Author: Zoe de Leon

By Cameron Lipp

Dublin, 1952. Three years before he will create his cat, Erwin Schrödinger warns an unsuspecting audience of his peers that what he is about to posit will “seem lunatic.” He describes a quantum superposition, the principle that a system of atoms or photons can exist in multiple states at the same time. Schrödinger believes that his equations and theories point to a shocking, almost inconceivable reality: there are multiple histories to this universe that are “not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously.” It certainly does sound ludicrous, even 70 years later. What Schrödinger never could have guessed was that Benedict Cumberbatch in a cape would be addressing the same metaphysical question in something cryptically known as the “MCU.”

I found it odd this year that two mainstream movies in theaters simultaneously explained the mechanics of a reality shaped by multiple concurrent timelines and/or universes: Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness delves into these concepts, as did indie cinema darling Everything Everywhere, All At Once. I felt an onset of déjà vu. Or perhaps I was in another dimension?! No, just kidding. I will not be comparing the films (though we all know which one is better), but simply noting their simultaneity as an indicator of a cultural shift. Doctor Strange and Evelyn Wang are not the only two characters to traverse the multiverse with us. Other recent adventurers include The Avengers, Rick and Morty, and Dr. Who.

Our generation is well-equipped to talk about meta. We use it in our everyday lives, sometimes to poke fun at pretentious indie kids, other times to explain a mind-blowing twist in a film or show, and sometimes when we’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest tragedy. Meta media (as coined by the renowned computer scientists Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg) is defined as the new relationships developing between form and content as media and technology develop. While it has a broad application, here let’s narrow it down to instances like Ferris Bueller looking right into our eyes and saying, “they bought it.” 

There is a new sect of meta-media hitting the scene, one which I will simply call Multiversal Media. (I know it’s on the nose, but you try and come up with a name that doesn’t sound corny as hell. Quantum Media? Whatever.) This new wave of art and media often features multiverses but is not limited to this. Multiversal Media features any sort of protagonist exploring a series of changes to their contextual, physical, and most importantly thematic surroundings. They may not be going through universes. They can also travel through dreams, time periods, planets––anything that provides a space for a new contextual and thematic change. Think Rick and Morty, Infinity Train, the recent reboot of Quantum Leap, Dr. Who, Inception, Ready Player One, and Happy Death Day. All of the characters in these media go through significant contextual changes in the rules, themes, and realities in which they initially begin. Undeniably there has been an upsurge in Metaversal Media in Hollywood, whether conscious or not. Why this pattern? Where is all this media coming from? Unfortunately, the answer lies in Vine (RIP). Hold your nose.

Almost one decade ago, the innovative social media outlet Vine opened its digital doors to millions. The platform was a revolution in entertainment. A six-second recording limit relegated any form of entertainment to bite-size increments that could be gobbled like popcorn. Vine’s lifespan was equally short-lived, as three years later Twitter announced that the app was to be discontinued indefinitely. But the damage was done. Vine had proved to the world that six seconds was enough. It marked a trend in decreasing attention span and increasing phone usage that only continued to worsen as the social media giant TikTok rose from Vine’s ashes––bigger, stronger, and here to stay. Swiping through TikTok often feels like a portal into another dimension. With every swipe surge we microdose other people’s lives. One second I’m with a Chinese laborer live-streaming themselves making toys on a factory’s conveyor belt for hours, and after the next swipe is a multi-millionaire taking me on a tour through her high-rise penthouse in Berlin. The context is non-essential. We enter another paradigm with the swipe of a finger. It is this constant shifting of culture, context, and content that so often reminds Gen Z that there are other lives out there. How often do we think of what else we could be doing right now? How often do we daydream about all of the wildly different paths our lives could take? Gen Z is more concerned with such things than any other generation before it. 

It’s no secret that the internet has globalized and sped up the world like no other event in history. The evolution of media and art has been an exponential compacting, compartmentalizing, and abstracting of ideas and information into smaller and smaller boxes, posing an enormous threat to media like movies and television (which are now getting a taste of their own medicine). And, at the risk of being too poetic with the analogies, just as the Impressionists arose from the invention of the camera, so too rises Multiversal Media from the traditional. When extinction looms, there is nowhere left to turn but evolution.

In order to conform with a changing society, these films and television shows are thriving through their specific catering to the attentively challenged. In an interview with Salon, Daniel Kwan, one of the directors of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, talked about the film’s relationship with ADHD, and how it even prompted him to get diagnosed: “When we started writing, we were like, ‘Oh, we should probably do a little bit of research about ADHD. Maybe the main character is undiagnosed and they don’t know it.’” As a Zoomer with ADHD, Everything Everywhere felt like a spiritual manifesto to how I feel all the time––how often I feel flung out of my boring office chair and into a distant daydream, just like Evelyn Wang. Multiversal Media provides this kind of maximalism for the masses. It sucks you in with a protagonist as an axle, and spins the context around them, scratching the itch that every iPhone addict needs. Every jump through a parallel reality is a swipe up, a brief little vignette into another style, texture, theme, world, person, anything, everywhere. This media is naturally more palatable and exciting for the modern viewer. 

What truly thrives in Multiversal Media is parody. Often many of these shows and movies utilize, and sometimes hinge on, meta-narrative and tropes. The work of TV writer and producer Dan Harmon is the quintessential author of these works. Harmon’s first real foray into Multiversal Media was Community, which first aired in 2009. Community served as an early prototype for Multiversal Media, which explains why it has grown to be a pop-culture staple with Gen Z a decade later. The show began as a simple sitcom featuring a cast of quirky community college characters, but under Dan Harmon’s vision quickly became a vessel for parody, each episode a replica of some trope in film or television. 

From a methodical parody of and homage to the standard Scorcese mobster films, to a blatant admission to utilizing the infamously lazy “bottle episode” of television writing, Community nails pop culture with scathing indictments of tropes and cliches in modern media. Harmon’s Rick and Morty takes parody even further. There’s a reason that these two shows are beloved by a generation of the most media-literature people in the history of this civilization. Generation Z’s lives are so ensconced in media and stories that we are immunized to genre and cliché from an early age. From a young age, we have been taught to treat everything on the internet with a grain of salt. This translates to bigger screens as well. This generation is more conscious of what is behind the screen than any other before it. This is what makes the explorations of parody and Multiversal Media so appealing to them. 

Given the trend towards increasing meta-narrative in our media, it’s understandable to be afraid of what is to come. But I see the meta and multiversal as an artistic era, which like all eras will have a counter. There comes a point when meta-narrative becomes as dull and lazy as what it parodies, and it won’t be long before viewers demand more sincerity in entertainment again. Or not. We could just as easily see films and television wrap themselves deep in metafiction and multiversal media, refusing to ever come out of hiding again. We’ll just have to wait and see.

By Julia Keikilani Edwards

Taylor Swift has yet again incited online discourse. This is not a new phenomenon—since her debut in 2004, America’s singer-songwriter sweetheart has consistently reaffirmed her position in ever-changing pop culture through tactics that have paid off in irrefutable stardom. Be it her country-goes-pop transition that allowed her to continue to dominate music charts, her recent projects to take back the rights to her own albums, or her critically acclaimed extended release of her song “All Too Well,” Swift’s relevancy has remained steadfast for over a decade, and it is the product of her constant innovation. As a result, every few months, there is almost always something new to talk about with Taylor. 

In October, the newest topic was brought to my attention through a text message that read, “apparently Taylor Swift is fatphobic,” alongside a link to her music video “Anti-Hero” on YouTube. Such a brazen claim was enough of a push to get me to pull up the video and see for myself. The lead single from her most recent album Midnights, “Anti-Hero” follows Swift as she sings, screams, and dances around her home while tormented by an evil-twin version of herself. This sinister Swift twin is meant to be the embodiment of her destructive behavior, a sort of self-saboteur, a human embodiment of her toxic thoughts. 

Midnights itself is an allegory for this same reflection on self torture––one writer documented the star’s explanation that the thirteen tracks on the album represent thirteen distinct sleepless nights throughout her career. This album is Swift at her most vulnerable, sharing pivotal moments in which sleep had evaded her by either triumph or tribulation. 

The “Anti-Hero” music video is a glimpse into the latter of these two. The two Taylors, the Saboteur and the Real, act out the songwriter and director’s cognitive dissonance from a sleepless night in which she reckons with the public reception of her own contradictory behavior. 

The song begins with a moment of reflection for Real Taylor: I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser. Real Taylor is struggling to reconcile the image she has of herself against the less flattering celebrity image created by public criticism throughout her immense success. Even before Saboteur Taylor arrives on screen, Real Taylor is suffering at the hands of her symbolic anxieties, the results of growing older but not wiser. She screams and sprints away from bedsheet ghosts, symbols of the people no longer in her life. She dials a rotary phone for help only to discover that the line has been––gasp!––cut. She books it to the front door to escape from her wretched reality, and opens the door to Saboteur Taylor, the smiling manifestation of her invasive shadow of anxiety, a blonde mirror that sings, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!

 This song is a response to those of us asking to understand the methodology behind the Swift strategy to pursue the narrative of persecution. Swift’s constant relevancy has not been exclusively a product of the aforementioned reinventions; a major strategy that has preserved her popularity is maintaining her image as a constant victim. Taylor Swift was disrespected by Kanye West at the 2009 VMAs; Swift was famously betrayed by a close friend in 2014’s  “Bad Blood” music video, rumored to be Katy Perry. Swift was wronged yet again by Kanye West in 2016, this time with Kim Kardashian, when he released his controversial song “Famous” that jabs at Swift. Swift spoke out in 2019 with her song “The Man” to express how she has not been given enough credit as a female artist. Even in the “Anti-Hero” music video, Saboteur Taylor instructs Actual Taylor to take notes from a chalkboard that reads, “EVERYONE WILL BETRAY YOU.” 

As B.D. McClay writes in The Outline, several successful figures maintain their success on the idea that it is always subject to scrutiny, and explains this construct of prosecution is a power play on Swift’s part. “Swift is always being betrayed by somebody, or, in some cases, anticipating such betrayal,” he says. “Nobody needed to be told that she keeps a list of enemies. She is always rising—above the haters, up from the dead, in fame—even when she doesn’t seem to have any space left to rise to.” 

“Anti-Hero” is yet another installment of Taylor Swift: The Victim Rises. However, this time she now occupies the roles of both the betrayed and the betrayer. Taylor Swift is no hero, yet not a villain. She is an anti-hero. She is complicated, tortured, contradictory, paradoxical. She is the problem and she’s not afraid to say it. She is so real, so vulnerable. But is she fatphobic?

Back to the music video. I’m watching as Real Taylor is being tortured by Saboteur Taylor around the kitchen, through the living room, and finally into the bathroom. I keep my eyes peeled for any indication of what my friend’s text could be referencing. In the midst of pastel pink and teal decor, Actual Taylor steps on a scale. Ah. The camera pans above the weight indicator to display the verdict. It calibrates in a whirl, and rather than Swift’s weight as a number, the word “FAT” appears in the viewfinder. As the word swivels back and forth on the scale, she sings: I’ll stare directly in the sun but never in the mirror. The scale begins to settle, and her fat fate is sealed as the word in all its uppercase glory lands bullseye on the red marker. Real Taylor has been sentenced to FAT! Saboteur Taylor bends down to look at the ruling. Once they lock eyes, Saboteur Taylor shakes her head to reinforce her disappointment. 

After poor reception and requests from those that found it inappropriate, the “FAT ” scale shot from the music video was removed after just a few days. Taylor Swift’s fat sentence has been overruled! All is well, the tree made no sound since the video of it falling got taken down and no one can look it up to hear it, right? 

That is unless you’re fat, saw the original video, and are now left with the irreversible impact of watching one of the most influential musical artists of all time use the description of your body as a target for her own thin self loathing.

Taylor Swift may have been taught to hate her body as a result of indoctrinated fatphobia; most of us have. Swift may have chosen the word “fat” as a way of critiquing this internalized hatred, to show solidarity with all of us that have learned to loathe our image. Though this may be true, the critical difference is that Swift merely learned to hate a hypothetical version of her body that has never existed, a version that is an everyday living reality for actual fat human beings. Swift is incapable of understanding what it’s like to inhabit the body she grew up learning to hate because she has never lived in it. As a thin woman, it is impossible for Swift to reclaim this word without lacking key substance, without lacking sincere weight, without lacking the same intricate rage and exhaustion that comes with trying to make a home in the very body you have been hardwired to fear. 

The controversy over the scale scene in the “Anti-Hero” music video is yet another example of how thin people have shoved fat people out of conversations about eating disorders in order to mask thin victimhood as liberation; when fat people call this behavior out, we endure the trauma of their loathing. Our bodies become the haunting sign of their biggest fears. Our descriptors pop up on scales in music videos, and when we attempt to explain why it’s more damaging than productive, we get silenced, we get invalidated, our tweets get reported, our replies get saturated with cruelty. The content is erased rather than acknowledged, and we’re left wondering what to make of it all as the perpetrator remains the victim.

As a fat person, watching the original version of “Anti-Hero” is just one of countless memories I have of thin people weaponizing my body to project their own insecurities onto me. This past summer, while studying abroad in Paris, I was eating lunch when a woman sat down next to me and berated me about my meal choice and my body for the sake of my health for almost an hour. I told her I was happy and unconcerned with food or my weight. She looked me in the eyes and asked, “How could someone so fat be happy?”

I am over three thousand miles away from where this woman ruined my lunch, but watching a music video that poses the same insidious question:

How could anyone fat be happy?

Taylor Swift answers that in the original version of this music video—one can’t. At least not according to her, to her Real Taylor self, to her Saboteur Taylor self. Taylor Swift is miserable and tortured at the idea of being fat, and by using that label to show her discontent, she suggests to fat people that we must be miserable and tortured, too.

 I am no stranger to eating disorders. I know Taylor Swift has opened up about her struggle with hers in the past with Variety and Elle, and even delves into her strained relationship with food in her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana.” I’m not here to invalidate any of Swift’s experiences or feelings. I’m not here to question the credibility of her sufferings. What I would like to know is how fat people who saw the original version of this music video are supposed to feel, knowing that one of Taylor Swift’s biggest fears is to look like us.

Does this make Taylor Swift fatphobic? Social media figure and social justice advocate Victoria Abraham (@fatfabfeminist) argues it does. In a Twitter thread with a screenshot of the two Taylors in the bathroom scene with the “FAT” scale marker, Abraham poignantly condemns Swift’s actions no matter her intentions: “demonizing the word fat while never having the experience of living in a fat body? Fatphobic.” 

Abraham’s thread incited a plethora of people disagreeing with this claim in order to absolve Swift of her mistake; at one point, the thread was even removed from Twitter. Abraham even replies later with a disclaimer that she never intended to cancel or attack Swift, but wanted to start a conversation about how the singer’s message demonizes the word “fat” at the expense of real fat people’s well being. 

To Abraham’s point: Taylor Swift has never been fat. She’s never had to face the same oppression that fat people endure as a marginalized community. She has never struggled to fit in a chair nor felt the humiliation of being reminded how the world around her was built to ignore fat bodies like hers. She has never faced constant reminders that her fat dad died of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, nor that she needs to be careful because she’s his fat daughter, so the same fate must be inevitable. She has never wanted a T-shirt from her favorite loveable country-pop singer as a kid only to find out there weren’t any big enough for her fat body. 

With no statement out, staying silent as a response to the chance to critically engage in a highly nuanced topic like fatphobia is yet another example of the Swift Sidestep Strategy. Swift has neither condemned nor defended her actions, merely concealed them from further observation. It’s almost bureaucratic, no statement as her statement, and Swift even sings of this sort of contradictory behavior in the second pre-chorus of “Anti-Hero”: Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism / Like some kind of congressman? Perhaps her choice to triage her own inculpability over the traumas of actual fat people is truly what makes Miss Americana akin to our politicians: unwilling to speak on social reform beyond the occasional defense of her own privileged dog in the fight, all the while profiting off of these declarations of lucidity as she dresses them up as indicators of sincere change.

By Maia Caleca

When I’m tired of being conscious, I open TikTok. Between polemic injustice, climate change, and the pandemic, it’s justified to want to shut down every now and again, to let two hours of my life go on without me. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment. Social media contains not people but different appearances of the same content: reproductions of circulated aesthetics, cryptic posts in a language that speaks through the familiarity of images, reflections of the masses instead of real self-expression. People signify who they are through their association with predetermined aesthetics. There is not a self, but an idea. And being an idea isn’t a reprieve when the idea is presented by someone else, an Other, and sold to you for metrics. The Other looks at you and you look back. 

Influencers, virtual Others to our being, remain relevant as long as their followers continue to replicate them. We consume their content—turning them into an object—and want to be consumed as they are. We consume each other, obfuscating any form of subjective self to be more appetizing. Influencer culture has shattered the notion of the self and its relation to others, piecing it back together in a commodified reflection. Circulated in a hierarchy of value determined by external forces, the image of the self is a commodity, a type of content then consumed through the social media interface. You consume the influencer’s content—which is an object of their self—and attempt to reproduce it, to appropriate their success and cultural value for yourself. The self-determining gaze of others has become desired. And in this replication, you offer yourself to be consumed as well. We consume each other, participating in and propagating a mediatized cannibalism.

There’s a trend of cannibalism in the media mirroring this urge. The recently released romantic drama Bones And All (2022) is, on one hand, a beautiful love story about two outsiders finding a home in one another as they roadtrip across the US; on the other, it is a story of two outsiders working together to seduce and devour strangers, not always stopping to clean the blood coagulating on their chins. There’s been reports of people fainting at screenings or getting sick at the grotesqueness of the film. In this complexity, Guadagnino reflected the human desire to belong, to be loved, to be accepted.

These desires are often expressed, albeit with much less visual gore, on the internet as users search for worth through likes, followers, and community. These feelings are what created an economy for influencers, for people who have proven themselves and their lifestyles loveable and consumable enough to be made a career. They market their image, and there’s an unspoken understanding that if followers resemble this image, consuming and reproducing certain performative cues, they may be as loved as their parasocial icon. This relationship, like most, involves a transaction––but not with money, per se. The product being traded is an image imbued with an idealized self-worth, a self-worth informed and shaped by an Other.

In the new world of content creation and consumption, this is the implicit relationship to influencer culture wherein the influencer becomes an object to be consumed. The allegory of cannibalism in Bones and All was so spot-on it was never prescient; it was merely a reflection of the way things have become. This summer, someone said to me that things that have been true for all of time aren’t true anymore. Things like communication that used to take weeks or months now take seconds. Research that used to require a trip to the library are a few Googles and maybe a paywall away.  Jean-Paul Sartre posited we consume the consciousness of others to stay the transcendent subject and reject object-hood, but the role of Object has become exalted. The influencer-Other is an object of enviable social capital, made valuable because they are visible, visibility then determining value.

Sartre describes the idea of a Look occurring between two people. This Look confronts the subject-being with the object-being, the former more associated with subject-hood, and the latter object-hood, which Sartre labels as being for-itself and in-itself, respectively. Object-hood is the sense of existing as a reducible object—a thing—and someone outside of you is necessary for this way of being. They see us, the object, for our facticity, or the facts of who we are. In the example of a restaurant, a waiter is limited to just a waiter in the eyes of the Other. However, the waiter understands their job as an external role they play, but not the extent of who they are. The waiter sees themself on a more transcendental plane, as Sartre describes it. The subject-being takes a reflective step back from the self that allows a person to see who they are as well as all the possibilities of who they could be. Through the Look, the Other grounds the transcendental step of the subject-being and restrains them in the image of the perceptible facts of what they are. The Look is a source of tension, and poses a threat to our existential freedom.

The Other creates worlds that confine this freedom, and these worlds, Sartre explained, resemble the identities or personal aesthetics created online. “I am this self that I am within a world that the Other has alienated from me,” Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness. “The Other’s look encompasses my being, and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole … turn toward the other a face that necessarily escapes me.” The individual, in a mediatized form of self-expression, moves toward pre-established boundaries, edifices, constructed in the form of influencers. Aesthetics are often set by influencers, who have garnered enough social capital to become influential in image or lifestyle—or a general “vibe.” Think what might be the walls of Dark Academia, the door of Cottagecore, the keyhole of Coquette. They are frameworks for Being set and designed externally, within which people situate themselves. So the self the Other constructs for us, each time they see us, is effectively outside of us. A great tension of Being is the constant back-and-forth between this version of ourselves and the transcendental version that exists in the worlds we make for ourselves. And Sartre doesn’t necessarily believe we will ever entirely overcome this tension. There may be moments of harmony, but it is a nebulous thing.

Through this tension, the Other creates and controls the facts of who we are in the reflection of their Look. To combat this loss of control over identity, and regain the freedom in the possibilities of who we are, we opt to “confer objecthood on him in my turn,” resuming the position of control. This reflects a desire to remain the subject to control our sense of self. But on the internet, the Other is far more popular. The Other can bring popularity and, on occasion, wealth. The Other provides a way to quantify identity, or at least significance of identity. And this is the center of influencer culture: identity is conferred to image. The crafted, filtered image that fetches a number of likes and comments becomes a tangible representation of Self, and, more importantly, self-worth. Everyone has a self, but we are (or were) left to our own devices to determine the worth of that self. We could only try and hope for the best. Now we can try and get an exact number of how many people like the self we’ve invented, comparing the numerical data generated by our ‘self’ to the ‘self’ of others. On the internet, our factitious selves are even more objective than Sartre could ever conceive. The image you project is the idealized version of yourself you want to be seen as, and the quantitative response enjoins the factitious and transcendental, where you convince the Other to see you as you see yourself. Yet, in offering yourself to the Other in this fashion, you are recognizing them as having power over your object-hood, consequently offering yourself to objectification.

Influencers are seen and effectively consumed, and extends this consumption to the self. In buying into their internet persona through their image, there is a commodification in this process of consumption. You recreate their image, hoping to go viral like them and be reproduced like how you reproduced them. Emma Chamberlain, Gen Z’s most beloved influencer, has cultivated a specific identity most clearly associated with an “art museum aesthetic” (an abundance of the type can be found on Pinterest). Girls attempt to capture Her essence in similar images, in a soft and contemplative pose amidst an array of Impressionist paintings. With their back to the camera, their face—their identity—is absent from the picture. If they are facing the camera, their face is obscured in some way, partially covered by hair or blurred by motion. They never have a face, an identity, a persona that might displease the Algorithm. In this sense, they have decapitated themselves, willingly, to access the most optics. The cannibalism is understood—there is a desire to be consumed—and they are preparing themselves for the reflective serving platter that is social media. The desire to use the facticity of cultural semiotics, to be understood as identifying with a specific aesthetic, now outweighs the self-reflective, transcendental step back that took our possibilities as a part of our being. The step back that is necessary to see these possibilities as who we are.

This voluntary death within the curated facelessness is the process of a subject turning themself into an object. Cannibalism devours through consumption, and in the era of the mediatized object, people would rather be an object to be consumed than a subject to be judged, presenting the destroyed self on a shiny silver platter upon which people are looking for their reflection—or, turning you into their reflection. People eat the Sartrean Other to remain the transcendent subject, but the new Other being eaten is the idea of influence, of which appropriation or reproduction is not enough—the thing must be subsumed and destroyed, destroyed through its consumption, consumed and turned to nothingness. Cannibalism has been used to incite fear, to excite the morally gray, to represent a societal othering, all through the specific lens of human relationships. It can only exist between two beings of the same species. So in this modern mediatized age, as interpersonal relationships change and shift to the online sphere, cannibalism has perhaps re-emerged to better understand the new ways in which we identify with and devour one another.

The Look involves vulnerability—the Other catching you in the act—and makes the objects surrounding you real, and you tangible, by association. You feel caught in an act or surrounding you didn’t see as yourself before they saw you in it. Most importantly, the Other has to see you. Emma Chamberlain is not the Other. She can’t be the Other posting through a phone screen. We are the Other, seeing her—but only almost. We are seeing the image she wants us to see, and taking this image as her Self. “The Other holds a secret,” Sartre wrote, “the secret of what I am.” There is no secret in this interaction, other than what Emma keeps to herself. But we have taken her projected image as her Self, and the privacy is discarded in regards to her overall Being. The Other is supposed to possess you, to create your body, but we are seeing the reverse. People on the internet see Emma, craft an idea of her Being, and model themselves after it, creating boards of her style on Pinterest, turning to Depop for little boys’ shirts and Adidas Sambas. The transcendent Self is removed entirely, lost to replication of Emma’s factic object.

This is not to say the Other no longer exists, but that the concept of it has changed. Sartre implied an in-person interaction for the Other and Self to work together, to find harmony between the object- and subject-being. But the era of parasocial relationships and the expression of the self through circulated media has seemingly transfigured the Look. The fictitious is overcoming the factitious as online interpretations create a new surrealism of experience. The relationship formerly necessitated by the Look has changed as we’ve moved online. What used to require something vulnerable and intimate, using shame to reveal to the Other the most authentic appearance, has become one-sided and ill-informed. And when this relationship, vital to grounding the removed way in which we reflect on ourselves, transmutes to the internet, the most important part of the look is lost. It is no longer grounded in vulnerability—it becomes a projection of the idealized Self. It leans too far into what might be considered a transcendent self, though this transcendent self is tainted by its inauthentic connection to the Other.

There is something comforting in facticity, especially as a young person. When you’re trying to figure out who you are, aesthetics offer costumes to try out when searching for your cartoon-character outfit, the one you wear everyday. You can learn to borrow from each, or just use them as stepping off points: introductions to subcultures that weren’t around in your childhood that open a whole new door to who you could be. So yes, I listen to x music, watch y movies, read z books, which may suggest assumptions about my personality that just turn out to be true. And when overwhelmed with I’m not who I thought I was or I’m a fraud, there can be comfort in reducing yourself to an image. Sometimes I’d rather be the underdeveloped friend character who is simply along for the ride. But there is always a trade happening, even amidst the mindless consumption that occurs during a silly little doom scroll. Each interaction that happens during this two hour lapse in consciousness further commodifies you in the world of the Internet, further objectifying you in the Other’s look.

Social media was created with the intent to connect people. We project a self with others in mind, modernizing Sartre’s trouble with mediating others against the Self. It is not for-itself. It is still in-itself, acting with the Other in mind, wanting to be seen as this specific object, but acting as the transcendent self acts, believing it to be internal when shaped by the external world of the Other. Because of this, we are abandoning facticity. Without grounds for the Self, we are left with machinations of appropriation. The individual is failing, and not in a productive way—in the way that the supreme individual takes the form of a thin, white, blonde, rich woman, and it is this individual being reproduced across a generation. It is individualism, but everyone is trying to be the same kind of specific. Identical individuals consume to be consumed. There is no Self, there is only Emma.

We are expressing the Self through a reproduced image that blurs all differences to sameness, to a faceless object designed to be consumed, to a materialized surrendering of consciousness. We are cannibalizing the individual to disseminate ourselves as objects. The coup of the Image as stand-in for person has revealed a system of objects that have decided, in the midst of Instagram and the influencer, and they’d rather taste good than exist.

 

By Samuel Wu

When my mom calls me and tells me that Selena is coming out with a new album, I am mildly surprised that she keeps up with Selena Gomez. My 45-year-old Mexican mother rarely keeps up with pop culture; the alternative, that Selena Quintanilla is coming out with new music, is impossible—this March 31 marked 27 years since Quintanilla was fatally shot by Yolanda Saldivar. And yet as I check the news, I see that Quintanilla, known mononymously as Selena, is indeed coming out with new music. In fact, she is coming out with a whole new album.

While Selena herself is no stranger to posthumous projects—23 albums consisting of compilations, live albums, remixes, and commemorative box sets have been released since her untimely death—Moonchild Mixes is different. Most unintended posthumous projects are typically composed of unreleased music—think The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death (1997), or Mac Miller’s Circles (2020)—but with those, producers simply finish instrumentation. Here, Selena’s voice itself has been digitally altered by her brother and producer, Abraham (A.B.) Isaac Quintanilla III, in order to make it sound like an adult’s; the lead single, “Como Te Quiero Yo A Ti,” was recorded when Selena was just 13 years old but was matured through digital modification.

The ethical grounds for releasing unintended posthumous projects are shaky at best—Brett Morgen released “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings”, a documentary full of half-finished songs by Kurt Cobain, as a tribute to the late artist, arguing “would you hide a Picasso sketch?” Morgen was then criticized for not only invading Cobain’s private space, but also profiting off it. “Seeing it—or hearing it—is one thing. Selling it is another. And who gets to answer that question? A dead artist? A profiteering executor? A ravenous public?” Fidel Martinez pointed to the hologram of Whitney Houston as the uncomfortable evidence that the dead will not rest when there are records to be sold, asking, when it comes to the fandom, where do we draw the line? With the processing of Selena’s vocals, does the question matter if Selena herself isn’t even talking? However, even Martinez is quick to point out that if a hypothetical festival lineup of Selena and other iconic dead Latin musicians like Ritchie Valens, Celia Cruz and Chalino Sánchez were to come to fruition, he would be buying a ticket to the hypothetical Bésame Mucho music festival. And with the recent release of Netflix show Selena: The Series (2020) and the looming parole eligibility date of Saldivar, the album comes at a delicate time for many fans. Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You, wrote in Vulture that the album is like being at “a theme park named Selena, buckled into a metal contraption shaped like a rose, getting closer and closer to a smiling version of the star with wires in her chest and washers in her cheeks.”

Despite comments by biographer Joe Nick Patoski calling the commercialization of Selena what “happens when your father is your manager,” the Quintanilla family maintains their position that not only are they honoring Selena, but this is what she herself would have wanted. According to A.B. and Selena’s sister Suzette, they had collectively agreed with Selena that if anything were to happen to any one of them, it was their mission to keep the legacy alive; in fact, A.B. claims that one of Selena’s wishes was for her to never go away. To A.B., Moonchild Mixes fulfills that wish, honoring her memory and legacy and reinforcing Selena’s ability to transcend generations. Allegations that Moonchild Mixes was just another easy cash grab by a family struggling to stay relevant are met with the defense that they are keeping Selena’s legacy alive, allowing the public to discover Selena again through these new forms of media by and about her. But the question that initially asks what Selena would have wanted prompts another inquiry: how important is the voice of the dead in their own legacy?

Very few artists have been quite as immortalized as Selena. As the Queen of Tejano Music, the Mexican Madonna, and a Tex-Mexican through and through, her story has always been fragmented identities put together to make a whole, a physical and aural iteration of the inherent muddy political nature of borders. Entre a mi Mundo, she said on her third studio album, claiming space on both sides of the borders of music and land, blatantly blurring where the binary begins and where it breaks. To this point, Sarah Misemer wrote in The Brown Madonna: Crossing the Borders of Selena’s Martyrdom how Selena’s music expanded the discourse, both in the 90s as well as today, on what it means to have a foot in multiple worlds, to occupy cultural space in both the United States and Mexico—revealing the tenuous mirage of the “border” between the two. “There is no denying the tremendous impact that [Selena] and her music had on border culture,” Misemer wrote. “[Her] iconization is the result of particular factors that cause questions of identity and themes of border crossing to surface repeatedly in the Chicano and Latino communities.” It is not the straddling of two worlds that makes Selena so important, but rather how she developed and shaped discourse on using the binary to find an identity. Identity became not a separation between the self and the Other, but in her concurrent existence, a melding between the within and without of the binary—she was a Mexican, born in America; she sang in Spanish yet struggled with conversational Spanish; to her, the binary existed both as the backdrop and the central leading point of her career.

 Selena’s untimely death, while tragic, did spark a revolution in the Latin diaspora. The trial was followed closely by the Latin community, although many Americans who were unaware of the singer criticized the attention she and her murder received from the media. To this, Lourdes Portillo, director of Corpus: A Home Movie about Selena, commented, “Here comes a brown woman, very beautiful and very talented, taking up a space that had never been filled by someone else. She represented people that traditionally had not had a presence. I think that is her real importance.” Indeed, when her death was announced, people traveled thousands of miles to visit her home, boutiques, and the crime scene. Churches with large congregations of Latinos held prayers in her name, and two weeks after her death, the then-Texas governor George W. Bush declared her birthday Selena Day in Texas. Record sales went up for months after her death, and all over, people mourned the death of an icon.

It is undeniable that Selena’s relevance in pop culture grew exponentially because of her death. In Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, literary critic Elisabeth Bronfen explores the aesthetic fascination that society has with the dead feminine: by dying, she wrote, women become a site of looking into death. The living, acting as the spectator, can simultaneously feel a closeness to the articulated mortality of humanity, while also acknowledging the distance between them and the subject. “The death of a beautiful woman emerges as a requirement for a preservation of existing cultural norms and values,” Bronfen wrote. “Over her dead body, cultural norms are reconfigured or secured, whether because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves a social critique and transformation or because a sacrifice of the dangerous woman reestablishes an order that was momentarily suspended due to her presence.”

The femininity of Selena was particularly important because she was occupying a space not intended for her; for Latinas, Selena’s success spoke even louder because she was also dominating in a traditionally male-dominated area. “The desire to see is a manifestation of the desire to be seen,” Peggy Phelan wrote in Unmarked, “in live performance as well as in…inanimate representation”; as a woman of color in fame’s spotlight, Selena had to exist as something larger than life to be taken seriously by her predominantly white, male peers. Selena, both as herself and her music, represented the ushering in of a new age for women, specifically Latinas, in a way that they hadn’t seen before. And with artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Selena Gomez, Becky G, and more citing Selena as an inspiration, it is understandable the desire to keep Selena alive.

And for Selena, being not just “woman” but “Latina” figured as an essential part of her identity and death. For Diana Taylor, author of Dancing with Diana: A Study in Hauntology, race continues to matter, even after death. Taylor compared the reception to Selena’s death to that of Princess Diana, citing scathing remarks made by prominent radio host Howard Stern: “Selena? Her music is awful. I don’t know what Mexicans are into. If you’re going to sing about what’s going on in Mexico, what can you say?… You can’t grow crops, you got a cardboard house, your 11-year-old daughter is a prostitute … This is music to perform abortions to!” Stern did face massive backlash from the Latino community and later apologized for his comments, but his lack of empathy reflects a truth to Taylor’s claim. Selena’s death is “too lowly to constitute a drama,” Taylor wrote. “It’s reduced to an incident [and] relegates Selena to the ignominy of particularism: poverty, deviance, genocide.”

Stern set himself up as one of the “migra” of the imaginary, a border police seeking to reaffirm their charge, ensuring that certain persons don’t sneak into dominant culture. To Stern, Selena was a Latina before she was a popstar; the established narrative is that Latinos are poor, they die every day—Selena’s story offers no counter. Dying at the hand of her own kind, Selena does not command respect like Princess Diana, who is invoked in hushed, reverential terms. Here, Diana was a member of the British royal family before she was a white woman; there is an uncanniness, an unnaturalness to Diana’s death—to die young, much less in a car accident, is not the established narrative for royalty. To apologize for this, Diana is crowned an afterlife as a saint; she is guaranteed a visa because by reinforcing borders, Diana is able to travel where she pleases. On the flip side, Selena continues into the afterlife as a martyr; her disregard for the border in life is canceled out in death—the migra of the imaginary have caught up, and now the border can be rebuilt. The inherent nature of borders is to divide; to transgress this cultural norm is to redraw the line in the sand. There is an urgency to memorialize, to draw new maps and claim new borders. However, all this does not come without opposition—new borders inhabit the carcasses of old borders, and to live within the new borders is to be subject to these hauntings.

There is a responsibility placed on the dead woman: now the “other,” she exists as a pawn in a game over which she has no agency nor consciousness, and she is manipulated to an extent that was not possible when she was alive. There is a burden, whether justifiable or not, that was cemented the moment Selena was iconized: robbed of so much potential, to let her go is to spit not only on her gravestone, but on the Latin community as well. But in the repeated exhumation of her image, both for memory and capital, a seemingly insensitive comment like “just let her die” does pose an important question: when, if even possible, will Selena be enough? 

To freeze Selena as the ever-smiling 23-year-old singer moments before her death is to offer a rewrite of the narrative, an opportunity very few get. Left to its own devices, Selena’s death reinforces the Latino narrative of internal divisiveness, but to make her something more than her death is to break that narrative. Perhaps this is why the Quintanilla family is so adamant to keep Selena relevant; suspended in now 24 posthumously released soundtracks, compilations, live albums, remixes, and commemorative box sets, Selena must exist to prove that the Latino legacy is not one that ends in tragic death, but one that can be celebrated. With songs like “Dame tu Amor”, “No Llores Más”, and “Soy Amiga”, it is clear that Moonchild Mixes, at its very best, offers a cathartic relief to a grieving community. At its worst, it is a reflection of just how unclear our responsibilities are as consumers. Perhaps her father says it best in an interview promoting the album: “With Selena, it wasn’t just the music. It was the person”; it is no longer enough to consume Selena’s music—we must consume Selena the Person™. Either way, Selena has always said it best: “Como la flor/ Con tanto amor/ Me diste tú/ se marchitó/…Yo sé perder/ Pero ah-ah-ay, cómo me duele.”

By M. Erhardt 

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” delivers Gloria Swanson in the iconic ‘50s film Sunset Boulevard. From classic Hollywood cinema to their modern homages like La La Land, abundant are characters who dream of becoming movie actors, directors, or writers. They pack up their lives and move to Hollywood, hoping to turn their dreams into a reality. 

But Hollywood, being overly romanticized and mythologized, is far from perfect. The overdone tale of escaping to Tinseltown with the hope of becoming a star often fails to include the systemic gender injustices that stand in the way of achieving this dream. Hollywood is a cultural institution predicated on hierarchical power and wealth, not talent and luck. Within this empire of extreme wealth and nepotism, it’s easy for important issues to be swept under the rug––after all, with money comes power. And when affluent stars with a society of devotees are accused of sexual assault, they have the power to not only quiet these allegations but also, in some cases, to maintain their stature and celebrity. 

The recently released docuseries House of Hammer touches on these uneasy ties between fame and control, focusing on women’s allegations of sexual assault against actor Armie Hammer. The limited documentary series covers not only their abuse at the hands of Hammer but also the generational patterns within the Hammer family. Survivor Courtney Vucekovich recounts the details of his assaults on her and describes the humiliation, fear, and sense of degradation she faced: “I didn’t feel loved. It was horrible. You feel completely immobilized. There’s something about trauma while you’re immobilized and can’t move. There’s that fight-and-flight and you can’t do either. You’re just stuck there. I was closing my eyes until it ended.” While she talks about events that happened to her years ago, she relives these buried memories as she verbalizes them. Speaking about trauma out loud can trigger unwanted memories and create a spiral of shame and guilt. Society pressures women into feeling responsible for their assaults, and women thus often feel culpable for their victimhood, wondering if they could have done something differently to prevent it from happening. Sexual assault is never the victim’s fault, but in a world where there is rarely true justice, it’s easy for the victim to blame themself rather than the abuser. 

As a woman, when I hear similar stories from women such as Courtney Vucekovich, I empathize, knowing that this could have just as easily been me. I feel frustrated, discouraged, and sad knowing that her tragedy is neither uncommon nor surprising: According to the CDC, over half of women in the US have experienced sexual violence and one in three women have experienced sexual harrasment in a public place. Armie Hammer will forever haunt these women, and his abusive influence continues to contribute to this harmful cycle of mistreatment against others without consequence.

When I mentioned the series to a friend, they admitted they had not heard about it: “Weren’t there rumors that he was a cannibal?” Their uncertainty and distrust of the situation seems to be shared by many, which could be partly due to the lack of media coverage on this important issue. House of Hammer does not appear on popular streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, but instead is only available to watch on Discovery Plus, ten times fewer subscribers than Netflix according to Earth Web. But we have the power to listen to their stories and show solidarity. Women should not feel they have to carry this burden alone. Although it was beyond difficult, both mentally and physically, to listen to these women’s stories and what they experienced, it was necessary. 

Hollywood has a dark history of covering up allegations around well respected men in the industry. The “rumors” about Hammer have been circulating for years, yet he was still cast in the recent 2022 film Death on the Nile. Doesn’t this seem odd? As may be expected, in a major industry like Hollywood filmmaking, money comes first. Top executives are incentivized to keep producing profitable movies and even go as far to conceal these allegations. With the overwhelming number of charges against Hammer, it’s hard to believe that major Hollywood studio executives were not aware of his past. Despite this knowledge, Hammer has the power to land roles in films, and Hollywood thrives on his success. 

The #MeToo Movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006, resurfaced around 2017 in a surge of media attention, particularly in its exposure of sexual assault by powerful figures in Hollywood. The movement creates a safe space for survivors to courageously share their individual stories, calling attention to the inconceivable amount of assault against women. Through conversation, women confront the normalization of this issue and advocate for change. In Hollywood, female actors, producers, and directors use their platform to pave the way in bringing awareness of female mistreatment and addressing the gender disparity. Salma Hayek, Gabrielle Union, Emily Ratajkowski, Gabby Douglas, Uma Thurman, Reese Witherspoon, and too many other survivors have come forward. Reese Witherspoon shared her own personal story: “[I feel] true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.” Women can feel desensitized to these assaults, leaving them afraid to speak up with fear of losing jobs, affecting their reputations, accused of lying, or not being taken seriously. Society has normalized pressuring women to endure their trauma because “boys will be boys.” Powerful women are breaking their silence and standing together, but change can only fully be realized if women are put into equal positions in an industry ruled by men. 

The lack of accountability extends to far more people than just Armie Hammer. Directors Woody Allen and Roman Polanski and actor Mel Gibson are prominent figures in the film industry and all share a similar trajectory: a history of repeatedly being accused of abuse and assaults and, ultimately, a complete lack of consequences. Roman Polanski admitted to his charges but was never convicted, and is still supported by people in Hollywood, with an upcoming film soon to be released. Woody Allen continues to direct box-office hits. Mel Gibson is still cast in films by well acclaimed directors and respected actors, starring in the 2022 film Father Stu with Mark Walhberg. Despite allegations backed by evidence, these men are still freely creating art, funded by companies, and collaborating with other famous actors, writers, and directors. The allegations against these well-known men are often viewed as lies and slander, and the victims of these assaults are accused of being attention seekers, thus, allowing men such as Allen, Polanski, and Walhberg to continue putting out art and being celebrated for their work. 

And in the case of Hammer, the cracks in his reputation are being sutured by his lawyer Andrew Bettler, well-known for defending celebrities accused of assault. “You have a well-known handsome actor being accused of salacious, kinky interactions with women,” he said. “It captured the public’s attention but was completely blown out of proportion.” Andrew Bettler brushed off the trauma and tragedy of Hammer’s assaults, implying the story blew up because people were bored and eager for entertainment. It’s easy to feel powerless, but as an audience, we have the ability to stop supporting these directors, showing our solidarity with the women whose stories have historically not been told. 

An epicenter of corruption, conspiracies, and affluence, Hollywood is a place that readily contains and neutralizes allegations of sexual abuse. Accusations against men in Hollywood appear to have little to no impact on their careers and are often forgotten and buried. With time, Hammer’s comeback will be quite likely. Hollywood still supports Allen, Polanski, and Gibson, so why would it be any different with Hammer? Courtney Vucekovich, Dylan Farrow, Julia Morrison, and all the other many survivors of sexual assault should receive justice, but within a male dominated industry and under-representation in the criminal justice system, the odds are stacked against them. How many more women have to say “Me Too”?

By Rocky Jacquet

Adopting a vegan or vegetarian diet, shifting household energy sources to cleaner alternatives, taking more public transportation, protesting nationwide, filing lawsuits against government bodies for their complicity in the climate crisis––these practices have become increasingly common in the 21st century, as citizen engagement in fighting the climate crisis hits its high. They’re an expression of the growing frustration of individuals across the globe with the terrifying effects of industrial and government activities on the global environment, not least because of the ways that international relations underscore climate redress. 

Exploited states, according to the world-systems theory, fall within two different categories: semi-periphery states and periphery states. Semi-periphery states are both exploited and exploiter countries striving to join the assemblage of core states in order to contribute to the establishment of the status quo and to further enable their exploitation of periphery states. In their attempt to follow core state practices, semi-periphery states—such as Brazil and China—have also contributed immensely to the acceleration of climate change. Nations seen as periphery states are those in the world-system that are the most exploited, least developed, and that are trapped in the cycle of poverty. They have no momentum in the world system and simply must accept the systemic configurations structured against them in order to interact and participate in the global community. Seeing as periphery industries are largely built around the extraction of raw materials in order to trade with core and semi-periphery states, these states are not only the most vulnerable in the world-system, but also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. While core and semi-periphery states are predominantly responsible for the immensity of climate change, periphery states are those which will face the soonest and most brutal effects. 

In each of these groups’ industrial activities, the domination over and exploitation of the environment is a central component. Consequently, the world-systems theory elucidates the fact (both intuitively and empirically true) that the abuse of the environment is an intrinsic element to capitalism’s endless wealth accumulation and, concomitantly, to the formation of the modern world-system. And within the arrangement of the world-system’s major industries, few sectors are dealing with the dangers and effects of this exploitation more than animal agriculture. 

The global livestock industry is the leading economic sector contributing to the emissions of greenhouse gases, or GHG. At every level of the production chain, from fertilization to land-use changes to transportation, GHG are emitted into the atmosphere, creating the most dangerous environmental practice in the industry. Due to the lack of regulation around the reports on environmental effects of mega agribusiness, it is challenging to calculate the exact percentage of global GHG that livestock constitutes, but the number tends to hover around 18%. 

The industry relies on other harmful practices as well, including land degradation in the form of deforestation, water and air pollution, and the loss of biodiversity—it is the leading cause for each of these developments. Animal agriculture is responsible for up to 91% of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest, which constitutes one of the Earth’s most vital spaces for fresh water, oxygen production, and carbon dioxide absorption. These are not only the roots and lungs of the Earth’s ecosystem, but they are also the most powerful protectors of a warming planet. 

The deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest is predominantly led by two US-based agriculture corporations: JBS and Cargill. These corporations, two of the three largest meat processing companies in the world, practice industrial animal agriculture known as factory farming, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). Factory farming began in the United States around the time of the Industrial Revolution, but over the years it spread across the world and resulted in the overwhelming disappearance of small farms. It is now a global phenomenon––across the globe, 90% of farmed animals live on factory farms; in the U.S. that number rises to 99%. Examining this phenomenon under world-systems analysis, it can be contended that the U.S. as a core state has defined the industrial structure of meat production––without any regard for how these practices affect the domestic environment or that of the other states that adopt the system of factory farming. As the Human League wrote, “Factory farms are the manifestation of corporate takeovers, turning the farming sector into inhumane factories. Their goal is simple: to increase profits for big corporations [and] this comes at the direct expense of animals, people, and the environment.” The animal agriculture industry is not only a prime example of the capitalist tendency to put profit over anything else, but it also illustrates the inevitable environmental consequences that this mindset engenders.

Because Brazil falls within the group of semi-periphery states, it is not in the position to determine or alter the rules of the game––but Brazil also doesn’t necessarily want to effect systemic change in the agricultural industry. Rather, aligning with the assumptions of the world-systems theory, Brazil wishes to work the system for itself by becoming a core state. Animal agriculture and cattle grazing are major contributors to Brazil’s GDP, and in some of the less-populated areas of the Amazon, working in this industry is the only option for personal wealth. A large number of those that live and work in the Amazon’s cattle ranches are in support of deforestation because it provides them with a job, a form of income, and the ability to support themselves and their families. 

Because deforested land can become up to 200 times more valuable,  the economic incentives in place encourage Brazil to maintain U.S. corporations’ exploitation of the Amazon. Accordingly, “international pressure to conserve the Amazon may backfire if it stokes fears that wealthier nations want to keep the Amazon pristine to stymie Brazil’s growth—or to appropriate its wealth for themselves.” The case of Brazil and its animal agriculture industry is a complex one: as a semi-periphery state, it wishes to become a part of the core and thus chooses to ignore the effects that the core’s economic prospects inflict on its valuable (economically and ecologically) environment for the sake of its own developmental agenda and economic growth.

But beyond a world-systems approach to Brazil, there is a specific role that individuals play in the construction and vindication of this noxious industry. There would be no industrial meat production if there wasn’t substantial global meat consumption. As noted in the previous paragraph, different countries and cultures have varying relationships to meat, but it is certainly true that in every nation, the consumption of meat is a customary tradition. While individuals in core states consume significantly more meat than those in other countries, global meat consumption has considerably increased over the past few decades, most drastically in developing, semi-periphery countries. And due to the overwhelming majority of meat being produced through factory farming operations, radical action must be taken.

China, while being one of the countries leading the increase in meat consumption, has also recently advocated for the introduction of other, more sustainable alternatives. In January, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs released its five-year agricultural plan, for the first time including cultivated meats and plant-based alternatives as part of its plan for food security. This action is a hopeful starting point, allowing for the expansion of research and investment into the alternative protein industry and, more importantly, encouraging consumer acceptance and implementation of more environmentally-friendly eating practices. And much like global meat consumption, which is on its way to doubling by 2050, China’s per capita consumption has tripled since the late 1980s––they are, after all, the number one importer of beef from Brazil. The Ministry’s plan offers a blueprint for other countries to introduce similar goals, indicating the agency that semi-periphery states have in the restructuring of consumption and production practices established by core states, hopefully in order to include ones that aren’t as detrimental to the global environment.

Keeping in mind the need for transformative work beyond just industrial reform, some scholars have even advocated for the global community to implement a plan for the gradual weaning off of meat altogether, and although this would engender a drastic decrease in global GHG emissions, this is entirely unrealistic. Humans have eaten meat almost as long as we’ve been in existence, and although plant-based meat is becoming more widely available and adopted, there is not currently an alternative to meat that offers the same nutritional benefits. As mentioned before, the consumption of meat offers most of the world’s vulnerable communities with the essential nutrients that they need and would likely go without if they lacked access to livestock. Individuals within these countries are also not factory farming, so their livestock practices have not contributed to climate change as the ones in developed countries have. Despite their lack of influence on the acceleration of global warming, periphery countries, especially those within Africa, are far and above the ones most vulnerable to climate change. Not only do core states need to finance periphery countries’ management of environmental damage that countries like the U.S. and industries like animal agriculture have caused, but they could also learn a thing or two from periphery countries’ more environmentally-friendly practices.

 If core states were to start a gradual shift from the industrialized meat production sector to more small-scale farming operations, the GHG emissions of meat consumption would significantly lessen. Whatever steps states decide to take to mend the climate crisis, they should start with restructuring our food systems. This is backed not only by the leading contribution that animal agriculture has made to global GHG emissions, but also scientists’ knowledge that food systems play a more critical role in climate change than even our fossil fuel habits.

Before countries can even start to reimagine the international food system, the global community needs to have access to accurate information on the environmental effects brought about by meat production, which is largely hidden or under-reported by the mega agribusinesses and is enabled by a lack of government oversight. The business-as-usual attitude of industry and government tends to outweigh the minor effects of actions like protests and petitions––the citizen members of the global community truly wish to help address and amend the state of our climate, we must begin the construction of an entirely new system, one that has our interests at its core rather than the economic interests of those in the mega-corporations that have created this systemic crisis.

The top-down approach to decision-making, in which government and corporate group interests determine the rules while citizens are designated as passive agents, is clearly causing harm, degradation, and decay. Instead, the global community and the state of the environment would benefit from adopting what Fenelon calls Indigenous models of governance, where community living dynamics is prioritized above accumulation and growth. Rather than letting the profit motive contribute to environmental exploitation, Indigenous societies champion the agency of all elements of life in their community, both of humans and of nature. This community-oriented and ecologically-minded governance is exemplified particularly in land management practices, which create a positive feedback loop between resource use and natural waste that can be returned to the earth. Extraction and waste will always be part of human life, but the excessive exploitation and extraction of natural resources that form the crux of capitalism must be left behind. 

Humanity’s association with animals can be traced back to the dawn of human life on Earth, but what has mutated this association into a noxious industry is the human capitalist mindset. This worldview has resulted not only in human domination of the global environment but also the capitalist domination over groups of people with access to an environment deemed profitable. No matter a state’s individual position in the world-system as exploiter or exploited, each country plays a part in the larger tenet of the system in exploiting, extracting, and abusing the global environment. As the international community has collectively found ourselves in the midst of crises of ecology and governance, the exploitative nature of capitalist world-systems have no place in a sustained future. Instead, environmental nurturance and cooperation require international action and interconnected restructuring. While it is recommended to start by revamping the international food system and reimagining our relationship with animal agriculture, it is inevitable that to arrive at that point will first require a reshaping of the public consciousness. To practice a symbiotic relationship between earth and society is to be skeptical of capitalism’s appropriation of worth, to reject greed and inaction, and to reinvest in the concepts of inherent worth, determination, and mutuality.

By James Freyland

Your body enters a peculiar state about 70 minutes into your sleep cycle. Brain waves begin to pulse faster, your eyes move as if following visual stimuli, and your body becomes nearly completely paralyzed. You have officially entered REM sleep, the stage of the sleep cycle where you spend around 20% of your sleep and, most importantly, have the majority of your dreams. In a state physiologically akin to being awake, you are at your most detached from the physical world and instead inhabit a dream world of your creation. Bound by an individual’s experiences while awake but unbeholden to strict recreation of reality, dreaming creates endless possibilities for how the world could look and function. The paradoxes that constitute dreams have attracted the interests of academia and the general population, resulting in attempts to find meaning in the switch from perceiving a disembodied reality to creating embodied simulations. Despite dreams being a universal human experience and a source of public fascination, many mysteries still permeate this daily experience. 

Nations find inspiration in the endless possibilities and mysteries dreams represent, creating national myths premised on embodied simulations rather than reality. This phenomenon is explored by South African artist Mary Sibande through photographs and sculptures of Sophie, a black mannequin depicted with perpetually closed eyes and elaborate costumes. In her exhibits Long Live the Dead Queen (2009–2013), The Purple Shall Govern (2013–2017), and I Came Apart at the Seams (2019–present), Sibande tracks gradual disillusionment with South Africa’s national myth of the Rainbow Nation, a dream of South Africa as “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” Despite all depicting Sophie’s dreams, changes in Sibande’s palette, setting, and types of clothing between exhibits reflect distinct realities. As dreams are merely a cerebral recasting of lived experiences, profoundly different realities must entail profoundly different dreams.   

The unique characteristics of each of Sibande’s exhibits reflect the evolution of a dream in response to imposed national myths. The first of these exhibits is Long Live the Dead Queen, which featured Sophie dressed up in lavish blue dresses bursting with excess fabric. Set in the time of Apartheid, one cannot escape the sadness pervasive in this series, as even the limitless possibilities of dreaming do not result in a dream where Sophie is free of the white apron and scarf, exposing her as a domestic worker. Sophie’s blue phase dreams of societal advancement evolve with the fall of Apartheid and promises of a realized Rainbow Nation. Peeks of a purple underskirt in sculptures such as The Reign foretell Sibande’s next exhibit, The Purple Shall Govern, and a time jump to a post-Apartheid South Africa. 

Sophie flexes the newly returned freedom afforded Black people post-Apartheid by trading in lavish blue dresses for otherworldly purple ones. It reflects purple’s history as a color for royalty and the powerful. In place of donning the garb of a domestic worker, Sophie grows vines, granting herself self-sufficiency and the power to settle down. Hope runs strongly throughout this exhibit as a dream once bound by Apartheid’s racist subjugation of non-white South Africans meets a reality now promising opportunity for all. It is not long before Sophie’s purple phase and dreams of self-actualization evolve again, and red begins to peek out from behind the purple fabric in Ascension of the Purple Figure. Disillusioned with the promise of a Rainbow Nation that is nowhere near becoming a reality, Sophie enters the most volatile phase of all, the red phase.

In her most recent exhibit, I Came Apart at the Seams, Sibande shows us what happens when dreams lose their emotional bases of sadness and hope, and instead become based on anger. Sophie’s dreams turn profoundly violent. She now wears bright red outfits befitting her rage coupled with militaristic details in the vestments designs. The certainty of her earlier phases culminating in the red becomes apparent in The Domba Dance. In the center of the photo sits a red phase Sophie with the severed arms of her earlier dreams above her. Reaching out to each other, the arms morph from blue to purple to red, leading to the seated Sophie as she feeds pieces of a heart to rabid dogs. Sacrifice is essential to this new Sophie’s reality, as the unrealized dreams of her predecessors serve as sustenance for this new Sophie’s anger. In her ever-changing dreams, Sophie shows that “dreams are different from one generation to another,” and that dreams impact the real world just as much as the real world impacts dreams.

South African poet Koleka Putuma analyzes the ties between sacrifice and materializing dreams in her poem Black Women/White Babies. Following Sibande’s depiction of Sophie through three distinct generations’ dreams united by femininity and Blackness comes Putuma’s description of three generations of a South African family: a grandmother, a mother, and children. The grandmother is not mentioned in the poem. However, her effect on the mother’s life is outsized, as she teaches the mother how to care for children, a task undertaken through physical labor. The mother’s life is characterized by trifurcation as she plays the role of mother to her children in the morning, caretaker to white children for most of the day, and absent mother to her children at night. By exposing herself to physical exhaustion and degrading treatment, the mother dreams of a better life for her children, where physical labor is not the only way to earn a living. In sacrificing her well-being to ensure her children can succeed, the mother does not pass on her own mother’s teachings. Despite this, the mother is shocked when, returning home from work, she discovers her children “have washed and hung their shirts/ironed the uniform for the morning/bathed and fed themselves.” The children are proud to have helped their mother. Still, instead of feeling thankful, she “cannot name the thing… [she] feel[s].” She “can only feel it on…[her] back,” as she watches her sacrifice end up being in vain and her children pick up the physical labor she tried to prevent them from undertaking. 

With Sibande’s and Putuma’s works haunting me, I cannot help but draw similarities between our national myth of the American Dream and its many similarities to South Africa’s Rainbow Nation. Both promise that hard work will ultimately be rewarded and that future generations can do better than the preceding ones. As a first-generation American, my life will forever be intertwined with a particular vision of the American Dream imparted by matriarchal sacrifice. From a grandmother leaving her deep-seated roots and family for the dream of stability and opportunity for her children, to a mother working sixteen-hour shifts for her own progenies’ futures, we see the loss of dream’s intangibility. Instead of reflecting endless possibilities, dreams become pure reflections of reality, as possibility is reduced to paths resulting in higher incomes and dreams become grounded in money. 

Through hard work, the firstborns that preceded me expected to create a new reality from the realm of possibilities only existing in dreams. The culmination of generations of physical toil is me, the first expected to be something different and make generations of sacrifice worth it. Following the path preordained for me, I found something unexpected—disillusionment in the American Dream held dear by past generations. Finding solace in the unrealized futures of Sibande’s next Sophie exhibit, the unnamed children in Putuma’s poem, and my upcoming graduation, I dream of a future where money is not required to reach happiness. In the greatest sacrifice of all, my mother told me she “just wants me to be happy.” For the first time in a long time, I think I can be, as my generation chases dreams reflective of our own experiences and reality.