyer explains:

“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.

But it is precisely because Zionist settler colonialism has benefitted from and pursued Palestinian fragmentation that it seeks to mischaracterize and destroy inclusive and unifying rhetorical frameworks. For example, journalist Marc Lamont Hill was attacked and ultimately removed from his position at CNN for calling for Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea.” After all, it is far easier to dominate a divided people fighting different battles on different fronts than it is to dominate one people united in a single battle for the same universal rights.

Since Zionists struggle to make a persuasive argument against freedom, justice, and equality for all people throughout the land, they seek instead to attack the message and messenger. When Palestinians proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” many Zionists argue that this is a Palestinian call for genocide. But as historian Maha Nassar has noted, there has never been an “official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.”

What Munayyer is getting at, I believe, is the misconception that everything is fine and democratic in Israel outside the “occupied territories” of Gaza and the West Bank. This is what I and many American Jews were taught about Zionism. In this context, “from the river to the sea” means that the second-class citizenship of Palestinians exists everywhere and shouldn’t be acceptable anywhere.

Being a trauma survivor makes you paranoid. Because you’ve had so little power globally, you don’t recognize when you do have power locally, and therefore you don’t use it in a responsible way. My people need some collective therapy so we don’t keep punching down.

 

The Poet Spiel: “Glut”

Friend of the blog Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel may be in his 80s, but his appetite for life remains strong, as the comic-horror poem below demonstrates. Have a tasty spooky season.

glut

six plate-size blueberry pancakes,
a half dozen eggs sunny side up
and a pound of bacon and sausage
serve as little more than a prompt
for a couple of fresh baked apples
drenched in cinnamon and butter
to start your day.
four fun-size baby ruth candy bars,
six butterfingers and one snickers bar
plus another baked apple
are only a prelude to
one whole bag of potato chips and
one cup of salty peanuts bathed in sugar —
not enough to pacify

your need to bite
into something that will satisfy
the rip and tear with teeth
your dentist has sharpened twice
in the past six months
because your penchant
for chewing has worn them down.

so you thaw a slab of pork loin
then slather it with honey sauce
and bake it in the same pan
you’ve used to bake the dozen apples
and turkey breasts you finished off
yesterday before the sun went down,
then topped that with your usual bedtime snack
of a bag of popcorn with catsup.

at noon you choke on soy free gluten free no wheat
angel hair noodles twisted round your uvula.
soon as your gagging fit ceases
you gulp a twelve ounce glass of milk
then shove down two large meatballs —
make that three or four, five or six
if you’ve got extras

all day every day and night
each bite of anything
persuades your saliva to bathe
the next bite of whatever
you’ve got ready-to-eat
in your pantry, fridge
and nuts and candy jars.

so look out
mister 300 pound footballer
with thighs like a side of beef,
if you wander into view,
be advised a fork and butcher knife
are in hand.

Spooktober Reading Roundup

I love horror. Not gore, so much, but the creepy stuff. Give me dark family psychology (gee I wonder why), cursed objects from dusty archives, the uncanny blankness of our modern built environment and the soulless things lurking beneath its plastic surfaces. Lately I’m especially drawn to historical atrocities with a supernatural twist, a sub-genre where a lot of writers of color are currently making their mark.

I read every horror anthology I could get my hands on in the 80s and 90s, mostly from school and public libraries because our family was broke. I knew I was “movin’ on up…,” as The Jeffersons theme song went, when I could afford to buy the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror trade paperback for $25.

Nowadays I get most of my literary scares from NetGalley or thrift stores, a nice mix of old and new. Honestly sometimes the most chilling aspect of these pulp paperbacks is how much sexism and homophobia you could get away with in the 1990s.

Certain flavors of horror don’t appeal to me, but this is my personal taste rather than an aesthetic pronouncement. I don’t usually pick up zombie stories because (I assume) they will be gross and violent. Same for serial killers, whose psychology is not as interesting as they themselves think it is. I can’t picture myself as a character in a post-apocalyptic survival novel, because it’s drearily obvious that I would immediately die from falling into a hole, just like I do in Minecraft every time my son demands that I play. Or else I’d be the person killed and eaten by my starving companions in the first week for complaining too much about the lack of flush toilets.

With respect to horror fiction based on real-life historical injustices, I find these books uniquely satisfying because they have a purpose beyond momentary thrills. I learned about the Negro Travelers’ Green Book from Lovecraft Country. Victor LaValle’s cosmic horror Western Lone Women, one of the best books I read this year, taught me about the diversity of 19th-century frontier homesteaders. Often, the terror and suspense in these books arise from oppressive forces that persist in the present day. The ghosts and monsters, on the other hand, may be a powerless group’s unlikely allies. If cosmic justice isn’t forthcoming, at least coding these stories as horror is refreshing in its honesty, compared to the whitewashed narratives of progress in our “realistic” history books.

A standout in this category is Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, coming out Oct. 31 from Gallery/Saga Press. Set in rural Florida in 1950, it’s based on a horrendous “reform school” where one of her ancestors perished as a teenager. Robbie, the 12-year-old son of a Black labor activist, is sent there on trumped-up charges to bring his father out of hiding. The sadistic warden takes a special interest in the boy because he can see the ghosts of other young inmates who were killed by beatings, rape, and hard labor. Capturing the ghosts will allow the warden to cover up his crimes. In return, maybe he’ll let Robbie go free. But the ghosts are going to make Robbie a counter-offer that he’s afraid to refuse.

This week in Jessica Dore’s Tarot newsletter, I came across a citation to Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts”, which is a meditation on the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of reconstructing the voices of sexually exploited female slaves. Hartman’s remarks about the archives’ “libidinal investment in violence” resonated with themes in The Reformatory, where the warden keeps a secret stash of photos of the boys he’s abused. Robbie and his allies hope to use this evidence against their tormentor, yet they know there’s no guarantee that the images will inspire empathy, let alone effective action from the authorities. The archive is contagious and uncontrollable as the Necronomicon, titillating the white gaze, while infecting Black viewers with further traumatic images.

Comedian and horror movie director (a combo that makes sense if you think about it) Jordan Peele is the editor of Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, just published last week. This one was a mixed bag, for me, with some amazing stories and others that didn’t have enough of a point, but I recommend checking it out anyhow. Tananarive Due contributes another solid tale based on Jim Crow history, this time about Freedom Riders seeking supernatural aid to fend off white supremacists. Nnedi Okorafor’s elegiac story of a Nigerian-American haunted by an Old World deity contains a wry moment when two white Karens in her neighborhood see the monstrous figure in her driveway and demand that she show them her parade permit! You may see the twist coming in Terence Taylor’s virtual-reality nightmare “Your Happy Place” but it’s no less horrifying, because you know that if the technology existed, America would happily sign onto this method of extracting prison labor.

Also out this month, Raul Palma’s A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) is a tragicomic ghost story about an impoverished Santeria priest in Miami who promises to exorcise his debt-collection lawyer’s McMansion in exchange for loan forgiveness. The book is both a Dickensian satire of capitalism and a poignant exploration of survivor guilt, as the priest learns that some emotional debts must be lived with, not expunged.

A pulp anthology that deserves to be rediscovered is Women of Darkness (Tor/Tom Doherty Assocs., 1988), edited by Kathryn Ptacek. Intentionally feminist without being didactic, this collection of horror stories by then-contemporary women writers holds up better than its male-dominated counterparts from this era. Lisa Tuttle’s haunting yet humorous tale “The Spirit Cabinet” reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” in how even a nice husband can dismiss his wife’s perceptions, with fatal consequences. Kit Reed’s “Baby” explores the darker side of the all-consuming bond between mother and child. Elizabeth Massie’s grotesque “Hooked on Buzzer” deals karmic revenge to people who exploited a disabled young woman.

From the same period (and batch of tag-sale paperbacks), I enjoyed Shadows 6 (Berkley Books, 1983), edited by Charles L. Grant, and Supernatural Sleuths (Roc, 1996), edited by Martin H. Greenberg…but with the caveat that both include some cringey sexism and ethnic stereotypes. Some of the new-to-me authors whose work I especially liked were Leslie A. Horvitz, Jack Ritchie, and Lee Killough.

The anthology Dark Fantasies (Legend, 1989), edited by Chris Morgan, evokes the gritty and despondent vibes of Thatcherite Britain, with contributions by Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Ian Watson, and others. In a lot of these tales, you’re not sure if something supernatural is happening or the characters have had a psychological breakdown, but either option is suitably unsettling.

Out of Tune, Book 2 (JournalStone, 2016), edited by Jonathan Maberry, is an anthology of horror and dark fantasy stories that each take inspiration from a spooky folk song or murder ballad. Books organized around a gimmick tend to be uneven in quality but this one, in my opinion, was consistently strong. Contributors include Cherie Priest, Delilah S. Dawson, and David J. Schow. Pretty sure I got this one at the NecronomiCon Providence vendor hall in 2017. The Young Master has graduated from “Paw Patrol” to “Wednesday Addams” (and not a moment too soon) so the stars may align for a family trip to NecronomiCon next August.

Just another Sunday afternoon in Northampton.

October Links Roundup: 78 Degrees

Happy Spooktober!

Pumpkins by Shane.

My inner 12-year-old would like to remind you that October 2 is the 571st birthday of King Richard III. Follow efforts to clear his name at The Missing Princes Project.

78 degrees is how hot it’s expected to be today in Northampton. Thanks, global warming! It’s also a reference to the godmother of the modern Tarot renaissance, Rachel Pollack, whose book 78 Degrees of Wisdom blended psychology, mysticism, and and literary iconography to inspire deeper relationships with the cards. At Xtra Magazine, Jude Doyle assesses Pollack’s legacy as a pioneer of trans-inclusive feminist spirituality:

Here, from Pollack’s self-designed deck the Shining Tribe, is her description of the Emperor: “A number of modern tarot decks have taken on the issue of patriarchal culture. They have tended to see the Emperor as a kind of villain, with gentle, childlike males as an alternative. Such images both belittle men and demonize them.” Instead, Pollack offered, women who drew the Emperor card might try to see themselves in it: “It might be a strong experience to imagine ourselves as the Emperor. What might it be like to contain and express such power and determination?”

The Hierophant is changed to the gender-neutral “Tradition,” and that is that. It seems to be as close as Pollack ever got to a direct rebuke of her peers’ transmisogyny. Yet that tiny tweak—don’t look for male power, look for your power—changes everything about how people see these cards, and therefore, how they think about gender and power when reading them…

…Her biggest contribution to women’s spirituality, The Body of the Goddess, waspublished in 1997. For a trans woman to write a book on Goddess worship in the mid-’90s was gutsy. For a trans woman to call that book The Body of the Goddessis fucking bonkers. It’s mind-blowing. It gets more so when you open the book and find that Pollack’s Goddess not only likes trans women; she is one herself.

Pollack doesn’t ignore menstruation or childbirth as aspects of female embodiment, but she doesn’t stop there either. She also locates trans and gender-fluid goddesses throughout mythology. Some—like the intersex goddess Cybele and her likely transfeminine priestesses, the Galli—are canonical. Others are creative interpretations of existing myth: Pollack notes that the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, is “created” when a male God named Ouranos loses his genitalia. Afterward, Ouranos essentially disappears, and a brand-new, very feminine Goddess arises to replace him.

Even trans guys get a turn. Pollack tells us that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy, was raised as a girl and was sometimes known as “the Womanly One” for his feminine looks and unusual kindness to women. In a 1995 essay for TransSisters, she gets even more detailed: Dionysus “went mad in adolescence,” was cured by Cybele, and went on to become an androgynous he/him whose myths portrayed him liberating people of all genders from the patriarchy. At rituals, Pollack tells us, “his male followers would dress as women, [and] his female followers would strap on large phalluses,” suggesting that liberation took a highly recognizable form.

Humorist Daniel Lavery is another of my favorite theologians, capering madly along that line between farce and horror. See, for instance, his questionnaire at The Stopgap, “Do You Think the Creator God Is Doing a Good Job, or Should Be Replaced by a Big Sheep or a Demiurge?” Bring back the formless void!

Gay provocateur playwright Joe Orton (1933-67) apparently had a sideline in altering library books to add satirical and bawdy images, then sneaking them back onto the shelves. You can see samples from the collection online. Not that I’m recommending you do this…

But there’s a hole just waiting to be filled.

“It’s both mystical and humiliating how your novel can know things before you yourself know them,” says the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Idlewild in this recent article at LitHub, “James Frankie Thomas on Discovering His Trans Identity While Writing Fiction”. Yeah, I know how you feel. Thomas describes a writing workshop, pre-transition, where the teacher and classmates criticized him for being coy about a self-insert character’s gender identity:

In all seriousness, I prided myself on my well-observed portrayal of teen girlhood in the early 2000s—specifically the way teen girls back then were consumed with the desire to be gay men. That was something you just never saw in fiction about teen girls, but Idlewild was going to change that. From the very first page, on which I introduced Fay as “a gay dude trapped in a female body,” I plumbed my memories of my own adolescence for universal truths about teen girlhood…

“Why not make it explicit from the start? What’s gained by withholding such important information about the character?”

And I wasn’t allowed to speak, so I just had to sit there and take it over and over. I was so flabbergasted, I bet you could see a giant cartoon exclamation point floating over my head. How had my entire workshop read my novel so wrong? Stranger still, how had they all read it wrong in the exact same way? There was only one possible explanation, something I’d long suspected but never dared to admit out loud: Everyone was stupid except me.

For what it’s worth, I also see myself in Richard Siken’s new poem “Pornography” in DIAGRAM Issue 23.4: “I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched.”

Perhaps this is related, perhaps not: In the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers Kristen Bottema-Beutel et al. question the objectivity of neurotypical researchers in their paper “Anti-ableism and scientific accuracy in autism research: a false dichotomy”.

Autism research focuses almost exclusively on autistic people’s perceived deficits relative to non-autistic people, and researchers rarely acknowledge that autistic people have strengths and abilities in addition to impairments, and exist in contexts that enable or disable functioning. Autistic people are often inaccurately described as missing core human capacities, and as incapable of social reciprocity or contributing to shared culture. Deficit construals persist even when autistic people show strengths in domains that would otherwise be considered positive, such as transparency, rationality, and morality.

The researchers argue that we can move away from these negative presumptions without sacrificing accuracy. They survey some now-debunked but still influential theories of autism’s causes, such as vaccines and insecure maternal attachment, which were considered objective but were demonstrably influenced by sociopolitical forces (e.g. backlash to mothers working outside the home). They also suggest that due to neurotypical researchers’ assumptions, common autistic behaviors like hand-flapping and echolalia have been dismissed as meaningless compulsions, when truly open-minded observation would reveal their communicative functions and nuances.

Speaking of repetition, this Missouri Review essay by Caitlin Horrocks, “Lullaby Machines”, reminded me of the hallucinatory early months of parenting the Young Master. Horrocks reminisces about trying to work, sleep, and stay sane while playing the same lullaby album 20,000 times. When Adam and I were reading up on parenting, one of the sleep-training books told us to keep a consistent routine. Baby Shane seemed to respond to this Spotify album of Celtic Harp Lullabies. Well, we played that thing on the iPad in his room every night for three or four years. We took it with us when we traveled. I used to joke that someday, as an adult, Shane would be at a harp concert with his boyfriend or girlfriend, “Woman of Ireland” would start playing, and he would have a Pavlovian urge to fall asleep and/or poop his pants.

Listen at your own risk.

Meta-Fiction’s Diminishing Returns

I like the midrashic commentary structure in fiction as much as anyone. Heck, I’m currently debating with my publisher how many different typefaces we can use in my next novel to set off the main first-person narrative from the invented “documents” fleshing out the story. Give me those footnotes that argue with the text; those Gothic framing devices beloved by Lovecraft and Hawthorne, pretending that the spooky tale was found in a genuine esoteric manuscript by the narrator. Done right, these tricks give pleasure because they re-create the complexity of real life, where one individual rarely has the complete perspective. As Aristotle observed in the Poetics, we enjoy the skill that went into a good imitation, even apart from its content.

However, I’ve been disappointed with a recent trend in structuring the multi-vocal or self-problematizing novel. Unlike the type of fiction described above, these books don’t reveal their layers of construction from the outset. Rather, what you get is an opening section that reads like a believable and emotionally engaging traditional narrative. Then, the next quarter or third of the book discloses that the story you just read is an inaccurate fiction by one of its characters, or by another character whom you haven’t yet met. Following this, you guessed it, there’s a third narrative undercutting the second one.

Some acclaimed books in this format include Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean, and Hernan Diaz’s Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife got so close to being my favorite novel-with-archives, until the very end, when a very minor character “revealed” that the entire murder mystery and its gay ex-Mormon protagonist were merely a literary device she’d created to frame her research about fundamentalist polygamist communities. It gave me real heartache to have this young man’s happy ending snatched away within a few pages after it occurred.

At the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own, the post “The Violence of Fate (or, How to Tell the True Kind of Lie)” by a contributor named Osteophage voices the question that troubled me after reading these novels:

“Why does it feel like fiction has broken its contract with us when it conveys, in-world, that the story never really happened?”

The feeling that a story made itself pointless, Osteophage muses, requires us to ask what the “point” of storytelling is. The post delves into a discussion of a narrative RPG (video game) where an important character is fated to die regardless of the choices you make. Playing this game, with this knowledge, gives Osteophage a kind of catharsis in facing the fact that sometimes we’re powerless to save those we care about. But this feels different from a narrative where the author is arbitrarily pulling strings to make an outcome seem predestined. The latter is a lazy notion of “Fate” while the former tells us something true and difficult about the human condition.

I think Osteophage is getting at something about why I felt cheated by those novels, despite appreciating them in other ways. In fact, it’s because the first sections were well-written and emotionally affecting, that I resented having the rug pulled out from under me afterward. Maybe this literary trend dovetails with our current era of “fake news” and the hermeneutic of suspicion-verging-on-paranoia that it breeds. As each successive narrative within a book is discarded in favor of a new one, a numb cynicism sets in. I’m never able to care as much about the subsequent characters and situations, as I did about the first set. The whole point of the book is that I’d be a fool to do so. Which, to me, is ultimately not a very interesting or helpful raison d’être for a novel.

September Links Roundup: Book Art and Backlash

The wheel of the year turns again. Back to school for Shane, end of school for me: I finished my coursework for Year Two in the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Now that I’m not receiving long assignments every month, I hope to spend more time playing with my collage art materials and exploring how to integrate poetry into visual media.

Poet L.I. Henley elegantly marries these genres at her blog Paper Dolls and Books. She showcases beautiful paper creations she’s made in response to contemporary poetry books like Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut and Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies. The dolls are jointed with fasteners, reminding me of the Commedia Dell’Arte paper marionnettes I made from one of those Dover Publications books in my childhood. (Probably this one.) In an interview with Cincinnati Review editor Bess Winter, “The Doll is the Third Space”, Henley shares why she assembles her dolls from multiple moving parts:

To make art that is not static, that can change even once it’s been made, means there is no being done with the thing; the life of the art piece extends beyond my handling of it. Photos, paintings, sculpture: all are fixed, and the only thing that changes, perhaps, is interpretation.

But poseable figures, especially ones with lots of joints, can change in shape, composition and mood. Even if a doll’s face is frozen in a smile, the implication of that smile changes when the legs are squat in a birthing position and the arms are reaching to the sky. Tilt the head a bit, and the smile is mischievous or coy. People who have purchased my dolls love taking photos of them in various poses and locations. They get to play and also collaborate in the artistic process.

On the Marsh Hawk Press blog, poet Elaine Equi gives prompts for getting back into the flow of writing after too much time away. Starting again at “Square One” can be intimidating, so she starts by guiding us not to fear the blank space. The essay itself is written somewhat like a poem, with stanza breaks and fragmentary phrases that enact the “room to breathe” that she recommends.

For me, an essential part of writing is to make a clearing,

first in my mind, then on the page,
so words can be seen, heard, taste-tested.

A clear ring like one of those pristine sound booths
that will allow the words to resonate.

White space is important.

What’s not said can be as important, possibly more important, than what is.

There are already so many texts, messages, words directed at us each day.
Every inch, every surface, seems covered in words.

But even words need room to breathe—and breed.

To de-clutter from words, Equi pivots to other senses. She might make or study visual art–a practice I find restorative, too. Listen to music, move your body, go for a walk. One of my hard-working poet friends fiercely defends the time spent lying on the couch, just thinking. That’s writing too!

PEN America is an organization that defends freedom of speech for writers worldwide. Their just-published report, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and Language of Harm”, studies the negative impact of social media outrage on writers’ ability to address controversial topics. Although the critics in question are often motivated by progressive ideals such as anti-racism, the report argues, our political discourse suffers when publishers over-react by canceling book contracts or revising books without the author’s permission. In many of the examples cited, the book’s problems were capable of other interpretations, or the author’s public behavior was too quickly conflated with the value of the book itself. Individual books and authors become scapegoats for problems with access to publishing as a whole.

There is no inherent contradiction between the belief that the publishing industry must transform to afford greater opportunities to authors from historically excluded backgrounds and the notion that writers must be unconstrained in their choice of subject matter. As PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel has said, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” The conflation of the need for wider literary representation and strict litmus tests for the legitimacy of authorial voice—two related but distinct issues—threatens to do a disservice to both.

This burden of representation can unexpectedly fall on members the very communities that movements like #OwnVoices seek to elevate, forcing them to reveal aspects of their identity that they might not have otherwise chosen to make public.

I thought that this lengthy report was a carefully researched and well-argued discussion of censorship from the Left. The cases studied were generally not analogous to J.K. Rowling’s sustained, intentional misuse of her public platform to attack a minority group. The living authors whose books were literally canceled (by publishers and distributors) shared most of the political values of their critics. Some were attacked for writing outside their own demographic, others for some ill-advised public statement that had nothing to do with the book’s contents. Media pile-ons don’t distinguish between honest errors and true prejudice pervading a text. The separation between author and text has been erased in our era of personal branding, leading to shallow ad hominem attacks on books that the critics may not even have read. Moreover, the overheated language of literary “harm” plays into the hands of right-wing government censors who crusade against LGBTQ-affirming and anti-racist literature.

Who needs an audience when you can enjoy your own artistry as much as this charming old gentleman? British character actor David Foster’s titular song from his 2015 one-man show is full of queeny double entendres, reminiscent of Quentin Crisp or John Inman. No, I’m not giving away the name; watch it for yourself.

Mr. Humphries made my college years more bearable.

The Poet Spiel: “Details You Just Can’t Live Without”

Friend of the blog The Poet Spiel tells me he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1996 and wrote this flash essay in 2000. What’s the secret of his immortality, I wonder? Could be his bawdy sense of humor!

 

Details You Just Can’t Live Without

Nurse Jonesy is rushed and red-faced as she wheels my gurney to surgery. She advises my mate Paul that I’ve been having these invasive procedures too frequently and I’m likely to become  increasingly vulnerable to stirring infections which naturally lie dormant in my system.

Sharp insistent pain is shooting into the middle of my back.

I’ve just agreed in writing I will not drive a car or sign any legal document for at least 48 hours.  The drugs I’ll be given will alter my judgment.

Assistants Heather and Tanya greet me like old friends in the sterile room, then drape me with  an x-ray apron and begin intravenous administration of 125mcg of Fentanyl and the hypnotic  sedative of 8mg Versed. As I drift into ‘twilight sleep’ they’ll be able to converse with me but I  won’t have a clue what I’m saying. I insist that they save the stent which is to be replaced in my  clogged bile duct. I’ve wanted to see how much crud it has collected after past procedures but somehow those loaded stents have always mysteriously disappeared.

A big color monitor hangs overhead as Doctor Lutz maneuvers his endoscope through my  innards. Though I can view the process, I won’t recall what I’ve seen during my conscious sedation—or so I’m told.

As the drugs engulf me I hear his voice—remotely—as if wind blows it toward and then away  from me. I can’t relate to the fact that he is talking to me. During past quarterly visits the women  have shown me the gross anti-gagging device which, at this moment, persecutes my lips as they  cram it against my gums. But this time I perceive it as a multifaceted stainless steel monstrosity and I believe they are pushing a shiny silver tractor down my throat. I resist vehemently. These veteran nurses strong-arm me back into working position.

From here on my awareness is nil as the side-view scope tube is advanced into the second portion of my duodenum where they’ll locate the biliary stent protruding from my papilla. This is the stent installed ten weeks ago when I was in horrendous pain. Debris occludes the stent just  as it has clogged each stent for the past 16 procedures. A tiny snare is skillfully manipulated to  remove the fouled stent.

It had been a close run with death—the outset of this awful process several years ago when we  learned my pancreas had curiously twisted and knotted my common bile duct and since then, this never-ending series of keeping my bile duct flowing freely.

The women manhandle me again as I struggle in discomfort. Doctor Lutz uses a biliary catheter  to cannulate my duct, then injects contrast iodine to obtain images that indicate a high-grade  stricture in the common hepatic duct just above the cystic duct. Now he passes a guidewire through my cannula, advances it through the stricture and on up into the intrahepatic ducts. The cannula is removed over the guide wire, over which he also passes a seven centimeter 10-French Teflon biliary stent. It’s placed above the stricture in good position and finally, aha! even in my  dumbed-down state, I see clear bile draining from the biliary stent at the conclusion of the  procedure.

As Heather wheels me to the front curb of the hospital, I am still under the influence of the  magic twilight of Versed, still babbling, making drug induced inappropriate comments about the  gross size of the endoscopic tube, revealing that I’d prefer to have my mate’s dick shoved down  my throat. She tolerates my rude remark as he pulls to the curb to load my dead weight into his  Pontiac.

As he drives me home. I realize they’ve not shown me the fouled stent. I become paranoid. I ask  him over and over again why he thinks those stents disappear. Does he suppose docs are pulling  the wool over my eyes? Maybe these gadgets don’t really fill up? Disability insurance money is easy money these days.

But what about my very real pain?

Between the hospital and the 45 miles to home Paul claims I ramble at least twenty times about  the size of that tube. Oh, and how the first thing I want after every procedure is a big steak  dinner with plenty of mashed potatoes.

He knows I’ll forget that wanting as soon as my head hits my bed.

But the best thing about these repeat procedures: I’m certifiably not responsible for what I’ve  said—or for what I say for the next forty-eight hours.

Hot Pink Heteropessimism

If anyone was primed to love the Barbie movie, it was me. But I didn’t.

Sure, I got a kick out of the dazzling pink re-creation of Barbie’s homes and outfits, and the jokes about obscure and ill-advised real Mattel dolls, like boob-growing Skipper and pregnant Midge. Somebody has to buy me a Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken, right now!

sugar daddy ken doll, mattel, barbie boyfriend

Transition goals!

I would have enjoyed “Barbie” far more if it hadn’t tried to say Something Serious About Feminism, because what it came up with was a very 1990s gender-binary utopia where all women are girlbosses and all men are idiots. That a film about male uselessness also has zero queer pairings, either in Barbie Land or the Real World, feels like both a failure of nerve and a bleaker assessment of gender relations than you’d expect from its relentlessly inspirational vibes.

Gender studies scholar Asa Seresin coined the term “Heteropessimism” in a 2019 article in The New Inquiry. Seresin defines it as a mode of discourse where male-female coupling is both inevitable and unsatisfying, even politically suspect. It masquerades as feminism without actually improving anything.

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

The movie’s Barbie Land is an alternate reality where Barbies have all the prestige, intelligence, and possessions. In the Barbies’ social life, the Kens are either mocked and excluded, or tolerated like endearing but none-too-bright puppies. When Barbie and Ken visit our world, she’s crestfallen that the dolls’ feminist fantasy world didn’t do more to inspire social change. Meanwhile, Ken discovers that real-world governments and corporations are run by men just as stupid as he is. He leads a short-lived patriarchal takeover of Barbie Land that mainly consists of bros drinking beer and explaining “The Godfather” to their girlfriends.

Notably, when the status quo is restored, the Kens’ legitimate grievances are still ridiculed. (Seresin: “A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power.”) With an obvious wink, the female president promises to allot them spaces in the halls of power…exactly to the extent that women have it in real life, i.e. not much. I guess what makes this a fantasy is that the men react with sentimental tears rather than incel violence.

Seresin suggests:

In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, an “anesthetic feeling”: “a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.” Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy delivers “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain.

If everything in Barbie Land is supposed to be a feminist role reversal of our flawed world, the Barbies’ indifference to their lovesick Kens seems to offer relief from the pervasive pain of coupling with a man who exercises power by not giving a shit about anyone. But if you ask me, a utopia full of man-babies is too much like the world we’re trying to leave behind.

At our trans men’s support group last weekend, we read aloud some passages from the 1995 memoir-in-essays S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt, the recently deceased lesbian poet and partner of Leslie Feinberg. In one piece, Pratt mused about how it felt patronizing when a man opened a door for her, but exciting when a butch woman did it. One scenario carried the assumption of superior male strength, the other had the potential for playing with gender roles between equals. Coming from a Southern feminine upbringing, in her generation, Pratt must have seen a lot of chivalry-as-patriarchy. But I was like, I’d be thrilled if the average young man today opened a door for anybody. Modern heteropessimism is at least as much a reaction against the kind of men who make up the essay collection The Bastard on the Couch–educated Gen-X and millennial guys who feel infantilized by their wives’ competence, and have decided to lean into the privileges of being useless.

There have been several think pieces about queer-coded elements of “Barbie” but I’m tired of settling for that. See also, “Across the Spider-Verse” and every other superhero movie that appropriates the emotional arc and metaphor of being closeted. Straight storylines with a gay aesthetic are as old as Puccini. It’s hard to beat Madame Butterfly for heteropessimism! The effeminacy of the Ken doll is so well-known that Autostraddle ran a humor piece “75 Lesbian Ken Dolls, Ranked by Lesbianism” when Mattel redesigned the doll in 2017 with a slimmer, more androgynous look. In the Barbie movie, though, this effeminacy is only played for laughs, as proof of the Kens’ immaturity and inferiority. It was hard to enjoy this movie because it would have given me massive dysphoria not too many years ago. Dysphoria that didn’t have a name for itself, other than “there’s no place in the world for the thing that I am.”

I made Stylin’ Stripes Ken my Facebook profile picture the year before I came out as nonbinary.

Beachy Tropical Shirt Ken is the 25-year-old trans guy that all of us dad bods with T-induced hair loss are sooo jealous of.