‘Body’ and I share a tumultuous relationship. As a writer, I savor the opportunities to build a character’s internal world and develop how they move about and engage in their external environments. As a poet, I delight in exploring how the sensory feelings and imagination’s workings can be captured in words. As an artist, I play with multifarious versions of the ‘human body’ and experiment with the lengths to which a ‘human form’ can be stretched and still be recognizable as such. In my work, I perceive of ‘body’ as an abstract concept with no rules anchoring it to any one kind of treatment. In my life, conversely, I struggle with understanding ‘body’ as a concept that is not governed by rigid rules; a concept that cannot be cut up and separated into ‘right bodies’ and ‘wrong bodies’, ‘good bodies’ and ‘bad bodies’.

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As a daughter of 2000s pop culture, I was raised on messages that thinness, tallness and blondeness were the factors of a ‘correct’ physical body, and as a product of a highly competitive private school, I was conditioned to believe that if a mental body did not possess intelligence in every academic subject, it was worthless. ‘Body’ and ‘perfection’ have been intertwined with one another to me, since the very first independent thoughts I can remember having about my own body – that I was too fat and not smart enough.

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Over the course of my childhood, I fought to achieve (what I had been taught was) a perfect mind and a perfect appearance. As a budding adult – having reaped the benefits that come with and endangered my mental and physical healths to upkeep a ‘skilled mind’ and an ‘attractive appearance’, for the last almost decade – I have begun questioning whether any of it even matters anyway? Conflating body and perfection, tethers body to influence, obedience and dependence; a ‘perfect’ physical or mental body, does not belong to the human, but to the authorities that determined the criteria of ‘perfection’. My relationship to this fact, whether I am accepting of my appearance’s and mind’s detachment from my autonomy, has started to shift. I don’t think starving, stressing and killing my body to be what a non-me entity had engrained in my developing conscience it should be, are unworthy of critical thinking, as I had blindly accepted all throughout my adolescence. Is having a ‘perfect’ body actually what I want my body to be?

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Elizabeth d’Espérance’s crisis caused by the presence of the presence ‘Anna’, embodied my working through of my relationship to my physical and mental bodies. Elizabeth understands Anna as at the same time, herself and not herself. Anna is by Elizabeth’s accounts, a superior ‘woman’ than she is – the audience witnessing the phenomenon like and care about Anna more than Elizabeth, and moreover, Elizabeth likes and is pulled to care more about the spectre than herself as well. She suffers a crisis of identity when Anna begins to intertwine herself with the medium – d’ Espérance loses the ability to distinguish between her body and the spectre’s body, becoming so bound up in the trial of determining what is reality and what can be trusted as a signifier of reality. For me, there is a catharsis to Elizabeth’s trying to differentiate between where she ends, and Anna begins. The coalescent being that is Elizabeth-Anna is like me, I am ‘perfect’ Caitlin-and real Caitlin, or ‘for show’ Caitlin-and self Caitlin. As Elizabeth is working forwards, trying to disentangle Anna from her to separate her true self from this spectre that is also, in some way her, I am working backwards, attempting to develop a true Caitlin that is unattached to the Caitlin that I have been performing as, unwilling to question whether there is a me beneath the me that not-me developed. Seeing articulated, the conflict between finding and protecting one’s real self, put into focus and fleshed out in all of its difficulty and pain my own process of revaluating my relationship to my body and who/what is in control of it.

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My sorting through in order to know my self-identity was externalized in Chapter XXIV of d’Espérance’s Shadowland, and consequently such enabled me to understand the operation more clearly and grasp the emotional toil I was experiencing because of it but could not diagnose. A thinking of one’s body and its relation to external powers and forces that is worlds away from d’ Espérance’s but had an equally profound affect on me, was Mary Oliver’s in “Sleeping in the Forest”. As d’Espérance and I – have been gradually learning to – believe, the permeability of the body is problematic, as it allows outside entities into it that can cause adverse affects on the body’s host; Oliver, assumes the inverse viewpoint, as to her, the body’s permeability is what allows its host to become one with its environment (and that that is a positive thing to occur). As I have discussed, I do not think favourably of the body becoming intertwined with any external entity; from my personal experience, that very phenomenon has caused me an unbearable amount of physical and mental suffering – my internalization of beauty, caused me to deprive and overwork my (physical) body and fill my mind with negativity, and of intelligence, to neglect myself physically and overexert myself mentally.

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In my almost two decades of living, I have not once been positively affected by any of the times I melded myself with any of my environments. From how Oliver’s speaker expresses her ‘becoming one’ with nature – an enlightening, spiritual, ‘bigger than herself’ experience – I can read between the lines, and make out that she too, has had negative experiences of attempting to be human environments. There is a liberation and a salvation to “Sleeping in a Forest”: the poet’s speaker is piece by piece, fading into the ecosystem she is inhabiting, and she expresses a great gratitude that the ecosystem’s players are taking her. The want to be absorbed by and made into nature, is not an urge that develops from a positive experience possessing a body. I take away from the poem, that becoming one with nature, was the first time the speaker had felt happiness and peace – it took her physical body sinking into the earth and the sea, and her mental body intermingling with the sky, that she felt at last, at ease. In giving up her body to nature, in being swallowed up by and made apart of the body of nature, Oliver’s speaker feels like they have become their true self. While I do not think I am at a stage of identity-determination that my body’s embracing its permeability would be a freeing rather than a destructive choice to make, “Sleeping in a Forest” made me believe that some environments may aid in discovering where one’s body’s host is most comfortable being a body. Perhaps later on in my life, I may experience a similarly transformative experience, be it in nature or maybe even a healing human environment.

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It is not lost on me, that of the two most impactful texts on my conception of ‘body’, one was firmly planted in the spiritual (abstract, metaphysical), and the other, the physical (corporeal, biological). Going into ‘Writing the Body’ with my concept of ‘body’ in such an insecure and confusing place, I was worried that that vulnerability would lead it to being morphed into a shape that would cause me a kind of physical and mental anguish that I had yet to experience. As someone with an extremely permeable body, other concepts that I have been re-examining my relation to over the last few years, have experienced that distortion due to some of the academic environments I have inhabited. Though exploring the body in two dissimilar channels – one as tied to the supernatural and one as linked to nature – d’Espérance and Oliver, speak of the body’s relationship to the spiritual and to the physical in the terms which I think of them.

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Feeling understood, and having my thoughts one, opened up in depth (as “Shall I be ‘Anna’ or ‘Anna’ be I?” of Shadowland did) and then, opened up in scope (as “Sleeping in the Forest” did), genuinely allowed me to grow, rather than feeling trampled on and having my thoughts, bent into a shape which I don’t recognize, a shape that pricks and cuts, as I have experienced in the past. While ‘body’ and I still have a great deal of growing and learning ahead of us – a journey that will not be without complicated and sore moments – I have emerged more hopeful from ‘Writing the Body’ that we will someday get along on an intimate, personal level, than I was when I entered into it.

​

Readings Cited

Shadow Land: or, Light from the Other Side by Elizabeth d’Espérance

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

 

- A Few Hours After the Fall -

The clock reads 12:00 A.M. and yet the sky is creamy pink. My three best friends, Meg, Syd, and Kate, and I are the only ones on the tennis court. Tears are wet on my cheeks as I look out over the Arctic Ocean on the top deck of the Disney “Magic” – a fifteen-floor cruise ship sailing from Norway to London in eleven days. At blame for my tears is my fourth best friend, Eve.

​

Kate wraps her arms around my shoulders and I squint to see the colours above the horizon – soft orange, periwinkle, powder blue. Meg and Syd play twinkly, sugary pop music at maximum volume and dance as if they were in their bedrooms; a second attempt at cheering me up after rubbing my back and holding me for hours in an empty stairway had not helped.

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To surprise Eve after I spent the day frolicking around a fairytale-land in Kristiansand, Norway with my mother and figuring out how much I loved Eve, I perfected the ice cream cone she fixed as I studied her on the first night that we met. Three thick swirls of vanilla in a waffle cone. It was sweet and faintly spicy.

Wearing an ear-to-ear smile and light blush, I ran up to her in the pre-teen club we had met but she was with two older girls – strangers. I tapped her shoulder and when she turned to face me her eyes were empty, as if she had never seen me before. Scowling, she mumbled, “I don’t eat ice cream,” and passed me by, hand-in-hand with the two older girls.

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It felt like all the air had been knocked out of my lungs. Burning tears welled in my eyes and poured down my face, stinging my cheeks. This feeling is one that many girls know well as they are growing up.

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How girls are mean can be like an art, and the scars that their wounds leave can last forever. In one study thirty-nine fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old girls at an all-girls school were asked to write a letter addressed to their best friend sharing a situation that happened to them or that they witnessed of one or a number of girls inflicting hurt on another girl. The letters showed several types of conflict weaponized by the teen girls but the girls’ favourites were calculated and relational – gossiping, making up lies, excluding, neglecting and ignoring.1 These practices kindle complex, multifaceted hurts and permit girls to act on problematic feelings of other girls without breaking acceptable girlhood.2 Such guileful practices cause psychological effects in the teen- or tween-age girl victim: a kind of confusion that disorients the worldview that that girl has built over time and an emotional pain that feels to be unending and incurable to the victim.3 Since the valuation of trust is interwoven in a girl’s sense of self and her connectedness with others in the worlds that she lives in, betrayal is a powerful weapon that impacts her core.4 And it can be hid behind to keep a true problem from a victim.5

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Meg, Syd, and Kate joined me where I was left. I fought whimpers and sobs to voice the tragedy that took place. I could give them no answers. Nor any words more than a few sentences repeated back-and-forth. My dropped stomach felt worsened by the club’s cherry-red pleather couches and fluorescent overhead lights. In the shaken up state that Eve left me, I could barely name nausea as one of my afflictions. Holding tightly onto one of my best friends’ arms to keep from collapsing to the ground, I gave wide, needy eyes to Eve anytime she was near, begging for the girl that I knew to flicker back, if for a second. I tried to catch whether she too was stealing lucky glances. To her, it was as if we were perfect strangers.

 

- A Day Before the Fall -

My heartbeat thumped in my ears as the clock struck 6:00 P.M. on the second day of our trip. I hugged my mother before rushing away from Lumiere’s where we were supposed to be having dinner. My mother promised she was okay with speaking to the families we shared a table with, for she saw my smile more in the last twenty-four hours than in many weeks before. Dozens of butterflies flapped in my stomach as I ran down the steps of the ship’s grand staircase to the second floor where Eve waited for me. Golden light from the second floor’s scattered sconces gave the floor a dreamy glow. I paused before descending the last step, wishing her gaze would flicker up to meet mine. It did, then drifted down my tight, dark blue dress, making my cheeks blush. I was warm and pink – her lips smirked and her brown eyes shone with mischief – as we rode up in the elevator to the arcade on the fifteenth floor. She put her hand in mine, filling it with little flames. Eve lead me where she wanted.

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Before saying goodnight the evening prior, she invited just me to sneak away with her when everyone we knew would be at dinner with their families. On that evening prior, the night air enchanted and the stars watched the five of us, Meg (Pennsylvania), Sydney (Ohio), Kate (West Virginia), Eve (Edinburgh), and Caitlin (Toronto), anticipating the memories our happy group could make. We met at the Disney Magic’s club for pre-teens and chose to be best friends because we all laughed at Eve’s dirty jokes. The five of us gathered around the glistening soft-serve ice cream machine on the ship’s fifteenth floor like it was a ritual. Warmth spread across my cheeks as I studied Eve: her strong arms cranking three swirls of vanilla into a waffle cone, her lips parted in concentration, the night air ruffling her dark hair and making her blink more times than she would like. To lick her ice cream she leaned back against the soft-serve machine, her right denim-clad leg propped up against the wall. My heart raced listening to her speak of skipping classes, sneaking around her hometown at night with the girls she trusted, and her plans to run away once she found somebody to be her partner in crime. To act out what boys back in her hometown were like, she wrapped her arm around my waist. Where her skin touched the lace of my dress pinpricks of heat showed themselves. Anytime she laughed it sounded like a melody. Anytime her brown eyes spotted with golden twinkles and dopey smile locked on me my heart sighed and the world seemed okay.

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Navigating a path through girlhood is tricky, just as finding a compass that feels right. In the twenty-first century, in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, the “restrictive and regulatory [demand of] hypersexualized femininity” disproves the script that girls have the choice, freedom and autonomy that boys do while growing up.6 A demand for particular physical (ex. luscious makeup and hair, revealing clothing) and personality traits (flirtatiousness, playfulness, obedience), mannerisms (fawning over, touching, and listening to boys), and actions (agreeing to sexual acts with boys and competing with other girls for their praise) to be upheld that keeps a girl in line and punishes those girls that do not comply with serving as a commodity.7 Once a girl recognizes this demand, she can make a “rupture” in or a “line of flight” from the web of  heteronormative rules for femininity, masculinity and sexuality she was born into.8 “Heteronormative” names the embedded belief “ that only heterosexual relationships are normal or right and that men and women have naturally different roles.”9

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By the time that I met her Eve had been on her own path of a “line of flight” for a few years. At eight she chose to be rough, aggressive and slightly crass to stop boys from belittling her; by ten she swore off dresses and skirts because she found them “too girly;” and since twelve, she had been talking girls in her year at Catholic school that had faraway stares into joining her wanderings around town when almost everyone else was asleep. But all this distressed her for she was scared her grandmother and her mother ever saw her as a disappointment. Growing up I found safety in traditional femininity. Pink, make-up, and ruffly, flowery and sparkly skirts and dresses were homey. Disney princesses and popstars understood my heart and dreams. Playing games of pretend-cooking and -mothering felt right to me. But once my body developed into a woman’s body at the age of nine, and the boys in my grade started to take joy in mocking the size of my chest and hips and sharing the violent sexual things that they would do to me with each other, I hoped to gain the strength to make a little “rupture” one day.

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To my delight, on this evening the arcade was empty – a playground made for the two of us. Bright lights from the games sparkled like gum drops and their high-pitched noises formed a symphony swirling around Eve and me. We played air hockey – adrenaline pulsing up and down my body as I fought to win. To even the score she tricked me into losing Guitar Hero by not teaching me how to operate its controller – my playful shouts spilling over her pixie giggles.

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Later, she confided in me that her mother had passed away a few years before, that the two of them did not share a good relationship and that she missed her more every day. I spoke about the darkness inside me that seeped out each time I pushed it down and my fears of disappointing my parents and teachers if it became too strong to fight. She gifted one earphone to me and placed a second in her ear. We sat on the arcade’s steps listening to songs shouting about running away and starting all over with the love of one’s life.

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The young punks 5 Seconds of Summer sang,

She ran away to chase her dreams

And they said she wouldn't make it far

She took a chance and packed her bags

She left town and didn't look back

So tired of wishing on the stars.”10

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Looking up from the wooden planks of the fifteenth-floor, comets of gleaming light from the evening sun reflected in Eve's eyes. The chill of the air dusted the apples of her cheeks pink. I nestled my left knee into the crook of her right knee, and my heart ballooned with the longing to lace my fingers with hers. Just then I noted how red and glossy her lips were – like she had sucked for hours on a never-ending cherry lollipop.

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So save me from who I'm supposed to be

Don't wanna be a victim of authority

I'll always be a part of the minority,11

cut a path in the still Arctic sky.

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Wishing for this evening to be a vignette from a dream, I announced it was time for me to be returning to me and my mother’s cabin until the next morning. “Goodbye,” I sung sweetly, tip-toeing away from her. “I’m not leaving you,” she yelled, steady as a stone. I paused – her romantic declaration igniting hundreds of little fires in my chest cavity. Her words dissolved me into a weepy mess.

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Even at the time, Eve and I seemed to be a story being written, delicately. The middle of a story about two sapphic subjects reveals a truth about their desires more wholly than where the subjects end up at the conclusion.12 Linearity belongs to the believers of heteronormativity and in stories of sapphic subjects, conclusions are traditionally molded by that philosophy’s expectations and pressures.13 At this time in our story, our affection for each other felt like romance. Even like…true love?

 

- Twelve Hours Before the Fall -

When I awoke the next morning my heart was aflutter. I loved my childhood best friend Mandy like a sister, and I had fallen in love as Juliet had with Romeo once before – with the boy that was my school’s star athlete. My feelings for Eve made me breathless and panicked – not at all like sisterly love. Yet, I could not easily name my feelings for Eve as love as I could with the boy from back home. No one at my suburban private school spoke about girls liking girls and boys liking boys. On Tumblr, where I hid for candied hours scrolling through blogs with names like “grungeprincess,” “badgirlreputation” and “runawaybaby,” two girls slept in one tiny bed, held hands, and pressed glossed lips to each others’ noses, ears, cheeks and mouths.

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Searching up “2014 grunge” on Tumblr brings up two kinds of photographs that have two girls captured in the frame (and are overwhelmingly taken at night). The first features girls putting make-up on right beside each other,14 pushing each other around in shopping carts,15 helping one another over fences,16 sneaking away to an empty parking lot,17 and drinking and smoking on swing sets and in playgrounds.18 Each, which cradle a budding sweetness too fragile to be between friends, on the cusp of blossoming, that was familiar to times in my past. The second displays girls intertwining fishnet-stockinged legs,19 holding hands in matching all-black outfits,20 centimetres apart, lighting each other’s cigarettes or blowing smoke into each other’s mouths,21 performing coquettish public acts together,22 and kissing, with self-manicured hands cupped around faces.23 All of which fizzled with electric pulses that shot through my laptop screen into my heart and flushed my cheeks a burning scarlet-red.

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The deviance and secrecy of these images tasted delicious and intoxicated my pre-teen self. I knew that I wanted to be one of the girls in the frame – so connected to another girl, so close to her body – if  just for a few seconds. Growing up, I adored the starlets of the Disney Channel. As I got older, I wondered if I wished to be them or to be as close with and to them as the girls in the Tumblr pictures.

​

The Magic arrived in the idyllic city of Kristiansand, Norway, and a soft sun sat in the powder blue sky. Me and my mother’s destination for that day was the whimsical woodland-village of Hakkebakkeskogen inside of the Dyreparken amusement park. I skipped from the port where we disembarked to Dyreparken’s glimmering ticket booth in the shape of a castle. My heart had wings carrying me through the cobblestone streets of lands built to match Norwegian children’s storybooks. Past the gates of Hakkebakkeskogen, fluffy trees kissed with light pink, purple, and orange flowers spread out for miles in each direction. Giant toadstool mushroom sculptures sprouted up all over the place, markers for how deep a traveller was lost in Thorbjørn Egner’s world of human-like garden animals.

​

What I did not know but that I could feel, is that it is easier to explain the reasons why we fear someone or something than it is for those why we love, and likewise, to justify our fears than it is our loves.24 Why somebody loves their beloved depends on the history of the one who loves,25 and Eve listened to my messy tries of speaking what was darkest inside of me and did not throw blame, she picked up the little things of those whom she cared for and tried to understand their meanings, and her vulnerability was the rawest it could be. But fear is like love in this sense.26 I was scared of what would happen if I aligned myself as a girl that saw girls like only boys were supposed to. Would my best girl friends begin to hate me? Would the teachers at my school think that this was wrong, and would they stop seeing me as golden?

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As me and my mother walked, clusters of butterflies flitted through the air and bluebirds flew from one tree branch to the next. The two of us took photos with actors dressed up as mice baking bread, foxes playing fiddles, rabbits knitting sweaters, bears gardening vegetables, and families of frogs eating at the dining table. We rode a little train around a rickety track that looked like a toy. We purchased frosted sweets from white-wooden, eighteenth-century cottages overhung with foliage. I mapped out our path with the sureness that comes with having somebody in the world that is all yours.

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Somebody who loves a beloved might not be fully aware of the reasons why they do, making the love feel like magic –27 Eve so spellbound me that I could not grasp exactly why she drew me in and she struck a chord in my heart that had never before been touched. At the end of the day, the reason why we love is that we think that love to be worthwhile.28 When it came to my hometown’s star athlete I would be handed a gold star for Prince Charming and perfect girlhood if he loved me back. While Eve gave me the chance of a new life.

​

I could not wait to return to her. I became spinny over the chance that she thought about me, wondered what I was up to, and wished that I was by her side instead. I felt like a princess running around a storybook and that my life itself became a fairytale with a happy ending.

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With my head caught up in the dreaminess of it all, me and my mother sprinted back through Dyreparken’s twisting cobblestone streets to the Disney Magic before it left us behind. I trusted that when I saw Eve again I could tell her how I felt.

 

- Twelve Hours After the Fall  -

The morning after Eve abandoned me I felt like a ghost. It was the day that we docked in Reykjavík – the skies were sleet-grey and drizzling. My body moved from my bed – dampened with tears – the tiny ferry that carried me and my mother through muddy, grey waters to a steel boat from where we would be watching minke whales. The coldness of the ferry benches crept into my bones, making them shiver.

​

I believed Eve was my guide to where I was meant to be. She was unlike anybody I had known before. She knew that rules could be broken and I felt more at home not being a good girl with her than I had felt in years. What had I done to hurt her? How could she have been so cruel? Why was her treating me so coldly making me need her to love me back?

​

Queer girlhood can sometimes be more difficult to navigate than girlhood alone. It is like finding the golden strings that lead a sapphic girl to who she could be or stitching together pieces of golden strings that a sapphic girl is lucky have somehow survived. Like anyone lost and searching I have looked to art to help make sense of questions since I was about the age of this story. Intimacy between two girls is traditionally framed as a heedless and nostalgic time of youth on the path to a woman’s perfect heteronormativity.29 Romantic and physical intimacy are sketched as a feature of girls’ friendship or as true to the nature of how girls feel.30 Sapphic desire is marked as natural and not communicating anything that a girl should pick apart – unworthy of turning over in the light – and as perverse – not correct nor a path to be followed.31 Sapphic emotion can be played with in a frivolous and meaningless light and when the time comes, it ought to be waved away. If it lingers and cannot be made sense of by a girl it can be quieted or buried beneath the blanket that it is wrong and never made into a thing that is (or was) real.

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Some things help a sapphic girl to discover her truth and nourish the likelihood that she will break through the rules that say sapphic sexuality is not real nor lasting to pursue a life of sapphic connection. Supportive ears to listen and arms that will hold a girl while she figures out who she is or that can point to guidance.32 Safe places, no matter how small or ephemeral, to touch or try out iterations of a self that she is drawn to to see what feels authentic and what is like a masquerade.33 Freedom to reflect on the emotions and actions that feel right to the girl, and to pull at the threads of a desire or emotion for another girl to find all of the colours present in it or its borders. Opportunities to learn how a girl can honour what she is feeling gifts her stepping stones to how she would like to do so – she might be guilty of and tormented by her feelings and hide them from herself if she has none.34

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In a few works of art the narrative of a girl’s coming-of-age matches that of her discovering the truth about her sexuality and telling it to those that she loves and that love her – tethering her coming to understand her sexuality to who she is.35 On a second hand, this hides the messiness of reaching a final note on one’s sexuality – the starts and stops needed to know what is right – and of tracing a way around the outside obstacles that deny or scare a girl from learning what is true for her.36

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For all of the rebellious need that Eve and I held inside of us, we could not have been coming from much more unalike places. Coming in to the dawn of my adolescence, I yearned for self-discovery. To know revolutionary literature and art and look as I pleased, uncaring of the rules of acceptable femininity. To kiss boys I would not marry nor know forever and try intimacy with girls that went beyond the box of friendship. I just needed the strength to defy what my school said was right and wrong. I am lucky in that my mother always granted me the room and time to try out a costume-chest of girls that I could be.

​

When my heart asked for make-up and to be a ballerina, she gave me her teenage make-up kit and signed me up for ballet classes. When I thought varsity sports might be good, we drove around for days to find the correct gear and she came to my early-morning try-outs. When I hinted in the springtime before this story that it might be nice for my second date ever to be with a girl, she simply smiled and promised me to be safe. I could confide in her any blossoming idea I would like to know more about. Our bond would be gifted with brand-new colours for my mother found a lesson on life anytime her daughter changed.

​

Since the age of two, Eve had grown up in a tiny, industrial, tough-as-nails neighborhood of Edinburgh that took shining pride in its sharply-cut rules for what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. Her grandmother was a deeply religious, Catholic woman and her working-class childhood taught her never to nurture something that could be judged as a weakness. If she ever let her guard down and let it slip that she wished to hide away with the town’s daughters and share secret, taboo touches – this misstep could have ruined her life. She could have been turned away by the girls and mocked by the boys that now had deadly ammunition in their weapons at school, kicked out of the house that held the memories of her and her mother, and made an outcast in the one town that she knew like the back of her hand and that she was safe in.

​

So she had to hide any sign that her tomboyishness was anything more real or dangerous than a childhood phase, while fighting inside to conclude if she could ever look at her calling to girls like her in the light of day Or if it had to stay a threat – unturned and unexamined, only able to breathe on those stolen walks with likewise lost girls in the smoggy darkness. Until she found someplace where she could begin to be free.

​

At the time of our Magic’s voyage, I was too young and hurt to think what might be keeping her from seeing where our budding friendship could go. Boarding the daunting, steel whale-watching ship in Reykjavik stole the last wisps of life out of me. Once my feet landed on the damp wood deck I found a corner of the ship near the stern where nobody would be and curled up, making myself as small as I could. I tucked my knees into my chest, buried my face between them, and tried to cry quietly. The large boat lurching side-to-side in the choppy waters worsened my nausea. My heart felt hollowed out, scraped clean of the fluffy, pink stuff that Eve filled it with just days before. Haunting whale calls and the roaring waves did little to lighten its burden.

​

Minke whales leapt from the ocean with the grace of ballerinas, yet I drew to burying my earphones into my ears and disappearing into the saddest songs of the bands that Eve and I confided in to make sense of life. I clung to the hope that she was trying to find reason in the words that I was.

​

Thinking it could have been what she was listening to in the precious hours leading up to our final meeting and desperate to share something with that Eve, I hid pretty much the whole time in 5 Seconds of Summer's “Amnesia.”

​

I drove by all the places

We used to hang out getting wasted

...Are you somewhere feelin' lonely

Even though he's right beside you.”37

​

Meg, Syd, and Kate took me to every place that we had touched with Eve to replace dreamy hope with giggly girl power in the aftermath of the fall. That only made me miss her more and covered each spot with the sick of sadness. The older girls Eve ran off with when she abandoned me possessed steely eyes, sharp voices and biting tongues. From all that I saw they were as cold as ice. Neither of them would be giving her the tenderness and empathy that I begged to.

​

And the dreams you left behind, you didn’t need them

Like every single wish, we ever made

I wish that I could wake up with amnesia

...And all my friends keep askin’

Why I'm not around.38

​

Proposed through searching gazes and sworn in by the declarations of young pop-punk poets, I believed that the two of us made the unspoken pact to leave both of our lives behind and become partners in crime – running all over the world in search of music and poetry that understood, meeting and learning from wise strangers, holding onto each other for dear life, and maybe if I was lucky, holding hands. With changed names and changing addresses, we would never be found. What a bewitched second night. This world that glimmered like gold with promise – empty of any bounds – was a dream away from the grey and sheltered monotony of my reality. And just beyond my fingertips. But it crumbled into dust and fell away. Never to be offered again.

​

The four of us, Meg, Syd, Kate, and Caitlin made a perfect harmony: Syd was our sweetheart, Kate grew into a fiercer mother-figure, I copied Eve’s manners and slipped into the rebel and Meg took up Eve's old role as the jokester. But there was an ache in me even when I was safe by their sides that they were helpless to patch. I was fearful of seeing the girl that I thought that I loved around – haunting corners of the cruise ship. And whether she would look at me. What would those deep brown eyes say? So I concluded I would take time to be on my own. To heal.

​

If today I woke up with you right beside me

Like all of this was just some twisted dream

I'd hold you closer than I ever did before

And you'd never slip away.39

​

I shut my eyes as tightly as I could, hoping to reverse the clock. If not in my life, than in Eve’s heart. If she could forget all that we were and all that we wrote in the Arctic sky just like that, then maybe we could try all over again.

 

- Six Days After the Fall -

Returning from a cooking class on one of the cruise’s last days I was lucky to brush by Eve and Lauren (Texas) – whom we’d spoken to on that fateful first night – walking to the atrium – a wondrous room with a lofty ceiling and the centrepieces of two thrones woven in gold and a chandelier with a hundred ivory lights. Eve’s newborn niece had a fondness for Beauty and the Beast’s Belle and an actress playing the princess would be meeting the Magic’s children in a few hours. Lauren invited me to join – I glanced nervously at Eve. She gave me a warm smile and her eyes twinkled with forgiveness. I nodded at Lauren with the glee of a little kid. Giddy sparks of hope flickered through my body as I followed behind. Could I have a second chance at becoming close to Eve?

​

Though the early days of summer, bouquets of red roses sat on the ends of each stair that lead to the atrium, dark-green pine-garlands wrapped around the staircase’s railings, and red carpets billowed from the top of the staircase to the feet of the throne Belle sat at. French vanilla lightly scented the air and twinkles of light danced on the atrium’s walls. The room held the nostalgia of Christmas. After sharing a bit of courteous dialogue Lauren left to meet up with her parents to prepare for dinner. Leaving behind Eve and me.

​

Remembering her grandmother’s tradition of attending the spectacular shows put on at dusk in the auditorium, I asked whether she enjoyed the past night’s recreation of 1940’s Fantasia, resplendent with fantastic sets, real costumed actors and a symphony orchestra. She nodded quickly and wide-eyed. Herself, like a little kid. I waited patiently for Eve to speak before I opened my mouth for a second time – I was too scared to stumble into a subject that would upset her. But she was silent, sometimes smiling at the floor and other times at me.

​

It is said that love’s practice is when “the care is not required by the social role itself, when neither duty nor personal advantage is operative.”40 It did not matter how great the hurt was that Eve abandoned me for no spoken reason. Nor had not sought to reach out in the days since. I held no ill feeling toward her. Though she and I returned to being strangers, I wanted her to be okay and would give any care that she granted me the chance to. I was called to this last service in spite of the chance that I might be burnt again, as if it was a duty of mine.

​

I yearned for the intimacy she gifted me in those early days. I was dying to speak aloud so many things to help me understand. To protect who we were now and what we could be, the fragility of me smiling at her and her at me was fine. Though I was not wholly aware of this truth, I possessed love for Eve.

​

Love is not blind, but rather is “undiscriminating and humble” – it does not judge and it lays itself before the beloved.41 In the many hours since she tossed my beating heart onto the ground, I accepted that she was all that I dreamed of. With time I could see how I felt about her was too big for me to hold – it was bigger than myself. What happens when we love a beloved is that, “The ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object [of love] more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego.”42 One’s self shrinks before the importance of the beloved and worry for the beloved becomes greater than the love one has for oneself.

​

I could not shut my eyes to Eve’s past cruelty but my fondness for her was greater than my happiness or my pursuit of happiness. My fondness was self-sacrificial. Giving this love to her, as she would like me to, was the only thing that could bring me happiness.

​

A honeyed warmth floated between me and Eve. As though our souls lightly touched, preparing to fall into each other again. Green Day’s sappy “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” fluttered through the atrium as wistful as my dreams of us and as bittersweet as our times of happiness. The song played over and over, becoming a lullaby like “Tale As Old As Time.” The atrium’s cozy serenity and the sweetness of us taking turns to look at each other took me so. I did not remember us meeting Belle nor what unfolded in the aftermath of our being together.

​

 

-  Seven Days After the Fall -

On the very last night of our Disney Magic’s voyage, Meg, Syd, Kate, and I were so joyful we were reckless, choosing to count the minutes to midnight on a floor of cabins we had not tested for whether we could get away with shouting and laughing and falling over each other. Rogue pre-teens belonging to other friend groups joined, adding to the cups of maraschino cherries and plates of ice cream cake shared between us. Eve was one of them. We were too young and innocent to be drunk on anything but the magic of all of us being there (and maybe a not-too-tiny sugar high).

​

Meg (12 years old), Syd (11 and a half years old) and Kate (12 years old) guessed that Eve abandoned me (12 and a half years old) – and the three of them – because we were too young and sweet for her (13 and a half years old). Meg learned from her older sister that at our age, some girls wanted to grow up as soon as they could and some chose to grow up over time. In one study six-hundred junior-high girls were asked how they, their friends, and other girls that they knew changed since beginning junior-high or were changing as junior-high went on. Some girls clung to what they enjoyed as younger girls to help comfort themselves: they played with dolls and came up with imaginary stories for them, asked for stuffed animals for gifts, kept their brightly coloured room décor and school supplies, took up the clubs and sports they had before and got involved in the community of their new schools, and chose sleepovers, cartoons and board games for parties.43 These girls longed for “continuity.”44 Other girls sought out things that are illicit for adolescents or that represent the “adult” world to introduce “discontinuity” between their childhoods and teenage years.45 They made fun of any object or brand that reminded of their younger childhoods or of childhood at all; found hiding places in their or their friends’ family homes; snuck out of the house and lied to their parents; threw and were guests at parties in which – often older – boys and girls were invited; reached one or all of the “bases” with a boy; and drank alcohol.46

​

Best friendships fell apart because girls of the second kind could not stand anything that girls of the first kind invited them to, while the first kind disagreed with the principles of what the second kind were getting into and thought that they were losing themselves and disappearing for good.47

​

Meg, Syd, Kate, and me were kindred spirits with the girls that relied on their ties to childhood to cope with the changes around them. Our role models were Disney princesses, and we asked for their memorabilia as gifts and played make-believe games based on them, picked brightly-coloured outfits featuring glitter, sequins, ruffles and lace, carried stuffed animals with us, took pride and competed on who had the highest participation in clubs and athletics that strengthened our school spirits, and if we dared to share the names and the looks of the boys from back home we dreamed about, we giggled and blushed. Though my desire to be a girl that broke rules and tried “grown up” things burst at the seams, I was afraid of losing what made me feel safe.

​

On the other hand, Eve had been chasing after “discontinuity” for years (even before the transition out of her elementary years). She rolled her eyes at our adorations of Disney (except if what we obsessed over her mother could speak about forever) and anytime we began to name off any of our extra-curriculars. She ditched school if she thought a teacher had nothing to give her, snuck out of her bedroom once her grandmother was asleep most nights, and spent hours causing mischief with her town’s bad boys. In the hours that such girls could afford, she walked down backstreets side-by-side with her school’s lost girls to find secret places that only the two of them knew about. We picked up from the hints of other, older girls that she had a bad habit of stealing bottles of cheap vodka and Marlboro cigarettes in her hometown. I never knew if she arrived at any of the “bases” with the boys or girls she gave her nights to.

​

After thinking hard about my three best friends’ proposal I began to believe that they were right – that Eve could not find lasting meaning in friendship with us, so she gave us up. Maybe I had been so lovestruck by Eve that I misinterpreted the little electric moments we stole to mean something more to her than a try at intimate friendship. All my doubt would soon be changed for good.

​

Every one of us heaped together on that mysterious floor on that final night agreed to crown our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with Spin the Bottle. The shining sconces that lit up the hallway we were gathered in flickered as though they were winking. The air was warm with enchantment. Though I could not see them the stars seemed to be watching again in anticipation.

​

 When it was my turn I reached over my crossed-legs and spun. As if by magic, the bottle landed on a corner of Eve’s heart. My eyes fell to the carpet, waiting for one of us to call for a second spin as we could not share a kiss on the principle of us being girls. I glanced up and she was kneeling in front of me. Her eyes holding a rare caution. She leaned down, softly pushing me until my back touched the floor. Her hands found my waist. Her lips met mine. I kissed her; time slowed.

​

Her mouth was warm and sticky with sugar granules. Her strong arms felt like silk on my bare skin. Then…she drew back. A gaping, awestruck smile I had never seen and a scarlet-red blush, unmistakable as the one often on me, lit up her face. If anybody spoke a word in the hour-and-a-half that followed I would not have heard it over the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears.

​

When Eve stood to return to her cabin for the final time I readied myself to say goodbye to my dear Meg, Syd, and Kate. I gathered my saving graces in my arms and wiped their tears, promising we would meet again soon. Eve patted the boys that she knew on the back and tip-toed to the elevators, and I trailed after her.

​

Silence hung as thick as a curtain as we stood centimetres apart, fingers nearly touching. She spoke not a word but her eyes were wide and glassy, staring blankly at the elevators’ doors and then our elevator’s buttons. The syrupy sweetness of her black cherry perfume hurt. Taken over by a need to stitch us together as we were before something broke inside her – a need that I could pick up from her but that she was too afraid to act on – I threw my arms around her shoulders, buried my face into her neck and tightly shut my eyes. She softened in my arms and trembled lightly. She had begun crying. Knowing this would be the final vignette I could look upon of the two of us, I whispered steady as a stone, “I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.” We arrived on my floor and I let go. Tears clouded my eyes. So I did not turn back.

​

Eve could not choose to be with me because she was still growing. She needed to find her own path for honouring her calling to be in a romantic pair with a girl and reckoning with her grandmother and her home’s need for her to grow up into a woman that matched what a woman ought to be. For just a few ephemeral moments – and not simply our lips touching – we could share in the exchange of our love.48

​

I never properly held the meaning of how Eve felt about me, that “speech act [that is the] very creator of truth,”49 that I had been searching for since she wrapped her arm around my waist for the first time. Before I met her I relied too much on the spoken word to make my choices in spite of my own wishes; I believed that only messages announced into the world should be leant on as they can be defended. I learned from our time together that I did not need to know what the truth of our bond was. Truths can be felt and not told, they can be asleep and not gone, or never there to begin with.

​

Walking home, I was sure that I had given a piece of myself to her and a piece of her had found its way into my heart. What is wonderful about memories is that they can be revisited like chapters in a novel: I can halt on those temporary but very real times of sapphic connection and think of what might have been.50

​

References

1. James, Vanessa and Laurence Owens, “‘They Turned Around Like I Wasn’t There’ An Analysis of Teenage Girls’ Letters About Their Peer Conflicts,” School Psychology International 26, no. 1 (2005): 77-79.

2. Owen and James, “‘They Turned Around,’” 77-79.

3. Owen and James, “‘They Turned Around,’” 81.

4. Owen and James, “‘They Turned Around,’” 78-84.

5. Owen and James, “‘They Turned Around,’” 80.

6. Emma Renold and Jessica Ringrose, “Regulation and rupture: Mapping tween and teenage girls' resistance to the heterosexual matrix,” Feminist Theory  9, no. 13 (2008): 314-315.

7. Renold and Ringrose, “Regulation and rupture,” 314-315.

8. Renold and Ringrose, “Regulation and rupture,” 313-318.

9. Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, “heteronormative,” Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, accessed November 21, 2023, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/heteronormative.

10. 5 Seconds of Summer, vocalists and instrumentalists, “Social Casualty,” by Luke Hemmings, Michael Clifford, John Feldmann and Nick Furlong, recorded April 2014, track 13 on 5 Seconds of Summer (Deluxe), Capitol, compact disc.

11. 5 Seconds of Summer, “Social Casualty.”

12. Yuka Kanno, “When Marnie Was There: Female friendship film and the genealogy of queer girls’ culture,” in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa (Oxford: Routledge, 2020): 71-72.

13. Kanno, “When Marnie Was There,” 71-72.

14. deft-0ned, Tumblr, October 11, 2023 (6:58 PM), https://www.tumblr.com/deft-0ned/730925739287937024?source=share

15. serialsmokr, Tumblr, October 29, 2023 (5:54 AM), https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/732507169789968384/balaclava?source=share

16. feelineuaphoric, Tumblr, October 31, 2023 (10:48 AM), https://www.tumblr.com/feelineuaphoric/732706855858700288/do-it-for-the-memories-the-1975-ugh?source=share

17. feelineuaphoric.

18. eternal-confusion444, Tumblr, October 29, 2023 (11:08 PM), https://www.tumblr.com/eternal-confusion444/732572248213520384?source=share

19. v1rginsu1cidal, Tumblr, October 9, 2023 (12:51 PM), https://www.tumblr.com/v1rginsu1cidal/730721464003821568?source=share

20. serialsmokr, Tumblr, October 26, 2023 (10:51 AM), https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/732254036502413313/diet-coke-cigarettes-stormy-weather-rain-and?source=share

21. serialsmokr, Tumblr, October 18, 2023 (3:42 PM), https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/731547581827694592/tumblr-girls-who-smoke?source=share

22. eternal-confusion444.

23. siren-444, Tumblr, October 25, 2023 (7:50 PM), https://www.tumblr.com/siren-444/732197389331546112?source=share

24. Robert Brown, Analyzing Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110.

25. Brown, Analyzing Love, 111-116

26. Brown, Analyzing Love, 111-116.

27. Brown, Analyzing Love, 115-117.

28. Brown, Analyzing Love, 115.

29. Monaghan, Whitney, “Not Just a Phase: Queer Girlhood and Coming of Age on Screen,” Girlhood studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 100-101.

30. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 100-101.

31. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 100-101..

32. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 101-109

33. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 101-105.

34. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 103-109.

35. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 98-99.

36. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 98-99.

37. 5 Seconds of Summer, vocalists and instrumentalists, “Amnesia,” by Benji Madden, Joel Madden, Louis Biancaniello, Michael Biancaniello and Sam Watters, recorded February 2014, track 15 on 5 Seconds of Summer, Capitol, compact disc.

38. 5 Seconds of Summer, “Amnesia.”

39. 5 Seconds of Summer, “Amnesia.”

40. Robert Brown, Analyzing Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26.

41. Brown, Analyzing Love, 37.

42. Sigmund Freud, “Being In Love and Hypnosis,” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press Ltd., 1949), 74-75.

43. Don E. Merton, “Barbies, Bases, and Beer: The Role of Home in Junior High School Girls’ Identity Work,” in Geographies of girlhood: identities in-between, ed. Pamela J. Bettis and Natalie G. Adams (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2005), 24-26.

44. Merton, “Barbies, Bases, and Beer,” 24.

45. Merton, “Barbies, Bases, and Beer,” 26-31.

46. Merton, “Barbies, Bases, and Beer,” 26-28.

47. Merton, “Barbies, Bases, and Beer,” 24-29.

48. Monaghan, Whitney, “Not Just a Phase: Queer Girlhood and Coming of Age on Screen,” Girlhood studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 104-105.

49. Monaghan, “Not Just a Phase,” 104.

50. Yuka Kanno, “When Marnie Was There: Female friendship film and the genealogy of queer girls’ culture,” in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa (Oxford: Routledge, 2020): 72.

​

Bibliography

5 Seconds of Summer. “Amnesia.” By Benji Madden, Joel Madden, Louis Biancaniello, Michael Biancaniello and Sam Watters. Recorded February 2014. Track 12 on 5 Seconds of Summer. Capitol, compact disc.

“Social Casualty.” By Luke Hemmings, Michael Clifford, John Feldmann and Nick Furlong. Recorded April 2014. Track 13 on 5 Seconds of Summer (Deluxe). Capitol, compact disc.

Brown, Robert. Analyzing Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus. “heteronormative.” Cambridge Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. Accessed October 24, 2023. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/heteronormative.

deft-0ned. Tumblr, October 11, 2023 (6:58 PM). https://www.tumblr.com/deft-0ned/730925739287937024?source=share

eternal-confusion444. Tumblr, October 29, 2023 (11:08 PM). https://www.tumblr.com/eternal-confusion444/732572248213520384?source=share

feelineuaphoric. Tumblr, October 31, 2023 (10:48 AM). https://www.tumblr.com/feelineuaphoric/732706855858700288/do-it-for-the-memories-the-1975-ugh?source=share

Freud, Sigmund. “Being In Love and Hypnosis.” In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 71-80. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd., 1949.

James, Vanessa and Laurence Owens. “‘They Turned Around Like I Wasn’t There’ An Analysis of Teenage Girls’ Letters About Their Peer Conflicts.” School Psychology International 26, no. 1 (2005): 71-88.

Kanno, Yuka. “When Marnie Was There: Female friendship film and the genealogy of queer girls’ culture.” In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa, 68-80. Oxford: Routledge, 2020.

Merton, Don. E. “Barbies, Bases, and Beer: The Role of Home in Junior High School Girls’ Identity Work.” In Geographies of girlhood: identities in-between, edited by Pamela J. Bettis and Natalie G. Adams, 19-33. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2005.

Monaghan, Whitney. “Not Just a Phase: Queer Girlhood and Coming of Age on Screen.” Girlhood studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 98-113.

Renold, Emma, and Jessica Ringrose. “Regulation and rupture: Mapping tween and teenage girls' resistance to the heterosexual matrix.” Feminist Theory 9, no. 13 (2008): 313-338.

serialsmokr. Tumblr, October 18, 2023 (3:42 PM). https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/731547581827694592/tumblr-girls-who-smoke?source=share

serialsmokr. Tumblr, October 26, 2023 (10:51 AM). https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/732254036502413313/diet-coke-cigarettes-stormy-weather-rain-and?source=share

serialsmokr. Tumblr, October 29, 2023 (5:54 AM). https://www.tumblr.com/serialsmokr/732507169789968384/balaclava?source=share

siren-444. Tumblr, October 25, 2023 (7:50 PM). https://www.tumblr.com/siren-444/732197389331546112?source=share

v1rginsu1cidal. Tumblr, October 9, 2023 (12:51 PM). https://www.tumblr.com/v1rginsu1cidal/730721464003821568?source=share

 

Social media as a phantasmagoric agent of behavioural regulation is a concept that most members of Gen Z know intimately. So intimately, many of us do not recognize social media as a socializing force working on us. Interpellation and agency have become muddled in the postfeminist 2010s and early 2020s. I believe the transmission of disordered eating habits is a rich trend to look at when examining the stickiness of Instagram and other photo-sharing platforms.

​

Before a dominant Gen Z cultural member gained literacy in the artificiality of online images, companies and content creators peddled personal ideologies to the then-youngest generation. In some cases, this transmission was conscientious and in other cases, particularly when the transmitter was not cognizant of their thoughts and behaviours as reproducing a particular sociopolitical ideology, this was latent. Images of conventionally attractive females stuck to impressionable Gen Zrs regardless of if the images depicted intentional propaganda (ie. the Kardashian-Jenner sisters selling a product vis-à-vis their celebrity support) or a social subject in-midi (conscientious) political interpellation (ie. a young woman sharing what she eats throughout a day or a week).

​

Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s (supposed) documentations of in-shape female bodies making meals and exercising were omnipresent on photo- and video-sharing platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The diets and workout routines of Victoria’s Secret models (dubbed “Victoria’s Secret Angels”) were consumed vociferously by impressionable (predominantly female) Gen Zrs that idolized the models.

​

Over the last few years Victoria’s Secret – as it existed during the 2000s and 2010s – has folded due in large part to Victoria’s Secret Angels’ spoken accounts of their experiences working for the company. A trend among these accounts is how physically weak and exhausted (even to the point of biological shutdown) the company-enforced eating and exercise habits they practiced, that were packaged and advertised by the company as health-optimizing, made the models.

​

Further Reading

 

Brophy, Sarah. “The Stickiness of Instagram: Digital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety.” Cultural Critique, vol. Fall 2019, no. 105, 2019, pp. 1-39.

​

 

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” Lacan attributes an infant human’s understanding of her agency in movement in the physical world to the mimetic image of her reflection (73). After the “identification” (76) of oneself as the image but in the absence of the knowledge of reflection and in the absence of language to realize that oneself is the image,  the infant’s “I” (her knowledge of oneself) transforms (76). “I” becomes “I” (75) (“I” but self-conscious, spatially aware and capable of recognition of the physical world) (76).

​

Prior to the “identification” of oneself as “I” in the physical world, the infant had no awareness of her agency (74); knowing now “I’s” powers of control and her placement in her surroundings, one’s self is compelled to do (75-76). Lacan theorizes that the mirror-image of “I” will be the “I” (the agent in the world) that the real “I” could never be (76); as the antecedent “I” to any “I” that the self can control, the “ideal-I” (76) will always be both out of reach and the goal of the self to become (76-77). As a consequence of the self coming to her own consciousness through the taking in of the mirror-image, “I” understands the composition of herself as “constitutive” (76) rather than “constituted” (76) – to be made up of parts as opposed to made up of parts (76-78). “I” is of lack and therefore needs (76-77).

​

Resultant of the “mirror stage” a human being’s self understands itself as incomplete and on the search to become whole (but this whole self – “ideal-I” – can never be acquired the theorist dictates) (76-78). “Desire” (74) is therefore born from the “mirror stage”, the infant’s “I” forever desiring that which will bring her (as she believes) closer to the “ideal-I” (76-79). Desire for Lacan is relativist, or it occurs in a scale of quantities: the desire one feels for another human can and does vary between the humans (74).

​

Lacan states the compulsion to become the “ideal-I” in the terms of motor skills: the natural state of “I” is anticipation to somehow recreate the feeling of seeing one’s mirror-image for the first time (76-78). The theorist also considers the metaphysical dimensions of the “I’s” recognition of the mirror-image, its becoming of “I” and “I[’s]” desire to become “ideal-I”. It is in the psychic where the “fragmented body” (78) of the “I” (about-to-be-I) searches for her self (76) and in dreams where “I” over the course of its development is at odds with “not-I”, or that “I” which is beyond the “I[‘s]” grasp (78).

​

Lacan identifies the end of the “mirror stage” for the self’s consciousness as occurring when self-consciousness is mediated through being desired by the (78-79) “other” (78). This desire according to Lacan can manifest as a desire for sex and/or a desire for competition (Lacan believing in even the most positive of two-sided relationships, there is still some negative present) (79). Desire can manifest as a paradox (74) – simultaneous “attract-tion and repulsion” (74). Lacan concludes that the “I” conceives of the remedying of its fragmented form as a mission to overtake the other (80) in “Hegelian” (80) terms: the “slave” (“I” needing to be desired by the other) defeats the “master” (the other whose desire is needed for self-consciousness) (79).

​

Simon May locates the possibility for Lacan’s “I” to become whole through the acquisition of “love” (May 6) – a two-sided relationship (10) of “submission and possession” (8). In response to Lacan’s model of the human self being in the “form” (76) of lacking or incompletion because of its coming to consciousness through the “mirror stage”, May theorizes the self can become whole through the acquisition of a self that is its opposite (May 10).

​

The search for wholeness – termed by May “ontological rootedness” (6) – is brought to an end by the finding of another human’s self that is “external” (9) to the constitution of her self (9-10): a second self that is the “ground beyond” (10) oneself. In his absolute independence from her “I” (10), her to be constituted self becomes one with all of the constituents she does not have (8-10). By “submit[ting]” (8) (/giving) to him all that she is constitutive of (7) and taking “possession” (8) of (/entering into her consciousness) all of the other’s constituents (8), the two joined selves can reach both of their opposite “ideal-Is”.

​

Citations

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition In English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

​

May, Simon. Love: a History. Yale University Press, 2011.

 

Anna Backman Rogers’ opens “Chapter 5: Marie Antoinette (2006)” in Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure by claiming that Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is a feminist film because firstly, Marie is the focaliser of her own life-story; (116) secondly, Coppola equates the value of a young female’s quotidian life and the historical event of the French Revolution; (116-117) and thirdly, in her film being an adaptation and not a filmic translation of Évelyne Lever’s biography of Marie Antoinette, Coppola challenges the notion that what we know to be history is factually accurate (117). Rogers proceeds to make the following arguments: the economic and symbolic value of Maria Antonia (/Marie Antoinette) is located in her virginal and girlishly decorative body; her excessive consumption of symbols of wealth represents the dominant social ideal for women in pre-Revolution France; and that Coppola plays with the signification of beautiful and expensive objects in order to suggest a contemporary subjectivity for females that is outside of post-feminism.

 

In “A Market of the Senses: Your Relations Are of Power” Rogers argues that 18th century France was a homosocial society wherein female bodies were viewed in society as representatives of the men of whom they belonged to (whether that was the body’s father, husband or another male relative or caretaker). Rogers disturbs the connection between sexuality and gender identity: she argues that men were sexually attracted to one another in 18th century France, and that trading young women’s bodies amongst themselves fulfilled their sexual desire for the man whom they had passed on the female body to (119).

​

The author then makes two points on spectatorial identification in cinema studies: at the same time that the spectator identifies with Marie when her actress is on screen, the element of the screen separating the spectator from her enables the former to see the latter as a reflection of something that is not them (121-123). Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is a spectacular figure as well as someone that the spectator can identify themselves as (123-124). Upon crossing the border into France, Maria is stripped of all physical signifiers of her Austrian origins (120). Close-up shots of her body in the processes of its de-robing perform a dissection of her self into body parts to be used in the service of the benefit of the kingdom of France (121). Coppola then frames actress Kirsten Dunst’s naked body from behind as a Renaissance portrait; this, Rogers argues, illustrates the French patriarchy’s omnipresent gaze on the teenage Queen-to-be (121-122). In a rare moment for a film that features scenes of numerous, layered voices speaking and also contemporary pop songs whose lyrics are dialectic with the images they accompany, this scene is pin-drop silent (121).

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Rogers connects the tethering of the idea of the female body to the idea of it as a symbol of male wealth and as a physical manifestation of how much a man can provide or has provided for his offspring (124) in “All Eyes Will Be on You: Reversing the Male Gaze”. The author argues that in relation to this 18th century French ideal, women’s consumption of things – things that have been given to them by the same men that they “belong” to – in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette should be understood as French aristocratic women’s bodies consuming more of themselves (124-125). After her sister-in-law gives birth to a healthy baby before Marie and her husband, the Dauphin, have had intercourse, Marie temporarily soothes the psychological sting from this perceived sign of her inadequacy as a fertile young woman through the consumption of varied luxuries including shoes, gowns, headdresses, pastries, jewelry and champagne. This series of events is condensed into a montage of images of the luxury at hand and images of Marie’s eyes, hands, and mouth (125). In the trading of female bodies amongst socially powerful men (and in this case, male-lead European imperialist powers), the female body becomes a physical embodiment of what each of her male owners desires that modern womanhood should be defined by; (127) therefore, Marie’s consumption of luxurious items is just one more way she re-entraps herself in French patriarchy (126-127). The montage ends with Marie licking frosting and lying down in a state of exhaustion caused by her torrents of consumption: in this image, the maligned historiographical figure of “Marie Antoinette” juxtaposes and acts as a farcical misinterpretation of the studious and charitable Marie that populates a majority of Coppola’s film’s scenes (127-128).

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Rogers continues to explain the visceral dangerousness of any woman’s attempts to deviate in any essential way from 18th century French patriarchy: if she succeeds in doing so, she identifies herself as Giorgio Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer – a body that lies outside of the community of society and can therefore be killed with impunity (126-127). Rogers considers how Coppola rejects the postfeminist ideals of material wealth and postfeminist ideology’s equation of socioeconomic accomplishments with social equality between males and females in “I Want Candy: Rejecting Postfeminist Values”. As opposed to reading the director’s hyper-stylized images of decadent foods, lavish past-times (such as purchasing imported goods and gambling with coinage that France is losing because of its ongoing war with England), and absurdly grand hairstyles, cosmetics and costumes, as an endorsement of neoliberalist economic philosophy, Rogers reads the former as a mockery of the latter (135-136).

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Rogers comments on Coppola’s decision to end her film on the ransacked rooms of Versailles and without an image of Marie Antoinette in captivity (137). The audience does not need to see Marie’s death at the hands of the French Revolutionaries because we have witnessed her one, failing attempts to successfully perform womanhood (therefore her incoming homo sacer-ization is inevitable), and two, continuously re-embed herself within pre-Revolution French patriarchy in her attempts to form an autonomous subjectivity that is not wholly submissive to it (138). Like a contemporary female cannot form a genuine subjectivity that is untouched by post-feminism, Marie cannot achieve any authentic self-actualization that is permanent (136-138). Rather, only in fleeting moments that are outside of Versailles’ walls and unseen by the pro-hegemonic members of the court (the latter being a symbol of the French-patriarchal gaze) can Marie come close to something like true self-empowerment (136-137).

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Rogers does an analysis of Coppola’s fictionalized rendering of Marie’s eighteenth birthday to give an illustration of what is available for 18th-century French women, like modern-day women, that seek an escape from the confines and pressures of performing ideal womanhood. It is in the particular scene outside of Versailles in which Marie and her self-selected and exclusive group of friends from the court of Versailles celebrate her birthday with one last activity – watching the sun come up on the day after the day of her birth – that Rogers centres on. In the little moments of reprieve from her duty as Queen of France; in the shimmering sound of fingers against champagne flutes, in the gentle blowing of a breeze, in the warmth of sunlight, in the laughter of close friends and jokes of which she is not the butt of, and in the soft touch of grass and of flowers; Marie is able to temporarily live out a self that she has chosen for herself (137-138).

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Works Cited

 

Rogers, Anna Backman. Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure. Berghahn Books, 2018.

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Hopelessness is a central theme of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). From the opening scene of Renton and Spud sprinting from the authorities through the concrete landscape of Edinburgh atop Renton’s monologue on the pressures and expectations of modern life. To the fast-paced montage of London’s tourist attractions and rushed pace of life Boyle includes to establish the Swinging city as a circus that is home to statistics of dying dreams and is empty of authenticity. A life of crime and drug use, the former to afford the latter, is the norm for the five Dunediner young men that Trainspotting revolves around.

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One scene that disrupts the pattern of scenes signifying the theme of hopelessness is when Renton meets schoolgirl Diane in a Edinburgh nightclub. Diane is a figure who offers Renton a way out of his drug addiction and crime-riddled everyday life in greater Edinburgh. After his becoming sober off the back of his heroin overdose, she visits him (only after inquiring if he was sober from heroin and the medicine cabinet of hard drugs that litter the run-time of Trainspotting) and motivates him to make a life for himself because the “world’s changing” (58:02). When Renton moves to London in pursuit of a 9-to-5 job, his own apartment and hopefully a better future, Diane sends him a postcard informing him of the status of Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, congratulating him for his successes and sobriety and wishing him well.

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Given the centrality of her character to the likelihood of Renton escaping his daily precarious situations, the scene in which they meet, titled, Renton Falls in Love, differs stylistically from the pattern of scenes of him, Sick Boy, Spud, Tommy and Begbie getting high (or low, more aptly) and finding supply.

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Natural and low lighting is used for a majority of the scenes in Trainspotting to capture the realism of what is being depicted and to reflect the sombreness of the lives of the main five drug-addicted young men and of Renton’s headspace. The exception to this rule is fantasy scenes – where dramatic lighting, unnatural and often offscreen noises and special effects communicate how life appears in Renton’s mind. The nightclub is lit dramatically: flashes and washes of different colours (the nightclub’s strobe lights) contrast against a black backdrop (the darkness of the unlit nightclub). Upbeat disco music played by the nightclub’s sound system soundtracks Renton’s first catching sight of Diane. The diegetic disco song forms a sound bridge between shots of Renton’s sight (Diane rejecting a man’s advances by drinking both of the drinks he was going to offer one of to her) and Renton watching Diane. The eight shots from 21:45 to 22:22 cut back-and-forth in shot-reverse-shot editing. If Diane was looking at Renton the editing between the shots would be an eyeline-match. This “first encounter” resembles the traditional “meet-cute” of the romantic comedy genre. For Renton it is love at first sight.

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Diegetic disco music contrasts the jarring absence of background noise in many of the scenes in the film and is a foil to the non-diegetic heavy rock music that plays over top of certain scenes where Renton and friends are high off of adrenaline, crime and drugs such as the opening scene (0:10-0:35). Outside of the two nightclub scenes in Trainspotting, prominent diegetic sounds that are not people’s voices feature in fantasy sequences. Boyle connects Diane to the escapism of fantasy through the use of diegetic music playing when she and Renton meet: she is his dream come true. As fantasy scenes are associated in the film with both the escapism of drugs and the becoming sober from drugs, Diane as a figure is painted as the drug that can get Renton high and the entity vis-à-vis which Renton can kick his drug addictions once and for all. Disco music connotes liveliness, joyfulness, sensuality and a softer, more feminine sensibility and as the historical opposite of rock music (which connotes aggression, anger and a tough, masculine sensibility), her musical association links her again to a high that will replace drugs and crime.

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In the shot that introduces Diane, soft lighting from the natural light illuminating the nightclub’s bar resembles three-point-lighting. The next shot is a dolly around the right side of Renton’s head to a straight-on capture of his face where the camera rests. Edited side by side, these two shots communicate the message that Renton is one, looking for something to save him (what the second shot’s cinematography portrays) and two, that Diane is the someone that he thinks could save him (the first shot’s reminiscence of three-point-lighting, dressing her up as an angelic figure). Despite the nightclub’s low lighting, Diane is always shot in or under lighting as if light walks with her. Through the visual motif of light never leaving her character, Boyle gestures to the Judeo-Christian tradition in religious art to represent saints with halos and the eventual popularization of the depiction of biblical angels as haloed female figures.

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The mis-en-scene and the acting performances of Kelly Macdonald and Ewan McGregor when Diane and Renton exit the nightclub’s interior space for the exterior space of the nightclub’s parking lot continue the characterizations of Diane as an angel-like figure and Renton as a repentant sinner asking to be saved. While Diane’s monologue characterizes the schoolgirl against the grain of traditional angelic figures, such stylistic features reinforce the dynamic of an angel and a (desperately) repentant sinner. Macdonald’s Diane has an authoritative and all-knowing disposition, while McGregor’s Renton is uncharacteristically wide-eyed, childlike and obedient around the younger woman. She struts with her head high, confident that she is above it and them all (like a divine being), while he trips over his tongue and stares at her in engrossment, hanging onto every word she says (like someone guilty of sin before a priest).

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Costumes and makeup also link the schoolgirl and the addict to the thematic motif of an angel and a sinner. Like the makeshift three-point-lighting from earlier, Diane’s silver, sparkly party dress, formal red trench coat, red lipstick and bobbed hair link the character to the legendary silver screen beauties of the classic Hollywood era. Diane’s resemblance to a starlet reasserts her characterization as an angel on two layers of meaning.

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Classic Hollywood starlets were mythologized by production studios and film critics as angels of the movie industry. Moreover, Diane is an angelic figure in part because she can connect Renton to the kinds of people (her parents, her parents’ friends, her friends’ parents, etc.) that are in much closer proximity to socioeconomic power than he, his friends and his family are. The classic Hollywood starlet is a symbol of the wealth and status that Renton could possibly achieve through the contacts she has access to. In contrast to Diane’s glamorous appearance, Renton’s clothes are loosely fitting and disheveled. The idea of rags is tied to what he is wearing in this scene. This visual reference to rags denotes Judeo-Christian artistic representations of biblical characters needing and often asking for salvation, and connotes forms of repentance that relate to asceticism.

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The improbable emptiness of the nightclub’s exterior spaces reaffirms the notion of Diane and Renton as star-crossed lovers: it is as if they are the only two people in the world. From 23:29 to 23:31 the camera rests on the open door of the taxi Diane has hailed to drive her home. Light emanates from inside of the taxi where Renton’s angel sits. Diane’s home, her parents’ house, represents a world of good schools, good jobs and domesticity. With her final line of dialogue, “Well, what’s wrong boy. Cat got your tongue?,” Renton is invited into this world. Renton’s jumping into the ride signifies his jumping into a new hope for his future. Diane Macdonald offers Mark Renton the opportunity to leave his world for hers. 

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Works Cited

Trainspotting. Directed by Danny Boyle, performances by Kelly Macdonald and Ewan McGregor, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 1996.

 

Vittoria Colonna’s "Sonnet 1" is an encapsulation of the sorrowful emotions Colonna harbours due to the death of her husband, a “mighty” fighter in his Italian region’s army and a member of its ruling class. Colonna attests that any virtue present in her poem is the result of the intensity of her grief, rather than any rhetorical skill. A true Petrarchist, Colonna imitates in exactitude, the form, the approach (to the poetic tradition) and the emotional essence of canonized poet, Petrarch. Colonna positions herself in the poem, as is present to a great extent across all of the poems in the body of work from which it comes, as the passive member in the material, spiritual and linguistic relationship shared between her and her, by the time of the poem at subject’s writing, deceased husband.

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Despite adhering precisely to Petrarchan – established, recognized, “acceptable” and therefore “safe” for a woman to reproduce – rhetorical “rules”, her recording her emotions and ideas, her interiority, her self, in language, was perceived contemporarily and (dominantly) throughout periods as early as the 19th century as polemical to the hegemonic, regionally specific and universal gender order. Regardless that Colonna – consequential of her family (participant in the European aristocracy), personal history (persecuted and thieved of power from her birth region and married off to her husband as a child) and contemporary social position (the wife of a member of/player in the Italian aristocratic and martial class) – bound herself to and exalts, the Petrarchan model, was attacked for motivating other (privileged enough to do so) women to write.

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On the other hand, Louise Labe’s "Sonnet 13" is a transformation of a poem by Latin writer, Ovid. The content of the poem centres on a woodland nymph who falls in love with a divine, mythological creature. In contrast to Vittoria Colonna who imitates in exactitude, Petrarch’s content (that is, the substance or “meat” of the poem) and style, Labe transforms – or “perverts” – the poetic strategies of Petrarch. Where Colonna reproduces historical and regional hegemonic ideas and relations of gender; wherein men are the active agent, the creator, the “looker”, and women are the passive agent, the inspiration or “muse”, the one that is being looked at; Labe, as is repeated throughout the collection from which this poem comes, takes up the masculine position and casts, or displaces, the object of her desire, as the feminine.

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Labe, known across Italy, France, Spain and as far as Bavaria for gendered behaviours that threatened the historical hegemonic understanding and order of gender (stemming from her contemporarily progressive growing up), confesses to desiring to become one flesh, one entity with her hermaphrodite lover. As can be similarly extracted from the introduction to the collection from which Sonnet 13 was published, addressed to an esteemed and literate courtly lady of the European aristocracy, Labe, transcendent of Colonna and more so than Gaspara Stampa (who cleaved to and recreated the “safe” Petrarchan model, but, “perverted” it, wherein she took up the active, relational role and her male object of desire was displaced into the passive, subject position), sought to unfix her contemporary relations of power between the sexes. In such an introduction, embedded in the ideology and (gender) politics of Sonnet 13, Labe urges (privileged like the courtly lady at address in the preface) women to take up the noble and virtuous practice of writing so that such aforementioned power relations will shift to the bettering of – privileged – women’s position in society.

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The plot of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eleonora” follows the mythological structure of the hero’s course as laid out by Campbell in the section “I. Myth and Dream”. Poe’s narrator has the making of Campbell’s hero (he is “singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth” (18) about love shall set humanity free), but he has to submit to some truth in order to become one. 

A majority of “Eleonora” takes place in the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” during “the first epoch” (Poe) of the narrator’s life. In the paradisiacal land of diverse flora and fauna he and his first beloved “Eleonora” spend all of their days together alone (the young girl’s mother somewhere in the valley but rarely with the children). Poe characterizes the bond between the narrator and “Eleonora” as familial and innocent; the latter takes care of the former as they both grow up. “Eleonora” and the narrator’s “Love” (Poe) is the ideal of love understood in the discipline of psychoanalysis to be an infant’s love for his mother (Campbell 3-4). The “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” and “Eleonora” (Poe ascribing the former to the presence of the latter) are representative of “bliss, truth, beauty, and perfection” (Campbell 4): ideals attributed to a male infant’s bond with his mother (4). Campbell’s mythological structure of the hero narrates that the to-be hero must be torn away from the realm of childhood and of the ideal if he is to become a hero – the finder of some truth about real life (6). 

During the “third lustrum of her life” (Poe) death approaches “Eleonora” (Poe). Before she passes (and all life in the valley is lost as a result), the poem’s narrator vows never to fall in love with another so as to not disrespect her life, death and their true love. Poe’s narrator and “Eleonora” take a vow of marriage. Campbell’s dichotomy of phases in a hero’s lifetime, an infant’s unconscious (12) and the uncomfortable parts of the psyche and those parts traversed (14-16), match the places of the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” and the “strange city” (Poe) respectively. 

The death of “Eleonora” begins the “second era of [the narrator’s] existence” (Poe). As heroes in history have done when stories believed throughout childhood prove untrue (11-15), he leaves the lifeless “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” to brave the darkness and meet what lies beyond the promise of true love in paradise (Poe). After “Eleonora” stops haunting Poe’s narrator, he comes up against Campbell’s “dark night of the soul” (16): reality absent of any (what he understands to be) magic and consequently the parts of his psyche that he has heretofore been able to defeat (Poe).

Within Campbell’s first framework for a hero’s becoming, the “river” (Campbell 16) needing crossing is the potentiality of new love with “Ermengarde” – such could enable him to recreate the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” in the real world but it would mean breaking his vow with “Eleonora”. In accepting and reciprocating his love (Poe) “Ermengarde” acts as the helper of the hero as he considers crossing and how to cross into the “ground beyond the final stream” (16). To cross, all those gifts and virtues that make his narrator eligible of becoming a hero must submit to the truth that there is more than one true love for him and that all his true loves can be loved at the same time (Poe). 

The “thread” (18) which leads out of the “labyrinth” (18) of living on after one’s true love is gone (/achieving one’s childhood ideal of life and losing it) is accepting such, and rediscovering love with another (/a new ideal). Poe’s poem makes manifest Campbell’s postulate that through becoming a hero, some historical truth is discovered – for “Eleonora” haunts the narrator one last time to state their marriage vow can be broken because his marriage vow to “Ermengarde” is the same (Poe). The hero, made to recognize the falsehood of mythological archetypes and stories (12-14), has made it out of myth, to become the maker of history, or new myths (14-18). 

Lyotard reworks “knowledge” (22) to be the breadth of which an “utterance” (a thing put out into the world) can be said to be true (18). Countering the perspective of “science” (18)  that dominates the production of knowledge in Western thought, he considers the spiritual or un-knowable to qualitative or quantitative observances to be equally contributive to how an utterance is or can be known (20). Lyotard contends “knowledge” (18), what Campbell refers to as “truth” (Campbell 18), is found through the consultation of cultural myths (Lyotard 22). 

Recitation (“knowing how to speak” (21)) and listening (“knowing how to hear” (21)) are the critical actions of a “hero” in Lyotard’s framework for the transmission of knowledge (22). Poe’s narrator listens to the truth of love spoken by Eleanora as they take a marriage vow in the “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass”, as she haunts him in the “strange city” and as she returns to him after his marriage vow to “Ermengarde”. A key piece of learning knowledge however, is that second half of Lyotard’s principle: “knowing how to hear” (“savoir-entendre”) (21). Poe’s narrator had to cross the river in order to come to know the truth about love which “Eleonora” could not articulate to him before then; without acting on his love for “Ermengarde”, the meaning of his haunting by “Eleonora” could not be understood. 

Lyotard de-mythologizes the hero’s narrative: knowledges can be found and known to anyone (22). Lyotard and Campbell differ in this regard: where the latter locates truth as to be found by one historical man, the former focuses on the omnipresence of knowledge, how it is found across a culture’s history – as in “nursery rhymes[,]…popular sayings [and] proverbs” (Lyotard 22). The structure of Poe’s poem aligns with Lyotard’s novel understanding of the circulation of myths and the spreading of knowledge. Poe’s narrator places himself as the narratee of “Eleonora’s” words of truth about love just as he (the narrator) refers to the addressee of the poem so he (the addressee) can be her narratee as well (Lyotard 21). The knowledge of love taught by “Eleonora” to Poe’s narrator, is therefore taught to the addressee alike.  

Poe’s “Eleonora” (the poem) is not “isolated” (Lyotard 22) from the tradition of “narratives” – the story’s structure of “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” to the “strange city” then to discovery with the guidance of a stranger is familiar. Similarly, Poe’s narrator associates himself with multicultural and historical “narratives” of love, loss, the “dark night of the soul” (Campbell 16), the re-discovery of love and the “knowledge” (Lyotard 18) of love. On a play of Campbell’s cyclical formula for the structure of myths – the macro being made into the micro (12) – Lyotard turns the macro of myths themselves into the micro of the ordinary, the everyday, the “hear”-able (Lyotard 22). 

The transmission of knowledge in Lyotard’s framework of myths is the following: (s)he who knows, he who listens to the (story’s) narrator and they who listen to the storyteller (19). Read through bell hooks’ framework of learning and disrupting exclusionary storytelling patterns, “Eleonora” is as much a “hero” of Poe’s poem as Poe’s narrator is. 

 

Allegorically, “Eleonora’s” death can be read as the silencing of her voice (hooks 28). To apply hooks’ interdisciplinary and praxis-friendly theory of story narratives and their social value, Poe’s poem must be analysed through a sociological lens. As the “hero” is forced to leave the perfectly idyllic “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” (a place of childhood and goodness) for the challenging but real “strange city” (the adult world), his female half must die. In the real world perfect girls are not narratively meant to survive and moreover, the conditions of the real world have been set to take away perfect girl childness from girls and women and to take away the femininity in boy children. 

hooks explains how those that are denied an agentic identity and are instead prescribed an identity by the (white and male) hegemon, find alternative modes of expression (27). When denied access to classical techniques of being heard, subjugated social subjects turn to or even invent other forms of communicating their thoughts, feelings and ideas (27). “Eleonora’s” haunting can thus be read as her trying to find a voice in the medium of the story (whose traditional structure she is not an agent in) as well as an alternative way of communication. The narrator losing his ability to hear the haunting of “Eleanora” can be read as a metaphor for his gradual distancing from his feminine boy self and, when read through a lens of psychoanalysis, from the teachings and attributes (or the voice) of his mother.

Poe’s poem ends however, with “Eleonora” visiting the narrator one last time to teach him the “truth” (Campbell 18) or “knowledge” (Lyotard 22) of love. Poe’s “Eleonora” (the poem) can therefore be understood as a fable that teaches traditional (white and male) heroes and heroes-to-be to try to listen to the voices of females (and all marginalized voices more broadly) (hooks 29). 

hooks’ dictum of accepting rather than rejecting the Other (hooks 24) adds an aspect of feminist criticism to Poe’s poem as well. In order to be reunited with the passive (while alive) and heavenly girl child “Eleanora”, the narrator had to embrace the agentic and earthly woman “Ermengarde”. Poe’s final “Ermengarde”-as-“Eleanora” theme communicates that real love and the reality of females (with earthly or impure dimensions) are equally valuable/worthy of being listened to as the ideal of love and the ideal of femaleness (/the ideal female).

Works Cited:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, 1949.

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hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Between-the-Lines, 1990.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10, edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Manchester University Press, 1984, xxiii-23.

 

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven Edition Volume II. E-book, Project Gutenberg, 2000. 

 

As perhaps a great number of my fellow female students at esteemed higher education institutions, being a “smart girl”, is the core around which I developed my identity as I progressed through childhood. Contrary to the dominant rhetoric of postfeminism; of which was omnipresent and influential in the first decades of the 2000s, the period I grew up in; I, the token “smart girl” of my grade, was subject to an incalculable number and diverse range, of macro- and micro-aggressions. Raby and Pomerantz’s disruption of such rhetoric that girls have no boundaries nor forces negating their ability to safely and successfully be, and that smart girls are the evidence of this progression in gender equality, reveals the myriad and intersecting institutional and social rules and regulators at work, denying or discouraging girls’ achievement and wellbeing (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 81-82). As my story speaks to and their research into the lives of so many more modern-day “smart girls” illuminates, the capability for self-identifying “smart” and “not-smart” girls alike to be in schools without authorities’ hindrance and/or peers’ harassment, is by no means an absolute fact of the “post-feminist” era.

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Raby and Pomerantz interviewed self-identifying “smart girls” from four schools each with a particular educational approach and scholastic ethos; the first impact on “smart girls’” wellbeing, and more generally the relationship of girls to their learning, is how the schools engaged with education (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 71). Central Secondary, a school with a progressive, creative approach to teaching its students, had “smart girls” that were proud of that identity and comparatively unafraid to be smart girls in school (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 72). In contrast, the “smart girls” at Academy House felt betrayed by their school’s methods of teaching and student engagement; represented as uplifting and intimate, these methods were not, but were rather, inadequate and uncaring, resulting in “smart girls” not being supported and the connection of girls to their education being neglected (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 73). As a “smart girl” whose school – a K-12 private school – was similar to Academy House, in its representation and that it had an approach to education that was lacking and disinterested; the instructors would prioritize the learning of the “smartest” students and neglect their teaching of “not-smart” students; I too, felt insecure in my identity and possessed a strained relationship to my education.

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In addition to the methods of education and ethos of the school, the social environment and particular culture of belonging specific to each of the schools the “smart girls” attended, affected their experiences of being smart girls at school (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 73). The social ‘value’ of identities – phrased another way, as how well an identity ‘fits’ into the student body’s culture – greatly impacts the ability of girls to be. At Blue Ridge High for instance, the collective culture of the student body is that in which intelligence is greatly valued and the social environment in which the students are all apart of is characterized by the “smart girls” interviewed as supportive and encouraging (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 73). Thus, they are motivated to embrace theirs, and feel as though they were encouraged to pursue the, “smart girl” identity; a stark contrast to the “smart girls” of St. Mary’s High, who disclosed that they thought at their school the “smart girl” identity was discouraged, regarded as an undesirable identity (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 73-75). They recounted how the culture of belonging to St. Mary’s High called for girls to not take on a “smart girl” identity and that the social environment of the school was one in which partying rather than studying was the impelled practice to participate in; this was to such an extent that the girls interviewed cited smart girls “dumbing [themselves] down” (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 74).

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The environment of student-to-student interaction and what the culture of belonging to a school’s student population calls for are naturally replete with gender politics and ideologies regarding gender. Ray and Pomerantz discuss how ideologies of gender police and inform how girls are allowed to be at school, determining from the “smart girls’” testimonies that contrary to dominant postfeminist rhetoric, smart girls are not able to just be in schools but must negotiate many different rules and boundaries impacting their identity formation and identity presentation (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 75-76). At Academy House and Blue Ridge High in particular, if a smart girl represented herself as caring most about her education, or if she did not possess a “carefree”, “social” and/or “popular” “girl” identity in addition to her “smart girl” identity, the gender politics in operation in her school’s student body would result in her being condemned, ostracized or otherwise othered (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 75-76). Evident from the accounts of the “smart girls” at Academy House is the pressure for girls, “smart” or otherwise identifying, to fit into a particular standard of beauty held and reinforced by the student body collective at their school in order to have an unproblematic school experience (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 76).

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Out of the four conclusions drawn by Raby and Pomerantz on the institutional limitations and social ideologies impacting the abilities of “smart girls” as well as girls that otherwise do not identify as “smart girls” to be, these two factors are those which I can most connect to my story of being a “smart girl”. Like Blue Ridge High, the culture of my student body valued intelligent identities so much so that if one was not a “smart girl” or “smart boy” they would be severely bullied, but unlike BRH the social environment was what I can summarize as competitive and unkind. I was conditioned to believe the “smart girl” identity was the only valuable identity for a girl, therefore I pursued it to the detriment of my wellbeing and grew to believe if I failed to maintain the “smart” part of my identity my value as a child would disappear. Likewise, my story supports the effect of socially engrained ideologies and enforced policies about gender on the ability for “smart girls” and girls in general to be. My school’s student body possessed strict, conservative understandings and expectations of gender which would call for girls’ to be submissive, obedient and humble; I did not possess these identities – I was a dominant, controlling, confident “smart girl” – and because of such I was continually ‘punished’ through gossip, name-calling and exclusion. Despite several attempts to achieve them, nor did I fit the criteria for being a “pretty” “smart girl”, adding to my social harassment and ostracization; experiences which had a great negative impact on my identity formation.

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The final factor affecting “smart girls” – but not limited to only girls who identify as “smart girls” – being in school Ray and Pomerantz foreground, is how if they possess intersectional identities, those identities engage with their identity formation as “smart girls” – or as other labels of “girls” for girls that identify as other than “smart girls” (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 77). Scattered hegemonies impact the success and wellbeing of “smart girls” and other “girls” alike, if they possess intersectional identities; both, girls’ figures of authority and peers, possess ideas about and even biases towards or against their racial, class and social amongst other, identities, and this shapes how their identity is perceived by such parties (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 77). This subjective perception of “smart girls”’ – and other “girls’” – identities based on one or more of their racial, class and social (as well as other) identities determines how they are treated by authority figures and their peers, and in turn, this treatment – either positive/complementary or negative/derogatory – influences how they come to understand their own identities (Raby and Pomerantz, 2016: 77-78). To support this conclusion by relating it to my story, as well as to draw to a close my analysis of Ray and Pomerantz’s study, I will recount how at my school, certain smart girls with particular racial, class and social identities were recognized as “smart girls” by our teachers and classmates, but similarly intelligent girls with different intersectional identities were overlooked and not considered by them as “smart girls”. Academically skilled girls with East and South Asian, upper middle class and legacy student (as in, had attended the school since she was in kindergarten) identities were in most if not all cases, perceived as and approached as though they were “smart girls” – and because of such, I was reaffirmed in my understanding of my identity. Racist, classist and elitist thinking held by an unfortunately large number of teachers and students at my school informed their judgements of and interactions with girls, equally or in many cases more intelligent than myself, that had one or more of the African-diasporic, middle class and new student identities, potentially denying the girls from seeing themselves as “smart girls”.

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Bibliography:

Raby, R., & Pomerantz, S. (2016). Landscapes of Academic Success: Smart Girls and School Culture. In C. Mitchell & C.A. Rentschler (Eds.), Girlhood and the politics of place (pp. 68-84). Berghahn Books, http://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_606216

 

Anyone who was aware of popular cultural media and even slightly knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ issues in the 2000s can remember just how atrocious the representation of queerness across every form of popular cultural media was in the 2000s. From songs that supplied the heterosexual male’s fantasy of lesbianism like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (2008), movies that painted all gays as histrionic sidekicks to straight women like Damian in Mean Girls (2004) and shows that exploited the ‘shock/comedy factor’ of trans individuals like There’s Something About Miriam (2004), there was no corner of the pop culture landscape untouched by the misrepresentation of the LGBTQ+ community. Heterosexual producers, directors and artists alike were receiving mass profit from the unapologetic slandering or bad-faith mimicry of queer bodies and their experiences.

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As a little girl who was fanatic about pop culture – more specifically the female contributions to pop culture – throughout a sizable portion of the decade and one relatively unaware of LGBTQ+ discourse; I came from a very liberal household, but was never officially introduced to the concept of queerness; I ate up their content without a conscience telling me not to. With the hysteria of 2000s nostalgia extant in the contemporary popular culture sphere, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit and deconstruct with the perspective of an adult Women and Gender Studies student, three infamous cases of dubious representations of queerness from that period: Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera’s performance at the 2003 VMAs; Season 1 Episode 1 of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” (2007); and the official 20th Century FOX trailer of Jennifer’s Body (2008). Two theories of gender and sexuality will form the lens of how these representations will be investigated – how established protocols govern reality but that new realities can be created (as re-discussed by Judith Butler in the Guardian article “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’” [2011]) and that the ‘pornographic’ is the “confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation (Lorde 4)” of sexuality (outlined by Audre Lorde in the Introduction to Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power [1978]).

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In the summer of 2003, Madonna was needing intrigue to increase the sales of her widely-panned American Life, Britney Spears was attempting to evade the shadow of her ‘good, wholesome girl’ image with the anticipated In the Zone and Christina Aguilera was seeking to cement her novel persona of ‘sexually liberated adult’ after the success of Stripped. At the VMAs in August, Spears and Aguilera recreated Madonna’s 1984 performance of “Like A Virgin” by crawling seductively towards each other in coquettish wedding dresses, before she joined them on stage in a ringmaster-style tuxedo. Madonna twirled each young woman around while gesturing at their bodies and danced erotically alongside them, as she sang “Hollywood”, a song about the thingification and commodification of women in Hollywood. She removed Aguilera’s garter over a gratuitous length of time, and then she shared a kiss first, with Spears and then, with Aguilera. All of these women were self-confirmedly heterosexual.

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Since the lesbian pulp novels of the late 1950s and 1960s, the ideology of dominant, masculine lesbians tricking or hypnotizing submissive, feminine heterosexual women into temporary lesbian relationships has been in the foreground of the hegemonic understanding of lesbianism. In the 1980s lesbian porn emerged, largely made by heterosexual male producers for a heterosexual male audience (to such an extent that this ‘lesbian porn’ became ‘mainstream lesbian porn’), and the performance of girl-on-girl erotic and sexual actions by – not necessarily homosexual – female actors proved to be lucrative and in-demand as a product. Britney and Christina’s slinking towards one another as they stare into each others’ eyes; the tight corsets and tiny skirt/shorts they rip their wedding dresses to reveal; their obedience to Madonna and the jealousy they feign when the other has her attention; the innocent, childlike and rebellious bad-girl personas they respectively act out; Madonna’s dominatrix character; all three’s movements emphasizing their chests and behinds or emulating their participation in a threesome, all exploit hegemonic girl-on-girl representation.

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Lorde defines the ‘pornographic’ as “The erotic…misnamed by men and used against women”, adding that “pornography is a…denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling” (Lorde 4). The pornographic is the antithesis of the ‘erotic’ which in her ideology, is the sharing of the most profound feelings of pleasure one (female-identifying person) can experience. Invoking a term used earlier, the pornographic is a ‘plasticized’ form of the erotic; the erotic ravaged, and its parts glued sloppily and haphazardly together. This VMAs performance is the embodiment of this terming of the pornographic. The ‘pleasure’ experienced from the performance was not Madonna’s, Spears’ nor Aguilera’s, but the heterosexual male viewer mainstream lesbian porn is made for. The acts of intimacy were pure spectacle (or ‘sensation’) to effect each of the women’s careers. Driving the point that the erotic actions were ‘pornographic’, the choreography and costuming for the performance, as well as the camerawork employed to capture it and air in on MTV, were chosen according to Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’.

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Madonna, Spears and Aguilera’s performance had created a new form of women’s sexualization in film, a new ‘reality’ for women’s representation in music – the ‘pornographic’ girl-on-girl music video. Erotic performance by heterosexual women atop music on film, became the premier tool for the successful commercialization of female artists. Thus, regardless of sexuality, the music videos of female artists in popular music became dominated by girl-on-girl pornography, in particular the kind of pornographic actions performed by Spears and Aguilera with each other. This kind of girl-on-girl pornography occurred as contemporarily as between Gwen Stefani and her background dancers in “Rich Girl” (2004), the members of Destiny’s Child in “Cater 2 U” (2004) and the members of the Pussycat Dolls in “Don’t Cha” (2005) and has sustained to as modernly as between Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in “WAP” (2020), Doja Cat and Saweetie in “Best Friend” (2021) and Billie Eilish and her background dancers in “Lost Cause” (2021).

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This homosexual activity between heterosexual women for the primary purpose of the sexual gratification of heterosexual men – which consequently increases the desirability of the women to the men – has been termed ‘compulsory bisexuality’ by author Breanne Fahs. The popularity of mainstream lesbian porn, amplified by the accessibility to it through and the diversity of it on video-streaming websites like Pornhub, fetishized and made desirable the intimacy shared between women to heterosexual men. Compulsory bisexuality spilled over from porn and music videos by the mid-to-late 2000s into the burgeoning industry of reality television, with female stars of the period’s most prominent programs, such as Paris and Nicole of The Simple Life (2003-07), Holly, Bridget and Kendra of The Girls Next Door (2005-09) and the female cast members of Jersey Shore (2009-12) participating in some form of the practice on-screen. In October 2007 A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila premiered, its premise being that Tila Tequila, a former nude model for men’s magazines and a Myspace celebrity with a fledgling electronic music career (that included pornographic girl-on-girl music videos), was a bisexual and was searching to build a true, significant relationship with a man or a woman.

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The history of Tila Tequila’s visibility in pop culture is not to construct a conception of her character a priori, but to intimate the demographic that A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was aimed at given her past work – heterosexual men wanting to view women being erotic (or ‘pornographic’, in Lorde’s terminology). The show’s first episode, “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” is bisected into two halves, the first which presents Tequila’s introductory interactions with the male contestants, and the second, her introductory interactions with the female contestants. The objective of the first half is to impress Tequila with a thoughtful gift, while the objective of the second half is to impress her with a “sexy costume (33:48)”. Each female contestant must present herself in a revealing outfit themed to a pornographic archetype; among the highest-ranked contestants, there was a schoolgirl, a nurse, a maid, a girl scout, a dominatrix and a firefighter; and strut down a runway in front of Tequila. The men being tasked to present a physical object, and the women being tasked to present themselves as a physical object, speaks volumes.

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The credits of the show’s first episode reveal a collection of producers – in addition to supervising producers and producers, there are line producers, story producers and segment producers – which explains its highly controlled and palpably fictionalized and sensationalized feel. As opposed to a reality show about a bisexual woman ‘finding love’, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was a commercialization of bisexuality on display. When it comes to the segments presenting Tequila; who confirmed in an interview after the show’s second season that she was at the time of filming, a heterosexual; ‘attempting to discover her soulmate’ amongst the women, the interactions on-screen register as mainstream lesbian porn.

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Butler describes the act of performance as, “Or is (one) citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then (they are) invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority (Gleeson).” As a bisexual woman, observing Tequila’s romantic and intimate engagement with women appears to resemble the mannerisms of a heterosexual man engaging with heterosexual women. As two primary examples, one of physical interaction and one of dialogue, she interrupts two of the contestants talking and proceeds to passionately kiss one of them while overtly ignoring the other, and in the next scene complains about a contestant for talking too much about her feelings and being “overemotional (32:00)”. The intended audience, Tequila’s heterosexuality and the network of producers responsible for the show’s text, builds the likelihood that her actions around and attitudes towards women, were conceived by an external entity that sought to present female bisexuality in a particular way – that of how a heterosexual man imagines it. Phrased another way, Tequila was performing a heterosexual man’s conception of a bisexual woman, his conception of how women behave romantically and sexually with each other.

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Tequila’s (inter)actions and her dialogue are chosen from a heterosexual man’s perspective (hence their disconnection from how women-loving-women women autonomously act with one another), and are constructed to acquiesce to the principles of mainstream lesbian porn. She is behaving according to its “set of conventions”: acting traditionally feminine, objectifying her partners’ bodies, voicing desire in experimentation and kink. She is “invoking the power” of heterosexual male lesbian porn producers, and in being granted the title of “designated authority” on female bisexuality by the show, is disseminating a conception of female bisexuality that contributes data to the zeitgeist’s understanding of female bisexuality. While this representation of female bisexuality that Tequila exhibited did not originate any new reality, it did reinforce the (mis)conception of bisexual women in the pop culture and society of the mid-to-late 2000s – that they are, as the LGBTQ+ NGO GLAAD phrased it, “untrustworthy, prone to infidelity, and/or lacking a sense of morality;  use sex as a means of manipulation or are lacking the ability to form genuine relationships; associated with self-destructive behaviour; and whose attraction to more than one gender is temporary, and will rarely be addressed after this period is over (Kornhaber).”

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Jennifer’s Body is unlike either the performance by Madonna, Aguilera and Spears at the 2003 VMAs nor “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” from Season 1 of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, as it was not produced for heterosexual male viewership (and gratification) nor through the lens of heterosexual male thinking. Created by idiosyncratic screenwriter Diablo Cody and auteur director Karyn Kusama, and starring two of the decade’s sought-after ‘It-girls’, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, the film was an exploration of adolescent female friendship and sexuality, and the trauma caused by sexual assault. The friendship between Fox’s “Jennifer” and Seyfried’s “Needy” is intimate, lustful and near the film’s climax, sexual, but it is also cruel, vengeful and violent. The relationship between these two teenage girls is complex, and when it is not antagonistic, it is ‘erotic’ in Lorde’s outlining of the concept.

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By the late 2010s, Amanda Seyfried had become representational of wide-eyed innocence and inversely Megan Fox, of sex, due to both women’s prominent roles (the former in Mean Girls (2004) and Mamma Mia! (2008), and the latter in Transformers (2007)) and their celebrity personas. Fox’s symbolism in particular, affected the environment of the film as she was perceived in pop culture and society and thus in the film industry, as a severed body heterosexual men greatly desired to have sex with. Despite the female perspective Jennifer’s Body was conceived through and the female demographic it was constructed for, the perception of Megan Fox as an erotic (‘pornographic’ in Lorde’s terms), fetishized object detached from personhood and extant solely as a commodity for heterosexual men to use for their gratification, made the film, in the eyes of its heterosexual male marketing executives, a vessel for such.

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A commentary on women’s power of the erotic being transformed into the male-desired pornographic provided by Lorde, summarizes the representation of queer female sexuality in the official trailer of Jennifer’s Body, “We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much... So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be…milked (Lorde 3)”. Jennifer’s Body was advertised to a young, heterosexual male audience as two separate pornography films: soft (domestic, wholesome) lesbian porn and hard (aggressive, violent) straight porn, both of which centred Fox as the dominant partner. The erotic aspects of Jennifer and Needy’s relationship that were constructed as a natural investigation of adolescent female friendships (whether the attraction is platonic or otherwise?), and the sexual autonomy of Jennifer conceived of as part of the film’s discussion of sexual assault (why does society think differently about a sexually liberated women’s assault than a less sexually active woman’s?), were refigured to fulfill heterosexual male desires.

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In the film’s marketing, like in the trailer, Jennifer is presented as an untouchable beauty turned viperlike succubus whose inescapable magnetism and sexual perversion wreak havoc in the lives of both female and male teenagers. Pornographic sounding dialogue – as in dialogue that sounds like it could be in a porn production – dominates the trailer, with phrases including “We could play mommy and daddy (0:41)”, “We always share your bed when we have slumber parties (0:49-0:50)”, “How is he tasting these days? (1:06-1:08)” and “I go both ways (1:24)”. Shots of Needy and Jennifer staring longingly at each other tease the possibility of soft lesbian porn, and a close-up of their lips as they are about to kiss propel this (mis)perception of the film’s contents further. To suggest that the film is at the same time, hard straight porn, Jennifer is shown inviting a male student to ‘her’ house, then in an abandoned property she crushes some of his bones, mounts him and after growing monstrous teeth bites down on him, and in other shots is seen unzipping her top to reveal her naked chest in front of one male character, and kissing and then dragging by his feet another.

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The advertising of Jennifer’s Body presents Jennifer at a distance; the audience is not invited to empathize with her as a being, but to observe her and imagine ourselves as one of the characters she engages physically or sexually with (in the case of her interactions with different teenage boys), or pretend to be an in-person witness to the physical and sexual interactions she is having (in the case of her and Needy’s). Relating this thingification of Jennifer’s body and the centrality that that practice has to 20th Century FOX’s perception of what the film is, to Butler’s theory that through individual occurrences new realities can be created, had Jennifer’s Body been marketed to the female audience it was developed for, a newfound form of female representation in film would have emerged. Horror films centred around female protagonists, portraying the particular experiences of women and discussing issues affecting women, that were made by predominantly female production teams, could have become a reality if Jennifer’s Body was advertised ‘correctly’. Throughout the genre’s history females suffering violence for artificial spectacle has been a dominant convention, and until the mid-to-late 2010s with the releases of the women-created Raw (2016), The Love Witch (2016), XX (2017) and Cam (2018), this convention had been invoked and profited upon by heterosexual male producers and directors like the largely unchallenged norm that it was. Had Jennifer’s Body been successful, had it been recognized by society and the industry alike instead of ridiculed like it had been, the representation of women and female suffering in horror would have been viewed as a ‘legitimate’ (profitable, ‘worthy’ to depict on film) practice and the reality of women-made, women-centred and for-women horror films, would have developed earlier.

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The misperception of Jennifer’s Body, like the representation of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and the acting of Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera during their 2003 VMAs performance, embodies like a time capsule the popular understanding of and attitude towards female bisexuality in the 2000s. This thinking of the sexuality is present within the film’s official trailer, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila’s “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls” and the Madonna, Spears and Aguilera performance – each of which were motivated by the theories of ‘female bisexuality is a sexual deviance women participate in to make themselves more desirable to heterosexual men’ and ‘displays of female bisexuality are spectacles that earn visibility and personal gain’.

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While the representations of queerness in popular culture; like bisexuality in the three works re-explored in this retrospection; were predominantly not sympathetic to queer individuals’ wishes nor truthful about queer sexualities and genders, that did not necessitate that they are absolutely detached from queerness and the queer community. Like the Madonna, Britney and Christina performance, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Jennifer’s Body, many depictions of queer subjects and queer actions in 2000s pop culture have been reclaimed by certain queer individuals and communities. These moments are refashioned into moments of iconicity and which give nostalgia. They are cherished for their absurdity, campiness or purely for being an embodiment of the 2000s. Some of these moments are valued for being the experiences which allowed young people struggling with their sexuality or gender to finally recognize their true selves. Thus, while the primary critique of Jennifer’s Body when it premiered was “needs moar bewbs” (Nichols), it, like the Madonna, Aguilera and Spears’ performance and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila have been revitalized as genuinely valuable sites of queer discovery and joy and not solely of ‘atrocious’ representation.

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Bibliography:

20th Century FOX. “Jennifer's Body | Official Trailer | 20th Century FOX.” YouTube, uploaded by 20th Century Studios, 11 Sep. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8azftM5puI.

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Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Out & Out Books, 1978.

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Gleeson, Jules. “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman.’” The Guardian, 7 Sep. 2021, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.

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Kornhaber, Spencer. “The Trope of the Evil Television Bisexual.” The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/tvs-evil-bisexuals-still-live/412786/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2022.

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Nichols, MacKenize. “‘Jennifer’s Body’ Turns 10: Megan Fox, Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama Reflect on Making the Cult Classic.” Variety, 11 Sep. 2019, variety.com/2019/film/news/jennifers-body-10th-anniversary-megan-fox-diablo-cody-1203323111/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2022.

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“Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls.” A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, created by Riley McCormick, season 1, episode 1, 495 Productions, 2007.

 

Sappho is a poet like many scholarly greats from the ancient world, whose identity is entombed in uncertainty, and yet the impact of her works has been so momentous as to provoke prodigious responses all throughout history, from the fervid condemnation of early Christianity to the plaintive yearning of Byzantine scholars; puritanical sanitization during the Victorian era to liberating empowerment in the modern day (Mendelson par. 5). Her ‘Fragment 31’ is one of remarkably minimal texts which have survived transmission through such multitudinous eras of reception and that, which would understandably evoke a myriad of intense emotions from a diverse readership: from the servant of Aphrodite, goddess of love, of a society which did not perceive female homoeroticism as ‘possible’ (“Lesbianism and Queer Female” par. 14), ‘Fragment 31’ represents a surrendering of love and its pursuit to the grips of fear and self-sabotage.

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The scholastic reception and understanding of Fragment 31, much like a majority of Sappho’s body of work, is largely dependent upon the true nature of her perception of and emotions for women, the objects of her infatuation and the primary subjects of her poetry, with scholars who conclude that this nature was in fact erotic and romantic, evaluating the lyrical fragment as an expression of jealousy or representation of unfulfilled desire, and those who theorize such as instead religious worship or mentorship, believing it to be a proclamation of her great overwhelming by Aphrodite (D’Angour 59-60) who she lead a cult for, or of admiration or respect for a young woman under her tutelage (Hallett 450) for she was both a teacher of poetry to female students and a mother to a daughter. Alas I belong to the persuasion of the former critical position, that her fondness was of the Greek eros as opposed to mania, or philia or storge, for throughout her accounted anthology there exists a prominent display of desire and passion akin a homosexual sexuality (such as her recounting of or wanting for physical relations with women), and therefore read Fragment 31 as a lamentation of the poet’s profuse yearning for a woman who for extant obstacles, is forbidden from Sappho’s reach. Precisely, Sappho’s ‘Fragment 31’ represents a precursive severance from the fulfillment of love by the poet due to a perception of that fulfillment being forbidden by society, as expressed through the disconnection of her love from the object of her admiration (the two being separate and immiscible), the graduation of her confessions of emotion into the onslaught of pain they have caused in anticipation of them being lambasted, and the secretness, the keeping close and internal, the specific feelings and desired manifestations of love for and with she who is admired. 

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Sappho’s Fragment 31 could be thought of as two separate, disconnected poems sewn together by a common, consistent theme, overwhelm: in the first two stanzas this overwhelm is of intense admiration, the longing of the poet (or rather the persona the ‘real’ author Sappho is writing as) to participate in affection with the woman of her desire, and in the second two stanzas overwhelm is in the malevolent form of grievous physical pain so dire it causes the persona to near death by the poem’s end. In the third stanza of the fragment, “no: tongue breaks and thin/ fire is racing under skin/ and in eyes no sight and drumming/ fills ears” (9-12), the subject of the poem; the entity considered by its language; shifts from the woman the persona observes in want internally, to the persona herself, demarcating a disjuncture between the physical world of amour in which the woman belongs, and the emotional realm of catastrophe in which the persona belongs. The contents of the lines are symptoms of a great malady, “fire…racing under skin”, “eyes no sight”, “drumming… fills ears”, the poet describing the affects that her observation of the woman has caused her: an introspection of her emotions manifest as illnesses she is either experiencing viscerally or is employing as allegory to quantify how extremely overwhelming her feelings of desire are.

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The woman and Sappho (unless prefaced with the ‘real’ identifier, as will now refer to the persona the real Sappho is speaking as) are both subjects of Fragment 31 but allocated to different planes of being impossible to transgress from one to the other (a poem cannot consider at once physical and emotional entities on the same plane of consideration [observation vs. reflection]); representative of how her love and Sappho are immiscible - they two will never exist together at the same place with one another. Moreover, the physical world in which the object of desire occupies is associated in the poem with a positive connotative essence established by lines like, “to your sweet speaking” (4), “and lovely laughing - oh it” (5) and “puts the heart in my chest on wings” (6), which contrasts against that negative essence of the poet’s emotional realm, represented by the violent imagery of the third stanza; the object of desire, is charming, graceful and uplifting while Sappho’s emotions are infuriating, blinding and volatile. Thus Sappho, believing her feelings of desire to be destructive or corruptive and she whom she desires to be delightful, wonderful, confines each to a separate, impossible to surpass section of Fragment 31 (could be read as the woman existing in [‘accepted by’] society and the poet existing outside of [‘rejected by’] it), for she does not want or will allow her admiration to damage the woman she admires; her unwillingness to pursue the object of her love (or significant fondness) to make fulfilled that adoration in anticipation of the unfavorable consequences which will derive from doing so or attempting to do so.

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Fragment 31 begins with Sappho admiring the object of her desire from afar as a man engages intimately (tangibly, but emphasized in scale to the poet’s yearning) with her, followed by a vulnerable confession of how the woman stirs profound poetic affection within her (Sappho), “and lovely laughing - oh it/ puts the heart in my chest on wings” (6-7), and then an examination of how this affection consumes her capability of personhood, “for when I look at you…no speaking/ is left in me” (8-9). What is initially a celebration of a lover, prominent within the practice of lyric poetry, or a worship of a deity (the desired resembling the characterization of a goddess such as Aphrodite), morphs gruesomely into an exhibition of gradual physical deterioration mirroring the climax or conclusion of a vicious battle scene typific of epic, Sappho narrating in strikingly visual language the violent plight of her mortal form: “and in eyes no sight and drumming/ fills ears” (11-12), “and cold sweat holds me and shaking/ grips me all” (13).

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In evidence of the idea that the fragment is an abandonment of the potentiality of a fulfilled, amorous relationship between admirer and admired by the former in advance of that possibility’s validation in actuality, the gruesome graduation of the stanzas is illustrative of the persona’s initial naïve emotional outburst disintegrating into the legion of condemnation she reasonably perceives or projects she will receive, in the case that she attempts to express it aloud. The poem’s fourth stanza, “and cold sweat holds me and shaking/ grips me all, greener than grass/ I am dead - or almost/ I seem to me” (13-16), is the ultimate shriek of pain resulting from the accumulation of the poet’s prophesizing the myriad of censure or abuse her indicating her sexuality will(/might) amass; in imagining how her affection will be accepted by the world around her, she is afflicted by the onslaught of painful feelings that will inevitably accompany such.

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After considering how her adoration affects her, “for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking/ is left in me” (7-8), she is immediately thrust into worried apprehensions of what would happen if she ever tried to fulfill that wanting, “no: tongue breaks and thin/ fire is racing under skin” (9-10); the passage (from ideological love to societal lambastment) is unacknowledged by the poem, the poet’s psychological shift and the spiral which transpires from it, beneath the text of those two adjacent lines. “I am dead - or almost/ I seem to me” is the condition Sappho eventually occupies once the wealth and intensity of negative response to her natural emotions is evaluated and accounted for - in rationalizing the viability of what she desires (done internal to the character, not disclosed in the fragment), she is perpetually informed of the futility or uselessness of her longing for the unobtainable “lovely-laughing” woman and is consequently lead to defeat: Sappho cannot be alive (living in society) and desiring whom she desires, her reason forces her to break or ‘sever’ from conjoining the two in reality.

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As is formulaic of lyric poetry, Fragment 31 is a private utterance of the poet Sappho to herself: the poem’s events occur within the confines of her mind for although they are (inferably) catalyzed by an observation, the “sweet speaking” woman in interaction with an “equal to gods that man” (1), the components which comprise; the language that initiates; them are produced by the persona herself. Thus the fragment belongs and exists solely to the perception of Sappho; practically, the absence of revelation of the desire confessed within it encompassed primarily in the second stanza, “and lovely laughing – oh it/ puts the heart in my chest on wings/ for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking/ is left in me” (5-8), evokes the idea of secrecy, an intention of keeping personal and concealed the vulnerable truth of one’s profound admiration of another critically, when that admiration is illicit. Contributing to the notion of the poet’s hesitance or even aversion to voicing the emotions of amorousness she wields in particular, are lines 7-8, “for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking/ is left in me” - to the persona this immense fondness and interpersonal communication, are mutually inconceivable, too petrified and intimidated is she to articulate or attempt to articulate, that the prospect of imparting her desire to the object of her desire is unbearable. 

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In analyzing these lines, the absolute unwillingness to transform her feelings to speech presents outright the preliminary amputation of internal affection from the pursuit of externalizing that affection, making manifest a connection or relationship with the woman whom she aspires tremendously, to develop such with - Sappho’s resolute confinement, whether speechlessness intentional or subconscious, of wanting to herself evidences a precursive sabotage, a surrendering to fear of consequence of what she wants. Fragment 31 serves arguably as confirmation (perhaps purposeful reaffirmation on the part of the poet) of reasoning for the preemptive self-hindering of establishing a physical (in-reality) correspondence (romantic, sexual or otherwise) with the woman of admiration: the second stanza is the confession that prefaces the onslaught of pain, almost like an inevitable chain of events - pursuit of desire causes and will cause great suffering and therefore it is beneficial that such is vehemently avoided or refused. The disparity of language between it (the second stanza), and the supplemental stanzas (applicable to the first stanza but not directly contributive to this point) attests: the former is blissful, joyous and ethereal, “lovely”, “laughing”, “heart”, “wings”, and the latter is inverse, sinister, malevolent and grotesque, “drumming”, “shaking”, “grips”, “dead”, outlining a monstrous cause-and-effect between communication and punishment. The linguistic divergence between light, ‘good’ tonality and dark, ‘evil’ tonality extends meta-textually when the real Sappho’s (who as is natural, embodies the same persona across a certain sect of congruent works) (preserved) anthology (Sappho 1-355) is consulted: the author customarily applies light-tonality language to her works, that which signals beauty, femininity, gracefulness (Johnson par. 4), thus the disproportionality of dark-tonality in Fragment 31, points to a grave direness of pursuing the poem’s subject.

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In understanding Sappho’s Fragment 31 as a representation of an ostracized minority - in a highly and enforced, hierarchical social structure - surrendering her opportunity to obtain her greatest aspiration that likewise is (one of) her most natural human need(s), connection, to evade the endangerment of that as primitive as her survival, poetry as an expression of that which is forbidden from existence otherwise and its cause, the index between sexuality, womanhood and liberation, and authority, order and repression, is foregrounded. As has been established, Fragment 31 is fraught with significant dichotomies - Sappho and the woman she desires, pleasure and pain, the internal and the external - , each ruled by the censorship, ‘forbidden’, of female and queer sexuality; as much as the poem is intentionally introspective and centering the persona it is ultimately reflective of the society in which it was created in (whose foundations described above have persisted through history of societies), and the opportunities not solely in regards to sexuality, but in life, for female and queer identities.

When disallowed liberty, autonomy and possibility in life, poetry and art, imitations, become the vessel through which personal desires and ambitions can be realized - queer sexuality, female freedom and defiance, and goals unachievable by circumstance, can be expressed, participated and explored respectively; imitation begins to amass a greater importance than reality when reality is contentious with or antagonistic of what one seeks to achieve - Sappho cannot have the woman she loves/wants but can imagine so reflexively (Fragment 31 is the drawing from this opportunity to the truth).

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The rebellion of female sexuality forced to be confined to the restraints of poetry and revolution of female poetry, a male-owned medium which granted status and power in Ancient Greece, draw dialectic focus to the repression of women, queer people, and queer women in society, and the (thus necessary) exploitation of artistic expression as personhood (as identity) and as ‘fiction’ through which that personhood can be protected and used, to achieve the means necessary of partly transgressing repression (as opportunity). In Fragment 31 Sappho the persona as representation of queer women throughout the history of societies prohibited from being themselves lest they accept severe punishment, is indulgent in her expression of admiration then likewise mournful of the fatality this admiration must undergo as it proceeds from the safety of art to the judgment and rule of real life; the poem as has been argued is a severance of love or deep fondness before action (upon that love/fondness), but, as its last line hints, “But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty”, that illegality can persevere in bounty in imitation. Though the intimate ‘truths’ of the real Sappho are untold to (our) contemporary accounts, it is essential that she was a woman who admired women and wrote about that admiration (inventing a novel form of writing, lyric poetry, to do so) - she represented a prominent aspect of her person ordered out of experience, through art, and in circulating her poetry, performing her art (presented as fiction, non-reality), accomplished liberty; she could communicate her sexuality in reality; autonomy; established herself as an authority of poetry, granting an independence; and opportunity; she transcended the meager, subjugated roles for women in Ancient Greece.

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Therefore, it is valuable to consider the conditions of Fragment 31, its (poetry’s) refuge and metamorphosis of suffering, when decoding the fragment: that one’s self-ordered isolation from that which they are forbidden from being can be through art, but in reality (as an expression of reality) cannot, and thusly must be severed from the individual before they move from the internal or imitative to the external or experienced (in Plato’s terminology from the state of imitation to craft). Moreover in reading the poem as a discussion of reflection and revolution; non-adhering to the order allowed by society, ridding oneself of crucial parts of personhood to attain adherence, diverting non-adherence to imitation and benefitting from society; the complexity both of the works’ internal (personal) and external (societal) representative qualities can be studied in a perhaps novel context or to provide supplemental layers of meaning to traditional receptions, of self (Sappho) versus society - desire and jealousy - or even of self and society - worship (lending a queer lens) and tutelage (feminist lens).

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Eros as I had used to introduce the division of study of (the real) Sappho’s poetry (that which accompanies the versus society narrative and is argued against by and society theories) I advocate as the nature of her admiration of women, and have implemented as the foundation of this literary analysis, is a theme bountiful in lyric poetry, essentially crucial to the genre: its portrayal, often reflects a similar precursive severance from the possibility of its fulfillment by the poet (Sullivan 15-21) - “love/desire” in Ancient Greece, conceived in partial relation to the antagonistic concept of wanting, admiration at a distance from the object of desire. Contrary to Sappho a majority of the lyric poets in Ancient Greece were men; all of her contemporaries, poets perceived in her same immaculate echelon (“Nine Lyric Poets” par. 1); and therefore the eros represented in their poems would have been accepted by society (whether the subject was a woman or a young man - a submissive to their dominant); the perspective of representation as the expression of identity which cannot be expressed in reality, makes representation and by apposite extension, lyric poetry, an agent of emancipation which provides queer and female poets identical privileges to their privileged (in society) male counterparts temporarily, within the form’s confines.

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This final consideration of representation and how it engages with (real/persona) Sappho’s poetry as explored through Fragment 31 and its illustration of the anticipatory fragmentation of homosexual eros, of a woman poet to a woman subject, might explicate the diversity of critical reception it and the author, have summoned throughout the history of societies the work(s) survived: if the poem is an imitation of love/desire, the craft it imitates is either natural or blasphemous; female homosexuality can or cannot be; for of the ultimate truth the craft represents it is at once a likeness or a falsehood.

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Bibliography:

D’Angour, Armand. “Love’s Battlefield: Rethinking Sappho Fragment 31.” Erôs in Ancient Greece, edited by Ed Sanders, Chiara Thumiger, Christopher Carey and Nick J. Lowe, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 59-72.

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Hallett, Judith P. “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality.” Signs, vol. 4, no. 3, 1979, www.jstor.org/stable/3173393. Accessed 29 Oct. 2021.

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Johnson, Marguerite. “Guide to the classics: Sappho, a poet in fragments.” The Conversation, 12 Feb 2018, theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-sappho-a-poet-in-fragments-90823. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

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“Lesbianism and Queer Female Sexuality in Ancient Greece.” WordPress, 2018 Nov. 27, womeninantiquity.wordpress.com/2018/11/27/lesbianism-and-queer-female-sexuality-in-ancient-greece/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2021.

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Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Girl, Interrupted: Who was Sappho?” NewYorker.com, The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted. Accessed 29 Oct. 2021.

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“Nine Lyric Poets.” Google Arts & Culture, artsandculture.google.com/entity/nine-lyric-poets/m08kgxd?hl=en. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

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Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson, Vintage Canada, 2013.

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Sullivan, Shirley D. “Love influences Phrenes in Greek lyric poetry.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 58, no. 1, 1983, doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/00397678308590767. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

 

Eating disorders are a subject that I have engaged incredibly intimately with: as someone who has struggled with anorexia and bulimia myself, and has witnessed many of my also, female friends cope with them throughout our adolescences, the matter is one in which I have attempted to understand thoroughly, for years. Though the media has the propensity, for depicting them as either, inane and glamorous (think: the ‘disordered popular girl’ trope), almost desirable, or, depressing and ghastly (ie. 2011’s,‘To the Bone’), often cliché, the formation and persistence of Eds, in adolescent girls is a complex and sensitive phenomenon, that more than deserves, to be considered critically.

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What follows, is a detailed study of the factors as to why eating disorders develop in teenage girls so inordinately than in any other identity demographic, according to research accumulated from medical, psychological and health professionals, to ideally, better comprehend such an unfortunately common illness that still, is seldom authentically explored outside of its, field.

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Toxic Parents:

Since a teen girl’s parents are her first agents of socialization, the very first opinions she forms about herself and the world around her will be heavily impacted by them; thus, if they routinely critique her appearance, or are unwilling to encourage her self-confidence, than she will be easily susceptible to unhealthy ideas about beauty and self-worth.

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Non-Constructive Criticism

As society convinces teenage girls that their self-worths are decided by men, they are particularly prone to developing disordered thoughts or behaviours if their male family members are the ones to put the pressures for perfection on them: if their male relatives think negatively of their appearances, then they will obsess over self-image, believing approval to be the only thing that determines worth. Helene Kerry, Kerri Boutelle, Kevin Thompson and Patricia van den Berg; all academics with university degrees in either medicine or psychology; studied how casual criticisms of an adolescent’s appearance impacted their body image, as well as whether or not they were more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviours and how familial teasing influenced their self-esteem.

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The study concluded that teenagers who are teased by their fathers and at least one other sibling were heavily disposed to body dissatisfaction, self comparisons, thin-ideal internalization, restrictive eating, bulimic behaviours, low self-esteem and depression, whereas those who are teased by their mothers are only disposed to depression. When a male relative; specifically a father or a sibling; teases a girl or places a pressure of perfection upon her that she cannot live up to, she is bound to develop an unhealthy relationship with her body as she believes all men - and to an extent all of society - view her in a negative lighting; thus pushing her towards obsessive relationships with food that she believes determine how worthy of love she is.

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Not Giving Support

A teenage daughter with a mother who is unwilling to reassure her that she is “enough as she is” nor encourage her to develop a positive body image, is extremely prone to fascinations with weight loss as all she has been taught about body image will have been by society and the media, and thus she will presume that the only way for her to be pretty or attract attention is to be skinny. Hilary L. McBride; a registered clinical counsellor with a Master’s degree in psychology; published a book analysing how a mother’s criticisms and toxic behaviours can lead to self-esteem issues and difficulties in relationships for her daughter, as well as why a mother’s opinions of her daughter’s self-worth help to create the habits she will default to when thinking of her own body image.

 

For example; if a daughter has an anxious attachment to her mother where she fears being abandoned and thinks highly of others but lowly of herself, then she is easily susceptible to internalizing images of thin women from the media, and carrying them around with her as constant reminders that she is inadequate or not good enough: thus showing the link between toxic parenting and body image. Conclusively, an adolescent daughter who has not been given the foundations to build love on by her mother nor has been reassured by her that she will not be physically or emotionally abandoned, will be highly likely to struggle with body image, self-esteem and weight/beauty as she will never have been given the proper opportunity to develop a healthy concept of self-worth.

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Clique Mentalities

One of the biggest challenges facing teenage girls is fitting in and finding a place within society, and therefore the creation and maintenance of a functioning friend group is viewed as a priority: if a girl’s friends pressure her into behaviours or expect her to have the same opinions they have, she is more likely to give in than protest, because sacrificing her morals is easier than losing her pack.

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Peer Pressure

Society and the media have engrained within teenage girls that the skinnier they are, the more well-liked and widely accepted they are to be by their peers, and therefore any conversations about appearance and body weight had with their friends, as well as body comparisons made to their friends will further strengthen their internalization of the thin-ideal of beauty. Nihaya A. Al-shevab, Tamer Gharaibeh and Khalid Kheirallah - all registered nurses with Bachelor’s degrees in medicine - conducted a study to understand how support from peers regarding the thin ideal of beauty reinforces the internalization of this ideal, and why peers discussing how they achieved the thin ideal encourages others to adopt the same behaviours they have performed.

 

The study discovered that adolescents develop disordered eating behaviours through either message; where one is teased and receives negative comments about their appearance, interactions; where one conducts body comparisons between their body weight and body image and another’s, or likeability; where one believes that their peers would like them more if they were skinnier. An adolescent girl who struggles with body dissatisfaction and the internalization of the thin-ideal of beauty will develop disordered eating behaviours through social cognitive theory by remembering the conversations she has had with her friends about appearance and body weight, and mimicking whichever unhealthy behaviours her thin-ideal friends’ have performed in order to achieve their size.

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Group Like-Mindedness

Within friend groups of adolescent girls, it is common for each party to engage in the suppression of feelings, internalization of the thin-ideal and comparisons of appearances in similar ways to one another, thus illustrating how a teenage girl’s peer group affects her behaviours both directly (through conversation) and indirectly (through observation). Hemal Stroff and J. Kevin Thompson; both of whom have Ph.D. degrees in psychology; published a study in the Journal of Health & Psychology that aimed to determine how exactly an adolescent girl is influenced by her peer group’s opinions of themselves by analysing how comparable body images are between friends, and if there are any common trends in eating behaviours amongst friend groups.

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They discovered that while there are no definitive conclusions on whether or not female friends share one another’s body images, there were results indicating that adolescent girls within the same friendship group share similar levels of self-esteem and body dissatisfaction, as well as have similar chances of developing controlled eating issues or disordered eating habits. Since the conclusions of the study proved that adolescent female friends idolize thinness and perceive their self-worths in identical ways to one another, it is highly likely that within a given peer group there is a communal attitude towards beauty, as well as an overall consensus regarding food that each party is expected to agree with, in order to get along smoothly with the group’s majority

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Social Media's Unrealism 

The second most influential agent on a teen girl; after her agents of socialization; is the media, and specifically in today’s society social media: easily accessible profile pages with carefully crafted feeds and personas that blur the lines between reality and fiction with the help of editing tools like Photoshop and Facetune that routinely promote extremes or falsehoods as normal realities.

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Normalized Photoshop

Social media has encouraged a culture to develop wherein before posting any image, the editing of one’s imperfections is expected; ie. removing blemishes, adding makeup, whitening teeth, cropping body parts, changing hip sizes, thinning thighs, reshaping the nose, editing hair and altering facial structures; in an attempt to look as flawless as humanly possible. Kolleen Duffy - a graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University working towards her Master’s degree in psychology - submitted her thesis on the links between body image and body satisfaction, and the frequency of photo activities like manipulation, investment and editing done to photos that were routinely posted to social media.

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The study concluded that the more dissatisfied an individual is with their body overall, the more likely they are to manipulate their photos, and additionally, the more dissatisfied a person is specifically with either their face or their stomach, the more frequently they are to edit those exact body parts before posting photos online. An insightful observation of the study was how participants often lied about what manipulations they had done to their photos: Duffy trained a blind observer how to evaluate specific edits on images, and after all the participant images were evaluated, discrepancies emerged between how many edits they endorsed (a mean of 2.31) and how many the observer actually discovered (a mean of 4.04).

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Overly Curated Content

Social media has an extremely strong influence over an adolescent’s body dissatisfaction, eating patterns and self-concept, as they are given complete accesses to - staged - images of thin models, thin social media stars and thin peers, thereby giving them the ability to compare their own bodies to those of skinner posters and thus enabling them to feel inadequate in their personal self-image. Greta Gleissner - a licensed psychotherapist and the founder of “Eating Disorder Recovery Specialists” - published an article in the Huffington Post explaining how social media fosters an environment that has the potential to encourage and strengthen eating disorders by exposing those with disordered behaviours to online content that promotes the idea of the “perfect or ideal body.”

 

Social media is full of carefully curated food-related content like meal decisions and exercise regimes created by extremely fit people with “perfect, ideal bodies”, and with such a saturated stream of in-shape individuals showing off their very healthy habits, comes a heightened sense of stress and anxiety surrounding one’s own - potentially less healthy - food choices and exercise routines. Since social media is so popular, entire peer groups often consume the exact same online content, and when all of this content is posted by the same kinds of creators with identically fit bodies, the idea of the “perfect, ideal body type”, becomes internalized within the group; and eventually members of the group will begin working towards this ideal, and encouraging others to do the same.

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Impossible Beauty Standards

The dangers of unrealistic beauty standards are prevalent more than ever in today’s society, as mass media continues to promote perfectly edited women as the norms for female beauty; with plastic surgery and modelling industries helping to fuel these standards by normalizing dangerous and labour-intensive procedures that allow women to finally achieve these expectations, albeit at a cost.

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Expected Plastic Surgery

In today’s society, plastic surgeries have become a prerequisite for those wanting to enter the beauty and fashion industries, and thus cosmetic surgeries have risen over the last five years, with the most popular procedures being related to the body like breast augmentations, liposuctions, nose reshaping, eyelid surgeries and tummy tucks. Chiara Townley - an expert health and wellness writer - published an article in Medical News Today, compiling a list of statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons that illustrate how plastic surgery has peaked in modern times, as well as what procedures have contributed to its rise and which factors have encouraged the populace to turn to such clinical means in the first place.

 

Minor, minimally invasive procedures like Botox, soft tissue fillers and chemical peels have risen in recent times as well, with the total of all clinical, cosmetic surgeries carried out in the United States in 2018 equating to 18 million - more than a quarter of a million from the year before; and mostly attributed to the low-self esteem and low levels of life-satisfaction recorded by the patients. Additionally, patients that rated their attractiveness as low, but their media exposure as high were more likely to undergo cosmetic surgeries; believing the procedures to have benefits; than those who had low exposure to the media and rated their religious beliefs as high; as they believed that their religious beliefs directly contrasted with those of plastic surgery.

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The Modelling Industry

The modelling industry is notorious for impacting the body satisfactions of adolescent girls, as those who routinely observe slender-bodied models are more susceptible to negative body images, a desire to lose weight and the belief that they are overweight even if they fall within a normal weight range, than those who casually view average-size or plus-size individuals and models. Two certified doctors: Ann M. Morris and Debra K. Katzman, published a paper in Paediatrics & Child Health that analysed why exposure to unrealistic body images in the media; specifically in television, movies and magazines; negatively impacts teenage self-perceptions, with an emphasis on why models in magazines lead to body dissatisfaction, a drive for thinness and controlled eating.

 

Their research showed that since the 1970s, the female beauty ideal portrayed in the media has become so thin and lean that the models in Western society advertised as having “perfect and ideal bodies”, are in actuality underweight, and therefore the teenage girls who view them and internalize their bodies as desirable are forced to turn to dangerous weight-loss practices themselves. The media and modelling industry are definitely agents that inspire disordered eating behaviours in youth, as teenage girls who regularly read fashion magazines are more likely to have at some point dieted or participated in a weight-loss exercise program, and those who idolize thinness because they want to look like the women on television and in movies, are more likely to begin purging meals.

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Citations:

Al-shevab, N. A., Gharaibeh, T., & Kheirallah, K. (2018). Relationship between Peer Pressure  

and Risk of Eating Disorders among Adolescents in Jordan. Journal of Obesity, 42(9),  

1028–1034. doi: 10.1155/2018/7309878 

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Duffy, K. (2019). Picture, Edit, Post, Repeat: Photo Editing, Social Media, Body Image and  

Personality Variables (Master’s thesis, Middle Tennessee State University). Retrieved  

from  

https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/bitstream/handle/mtsu/5889/Duffy_mtsu_0170N_11132.pdf 

?sequence=1 

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Gleissner, G. (2017, October 1). Social Media and its Effect on Eating Disorders. Huffington  

Post. Retrieved from  

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/social-media-and-its-effect-on-eating-disorders_b_59134 

3bce4b0e3bb894d5caa 

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Keery, H., Boutelle, K., van den Berg, P., & Thompson, J. K. (2005). The impact of  

appearance-related teasing by family members. Journal of Adolescent Health, 37(1),  

120-127. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2004.08.015 

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McBride, H. L. (2017). Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as  

We Are. Retrieved from  

https://books.google.ca/books?id=mKQ2DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage 

&q&f=false 

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Morris, A. M., & Katzman, D. K. (2003). The impact of the media on eating disorders in  

children and adolescents. Paediatrics Child Health, 8(5), 287-289. doi:  

10.1093/pch/8.5.287 

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Shroff, H., & Thompson, J. K. (2006). Peer Influences, Body-image Dissatisfaction, Eating  

Dysfunction and Self-esteem in Adolescent Girls. Journal of Health Psychology, 11(4),  

533-551. doi: 10.1177/1359105306065015 

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Townley, C. (2019, March 17). Cosmetic surgery is on the rise, new data reveal. Medical News  

Today. Retrieved from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/