My Body, Your Body /
By: Sydney Moyers
There's nothing quite alluring as the sensation of your soft, pale skin. Your presence stirs up a sense of calmness over my body. You are an extension of myself, and when I am touching you we merge together. There is this worldly desire for penetration, and the occurrence of pressing lips together is taken for granted. I like the way our tongues fight, and I want to be absorbed. In my mind, you have built a house. But apparently that's not enough for me. If I could teleport, I'd choose your soft stomach, with the constellation like freckles. The incredible phenomenon of kissing your neck, feeling your hair, and embracing your smell is like ecstasy. I'm a goddamn addict.
‘The Last Virgin at Sarah Lawrence’- A Comprehensive Review of Bottoms /
By Jai Deans
After weeks and weeks of anticipation and careful planning, my newfound college friend and I went to go see the smash hit (no pun intended) queer teen movie Bottoms. One Friday morning in September, we took the bus to the East Towne Mall and explored, making sure to cultivate the quintessential lesbian shopping experience. We presented our perforated punch cards to aloof Spencer’s employees to claim our free septum jewelry, shopped around Barnes and Noble in search of the best edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and even gorged on all you can eat pasta at Olive Garden. Despite all of our mall time fun, right at 7:30 we made sure we were sitting in our seats at the Flix Brewhouse theater, patiently waiting for Ayo Edebri and Rachel Sennott donning multicolored rugby shirts to appear on the screen.
The movie started and I was immediately enthralled and slightly confused. Right out the gate, I laughed at all of the clever jokes augmented by the incredibly strong acting, but I also had a weird feeling in my stomach. I was loving the movie, but something about it made me feel weird and even mildly uncomfortable and I couldn't understand why. The film had everything I love to see in the media I consume: campiness, grim humor, even a touch of surrealism, so why was it that it made me feel so off? I couldn’t figure it out at first, but eventually it clicked.
Bottoms made me feel vulnerable. It made me feel exposed.
Throughout the film, Josie, the protagonist of the movie played by Ayo Edebri, openly talks about girls, sex, and being gay in a way that is rarely seen in film. As the film went on and on, I slowly realized that I just wasn’t used to seeing characters like the ones depicted in the movie. I wasn’t used to seeing queer characters say crass and out of pocket things. And I definitely wasn't used to seeing queer characters, specifically lesbians, talk about sex in the way we’ve seen straight film characters talk for years. Watching Josie as she talked about “playing the long game” with her love interest, Isabel, felt like looking in a mirror. She’s just like me: an awkward, queer black girl with awkward queer black rizz. I saw so many parts of myself in her. She’s goodhearted, but also really messy. She’s funny and kind, but also a bit of a liar.
Josie and the other queer teens in the movie are the perfect anthesis to the idea of “good” queer representation. Similar to the straight teens we’ve seen in cinemas for decades, the teens in Bottoms don’t care about being perfect or even good people. They’re just normal teens who often make morally questionable decisions to get what they want, with what they want being popularity, intimacy, and sex, specifically sex with girls. Josie and PJ (the co-protagonist played by Rachel Sennott) are a breath of fresh air in the current age of perfect, overly-sanitized queer characters. Dissimilar to many gay characters we see in the media today, Josie and PJ are perfectly ok with being crude and unlikeable, especially to straight people. Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman, the writers of Bottoms, created a film that humanizes gay people, finally appeals solely to queer audiences and doesn't worry about depicting gay characters for the straight audience. Josie and PJ don’t play opposite any straight protagonist. They aren’t the gay best friend to any straight teen. They aren’t especially witty, sassy, or ambitious. They’re just gay (and honestly pretty lame). Also, unlike other classic LGBTQ films, such as But I’m a Cheerleader or Brokeback Mountain, homophobia is not central to the story in Bottoms, but rather a comical aside that serves as the punchline to some jokes within the broader narrative. Josie, PJ, and the other teens in Bottoms don’t provide the straight audience with some sort of insight into how to be a better ally. They just exist.
In short, to all my LGBTQ folks (and even my straight allies), go see this movie and see what it means to be messy, horny, and even a little bit problematic. Revel in Josie and PJ’s imperfections, laugh at their out of pocket jokes, and most importantly learn to be okay with being imperfect.
With Liberty, and Justice, for Guns and Men. /
by Charlene Huynh
Whenever late January rolls around, I am reminded of Tết (also known as Lunar New Year)–not because I particularly remember that it’s around the corner, but because my family’s week-long preparations are impossible to ignore. Tết instantly evokes memories of having a large family reunion at my grandparents’ house with tons of food, playing games with my siblings and cousins, lighting ear-deafening firecrackers in the garden, and walking to Vietnam Town to celebrate in our áo dài (a traditional Vietnamese garment, typically worn during special occasions), the firecracker smoke polluting the air above us.
This year, however, I was reminded of something else. On January 21–Lunar New Year’s Eve–a gunman opened fire in a dance studio in Monterey Park, California, killing ten and wounding ten others. Monterey Park is known as the first Asian ethnoburb, an unassimilated, suburban ethnic enclave, with 65% of the population being of Asian descent. Two days later, in Half Moon Bay, California, seven farm workers who were Chinese and Mexican immigrants were killed by another gunman. These two shootings come nearly a year after the Atlanta spa shootings, when two Asian-owned spas were targeted, killing seven women and one man. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent. The perpetrator, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, was being treated for having a “sex addiction” and was a customer at these parlors. He saw the workers as sexually tempting, ultimately motivating him to target them in order to “eliminate the temptations” and “help” others dealing with sex addiction.
As I sat reading the news in my college apartment in Wisconsin, unable to participate in Tết celebrations this year, I was reminded of the trauma the Asian American community has suffered, and the multidimensional layers of trauma we face as diasporic peoples. I assumed that the perpetrator was a sinophobic white man committing a hate crime, drawing from the well-known patterns of mass shootings in the United States. Surprisingly, both of the shooters were older, Asian men. Many on the internet began to suspect that it couldn’t be a hate crime if the shootings were Asian on Asian violence, misinterpreting the politics of identity and racism to assuage the gravity of the situation. However, as the motives of the two shooters remain unknown, for now, one thing is for sure: gun violence is a symptom of American culture, built upon white supremacy, colonial violence, and patriarchy.
Since the conception of North America as a European “discovery,” violence has been a foundational component of the colonial quest of the ‘New World,’ which is now known as the United States of America. In 1585, English colonists attempted to settle in territory they called Roanoke–in present-day North Carolina–where several Native tribes resided; as a result of mistrust, the colonists burned the surrounding villages and decapitated the chief. In addition to colonial atrocities, disease and famine would exterminate around 90% of the existing Native population, setting the stage for colonial and imperial violence to shape the rest of the historical development of the colonies and the eventual conception of America as a nation.
Additionally, Duke University Professor of Law Darrell Miller said at a Johns Hopkins panel discussion that "There is a long tradition, going back to the slave codes, of disarming free Blacks and enslaved persons. But equally, there is a long tradition of whites using private personal arms to act as privatized police of Black persons and communities of color in the slave patrol." In fact, a study found a positive correlation between the percentage of enslaved persons in a U.S. county in 1860 and the rate of gun ownership in the county today.
Perhaps the most obvious and encompassing example today is the excessive presence of law enforcement and the military. President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, allocating $816.7 billion to the Defense Department–an 8% increase from fiscal year 2022–and Customs and Border Patrol were given $17.5 billion. Despite defunding claims following the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, ABC Owned Television Stations found that in more than 100 cities and counties, 83% spent at least 2% more on police budgets in 2022 than in 2019; in 49 of these cities or counties, police funding increased by more than 10%.
It has been made clear throughout history that neither Democrats or Republicans are willing to decrease state-sponsored violence and give power back to our communities. How can we expect our elected officials to seriously do something about the drastic increase in gun violence nationwide and protect our schools, as well as BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ communities, when they are the ones perpetuating and reinforcing the culture of gun violence in the first place?
Intertwined with the issue of gun violence and militarism is patriarchy. 98 percent of mass shooters are men, and 90 percent of all murders worldwide were committed by men. The socialization and cultural upbringing that men are subject to work to reinforce and reproduce the patriarchal paradigm that men must be strong and dominating. Guns and violence represent an outlet for men to embody their masculinity and project their bottled up emotions and convictions onto scapegoats of their pain–namely, women, BIPOC, and queer folks. The Atlanta spa shootings are a clear example of patriarchal violence against women, exposing the deep-seated fetishization and racial sexualization of Asian women, mirroring the histories of sexual imperialism by the US military.
The entire history of the New World and the United States embodies a collective trauma faced by marginalized communities who were and are exploited, assaulted, killed, and othered. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asian American community felt the full effects of the historical roots of racism, as anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 339% in 2021 compared to in 2020, exposing the racism-fueled narrative propagated by former President Donald Trump and the GOP. With our political leaders touting about the “China virus,” “Kung flu,” alongside other sinophobic claims, it’s no wonder that over half of Asian Americans said they often or sometimes feel unsafe in public because of their race or ethnicity.
I remember the day my grandpa, who usually takes walks around the neighborhood, said that he was scared to go outside because he feared getting attacked. My mom, while at Walgreens, overheard employees eyeing her and whispering about “how all the Asians are hoarding all the toilet paper.” My cousins, sister, and I also had an encounter at the store, where we received suspicious looks from someone, who proceeded to go to the self-checkout register furthest away from us. As someone who has always felt othered because of my race, the pandemic served as a reminder of the fact that people like me are unwanted here (echoing the sentiments of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as a series of naturalization acts and immigration quotas) and that we will never be enough no matter how assimilated we are–we are the undesirables of America.
As I reflect upon the violence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Lunar New Year shootings, I understand now, more than ever, the implications of collective trauma, how it impacts a community’s responses to traumatic events, and how it affects the way our collective bodies move through life and the world around us. As the neverending slews of racist policies and attitudes invade the well-being of our communities, I wonder when–and if–we will ever be able to heal from these eternal wounds. Unless we change the whole system as it is, the systemic issues plaguing the country will not be solved. We can no longer depend on the government to help us. We must build back and strengthen our communities and relationships together, with love and compassion, one step at a time.
The Ability to Shapeshift /
by Maddy Hu
I am a bug. I am me. I am nothing. I am an ocean. I am everything.
When I was younger I thought of shapeshifting as a superpower—something I saw only on television and in movies. Turns out, I could do it all along. But not in the ways my 9-year-old self thought.
I first took note of my ability when I lived exclusively with white people for the first time. They would leave their random junk in the living room and kitchen: tacky artwork, a giant coke bottle, random tv show paraphernalia. They would shove their dirty dishes and messes into every nook and cranny that they could. They would be everywhere, taking up space wherever they could. They took up so much. They left me with nothing. I transformed into a fruit fly. A fly on the wall in my home that did not feel like home. Tip-toeing around—I felt like I could not exist in the same space as them because their sheer presence was too massive, too overwhelming.There was not enough oxygen for the both of us. It became so daunting that eventually I dared to not enter. I did not always want to hold my breath. I did not want to exist only in these narrow windows which they permitted. Even though I was a fly, did I not deserve space too? I’m still here! Don’t you see me? I ended up spending a lot of time in my room. It was safer. It was better. When I did dare to enter their space, my presence immediately contrasted theirs, and I was too aware of my fly body, my beady eyes, my fluttering wings. Can I make myself smaller and smaller? Let me hold my breath a little longer. Let me be a little smaller. Living with them for so long, I forgot how to breathe. I could not tell you what it was like to fill your lungs to the fullest nor how to exhale without worry. I could not exist. Not in the way I desired.
I moved out after a year. They did not.
Over the summer I worked at a job alongside a white male intern. His name was Freddy, and sure he was nice, but I felt forced to shapeshift nonetheless. I became bacteria. He talked over me because he was more intelligent, his ideas were more formulated, and his voice more commanding. I could not even get a word in at times, and I forgot that they did not see me. I tried to shout and scream: “I’m here too!” but how could I? I was a mere speck on the table. He spoke down to me like when you are scolding a dog but trying to retain your composure. Like I had peed inside the house or chewed up his favorite leather belt. Oh, silly dog, you do not know as humans do. Oh, foolish dog, you are so silly. No thought behind those big eyes of you dear. He would be included in meetings and events because “we want you, Freddy!” I sat in the next room—listening. Huh. Maybe they forgot that I was here. Maybe, I need to shout a little louder. Wave my hands around like a madman. Would that work? Would you see me then? He over-explained things like the partisan primary—telling me that if I did not know which candidate was more qualified, I should vote for the “minority.” As he was telling me this, I could not help but laugh. He did not understand. He went on to say that his political science professor told him this. I could only laugh.
He stayed for an extra two months. I did not.