Now as an adult, I turn to horror stories not to train myself to survive the world but to make sense of it. The world is horrible sometimes. Terrible things happen for no explicable reason, and the rules that run society can be unfair and cruel and horrid. But horror stories reframe the terrible things of the world. They hold a mirror up to the revolting so we can put it into some kind of taxonomy. They place wickedness and evil in a context that helps us see their limits and comforts us with the notion that darkness can be labeled, lit, and even survived. The work of the horror story is to define and demarcate the uncanny and the dark. But to be queer and to love horror stories is not always easy. Those stories are spun out of our culture and our societal norms, and the labels and definitions that come out of horror stories aren’t always inclusive or healthy. (Kindle edition, loc 60)

If you’re not familiar with the Destroy All Genres series, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy magazines have held several series respective to their genres to highlight marginalized authors under the accusation that diversity (or “identity politics” or “political correctness”) is “destroying” the genres of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. I first became aware of their “Women Destroy” series through Escape Artists, and for Halloween this year, I purchased a copy of “Queers Destroy Horror” special issue of Nightmare Magazine. Queers Destroy is one of the series, and so far there are also Women Destroy and POC Destroy Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy series, with Disabled People Destroy coming in Sept. 2018.

“Queers Destroy Horror” is broken up into several parts: Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Art, and Interviews with the artists and the authors.

The eight fiction stories vary a lot in tone, style, and subgenre, and I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to get to read stories where a character’s queerness is neither the element of horror in the story nor is it used to “add atmosphere.” When “insane asylum” is still a trope used in haunted houses, Kelly Eskridge’s “Alien Jane” deals with about mental illness and medical trauma from a queer patient’s perspective. Sunny Moraine’s “Dispatches from a Hole in the World,” one of my favorite stories because of my years holed up in the graduate library, features a graduate student who survived a suicide epidemic and is now going back into the archives to do research on it. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” features the relationships of queer ghouls. The poetry section features contemporary poetry, all saturated with horror, some subtle and atmospheric, some more like ghost stories told in poetry rather than prose.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the fiction and poetry, my favorite part of the edition is the nonfiction essays. These are incredibly useful resources and each essay articulates and gathers references and information on ideas that I knew but hadn’t seen written out so clearly. In “The H Word: A Good Story,” Lucy A. Snyder writes about the problem with saying “I don’t care about the author’s sexuality; I just want a good story” (loc 2407):

Horror is the literature of fear. And if you’re queer, and if you write fiction about your darkest fears while also doing your very best to tell a good story, a funny thing happens. Many of those readers who claimed to just care about story are now all squirmy. Sure, the plot’s exciting . . . but you made it all weird! Why couldn’t you just write a good old-fashioned entertaining story where the monsters are uncomplicatedly monstrous and the heroic guy gets the trophy girl at the end? Why couldn’t your story be straight, darn it? (Loc 2418)

In the essay, Snyder also details an argument with a publisher about having queer character as part of a self-fulfilling cycle: the lack of positive representations of queer characters (read: characters whose queerness isn’t negative or monstrous) in YA and genre fiction reinforces negative views of queer people and lack of positive representation for queer and questioning youth.

Sigrid Ellis’s “The Language of Hate” tackles how Stephen King simultaneously taught her that being queer, a woman, disabled, and fat was hateful but also that “losers” and misfits are the real heroes of the story. She writes,

King taught me how to hate, including how and why I ought to hate myself. But he also taught me that those voices of hate—the ones he created and I then allowed in my mind—were wrong. (Loc 2579)

I particularly like the connection between how the reader grapples with the author’s intent and effect and how marginalized people can queer a problematic narrative to find something positive in it. This doesn’t get the author off the hook, of course, but shows how fandom and queer fans transform narratives—and eventually create our own work that takes the elements we need (misfits are heroes) and imagines a world that includes us (queer misfits are heroes, not the site or victims of horror).

Catherine Lundoff’s “Creatures of the Night: A Short History of Queer Horror” is, as stated, a very concise, well written summary of not just queer horror but why we use and reclaim the word queer. She looks at queer representation and obscenity laws in 18th and 19th Century horror stories and in Gothic literature in the Victorian period written by women; the effects of the Hollywood Production Code (Hays Code) of 1934; queer-coding villains in pulp fiction and film in the 1950s; how queer authors and filmmakers created more queer work post-Stonewall in the 70s and 80s; and how queer horror authors who debuted in and after the 90s changed the genre.

Michael Matheson takes a different angle in “Effecting Change and Subversion Through Slush Pile Politics.” They write about how to write better queer horror fiction to get out of the “slush pile” and why and how to disrupt the idea that the default, unbiased character or writer in North American and European literature should be white, male, and straight.

See, unexceptional fiction is content to skim the surface of an idea. Whereas exceptional fiction is dizzying and heady in its aims. It embraces the sense of awe that informs great fiction. You feel the crush of it beating against your ribcage. Sometimes so quietly it’s all but a whisper, but you know it when you find it…I would argue that exceptional queer fiction reshapes the conversation by naturalizing queer identity and representation. (Loc 2754; 2759)

Finally, Evan J. Peterson writes about reappropriating the word queer and the queer body horror of Burroughs in “Putting It All the Way In: Naked Lunch and the Body Horror of William S. Burroughs”:

“Gay” is a euphemism. “Queer” is a reappropriated slur; it’s outré, unapologetic, and frequently considered offensive. While “gay” conjures a specific subculture with specific tastes, “queer” is a word that implies homosexuality but goes far beyond it. “Queer,” like Burroughs and his work, is transgressive, intentionally positioned against category and easy definition, and grounded in the body. Queerness is about unstably gendered (and non-gendered) bodies and the sexual anatomy and activity of those bodies. Queerness does not conform, even and especially to a homosexual mainstream. Queerness destabilizes gender and sex just as Burroughs’ work destabilizes grammar and genre. Queerness disrupts the status quo—like horror and science fiction. (Loc 2914)

I can’t recommend this special issue enough. Every element of the prose, poetry, essays, and interviews challenges authors, editors, and readers to do better and shows you how to do it. Enjoy, spooky readers!

You ever read something that seems very “no, it’s not queer, they’re, uh, sisters/cousins!” and you’re like

GIF: Rei from Sailor Moon tries to stop her bike, skids past Usagi, Minako, Makoto, and Ami, and crashes into a “decelerate” sign. Source.

Welcome to Christina Rossetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market.” Major spoilers below, force-feeding mention.

Illustration for the cover of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Via Wikimedia Commons

Queer-coding comes in two forms: 1. developing subtext, a set of cues and hints that readers in the know can read between the lines, which is useful for getting around obscenity laws; and 2. giving a character, often a villain, queer-coded characteristics (being flamboyant, being butch, etc.) to make them seem monstrous. Rossetti’s poem falls more into the former category.

I discovered the poem via Queers Destroy Horror in Catherine Lundoff’s “Creatures of the Night: A Short History of Queer Horror.” Lundoff writes that “Goblin Market” is filled with so much [sapphic] sexual imagery that the poem and poet are “now claimed by historians of lesbian and bisexual women’s writing,” yet the protagonists Laura and Lizzie are described as “sisters”; Rossetti claimed the poem was a “children’s poem.” “The alternatives,” Lundoff writes, “were too dangerous to consider” (loc 2615).

The premise of the poem is that Laura and Lizzie are two girls enjoying themselves in the woods, and every night a wandering group of fruit-selling goblins comes by to sell their wares: all variety and all seasons of succulent fruit. Laura is fascinated by the market, but Lizzie is having none of it (#nohomo):

“No,” said Lizzie, “No, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.

Laura trades a lock of hair for goblin fruits:

She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;

Then promises to bring Lizzie some:

“Have done with sorrow;
I’ll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap.”

but then falls into a melancholy and cannot go. Lizzie goes to buy the fruit; when she will not eat the fruit herself, the goblins try to force her, smearing her face and body with the juices:

She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

GIF: Usagi nudges Michiru with her elbow and Michiru makes an awkward face; Haruka watches. Source

She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?

Read the poem in full on Poetry Foundation.

Contains goblins, female wasting disease, food, attempted force feeding, “bury the queer themes with incestuous ones I guess.”

Image: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House poster. Image of a woman in 19th century dress in profile, her arms are attached backwards. Source: IMDB

In the course of doing this series, I always find a couple of duds–films that aren’t very interesting, not ones I can recommend as feminist horror films but also not ones that clearly illustrate problematic elements. (2016: The House on Sorority Row, The Moth Diaries)

Lily Saylor is a in-home hospice care-giver who is afraid of horror stories. She moves to Braintree, MA, to care for Iris Blum, a retired horror author who has dementia and keeps calling her “Polly.”

Major spoilers ahead.

I worried at first that this movie would be about elder/caregiver abuse, but it’s actually a rather straight-forward ghost story. Iris Blum’s 19th century home is haunted by the ghost of Polly Parsons, whom we see in flashbacks–a pretty young bride murdered by her husband and shoved in a hole in the shiplap. (Uh oh, HGTV – killer shiplap!) Polly’s ghost tells Iris her story, and Iris publishes it as The Woman in the Wall. At some point, Polly stops speaking/appearing to Iris, but when Lily moves in, Polly starts ghosting around again.

What I liked:

-Shirley Jackson vibes, including young Iris’s fashion

-The set and lighting

-The scene where the ink from eye from the author photo of Iris comes off on Lily’s hand

– Lily failing at reading The Woman in the Wall in bed

-The idea that the moment of death is tied to the physical body, not the spirit, so ghosts don’t remember it

What didn’t work

-Constant voice-overs about how Lily is going to die soon and will never be 29. About half of these could have been cut, and leaving parts about borrowing houses from ghosts and the part about ghosts forgetting their deaths

-Weird CGI Polly with backwards legs doesn’t look quite right, and I don’t mean in a “your legs aren’t meant to go that way” way. It really reminded me of a child’s backwards Halloween costume, and not in a scary way.

Honestly, I think the the hamfisted narration and the weird CGI ruined an otherwise subtle, atmospheric ghost story for me, which is really a shame. Also, fuck shiplap.

Contains ghosts, domestic violence (not with caregiver/patient), dementia, some gore, mold, brief body horror. My complaints are all about the CGI and narration–there’s nothing particularly problematic or misogynistic.

I swear to owls I am going to write a fanzine about how Truman/Cooper is the best ship ever. Just let my favorite Bookhouse Boys kiss, okay.

This review covers the book The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost and the TV series Twin Peaks: The Return by David Lynch. Minimal spoilers for the book, some spoilers for the series; discussion of violence against women, big spoiler near end of review is tagged.

I can’t say enough good things about The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which was released last winter. The dossier is a file compiled by a mysterious Archiver and concerns Twin Peaks history from legend to the end of Twin Peaks. The premise of the book is that a young FBI agent who signs her work “TP” is reviewing and annotating the dossier for FBI Director Gordon Cole. The files contain the backstories of the Log Lady, the Milford Brothers, the Nadine-Hank-Norma love triangle, Hawk, the Briggs family, and Sheriff Truman and his brother Frank. Oh, and Roswell, the owls, and BOB, of course.

I am a sucker for a good document-based question, and I adored all the newspaper clippings, announcements, interviews, and classified documents–and easter eggs. If you liked Twin Peaks and are a research/archives nerd, you’ll love this.

Twin Peaks: The Return, however, was hard to watch. Parts of it were hilarious and sweet: Nadine’s and Norma’s storylines, what happened to Dr. Jacoby and to Bobby Briggs. Parts of it were David Lynch being David Lynch: atmospheric whooshing, a prophecy about a garden glove, more atmospheric whooshing, ghosts in outer space. I’m more of a Frost person than a Lynch fan, although I like them in combination, and my reaction to the supernatural and surreal elements was mixed. I liked the idea of two Coopers, the idea of atomic bombs causing supernatural things to happen (or to accelerate the owls), the outer space theater, the Red Room. Also: meeting Diane! I loved that the characters, especially the women, were allowed to age.

However, more disturbing than ghosts or bad relationships was the sheer amount of violence against women—it felt like almost every episode had a man or ghost murdering or attacking a woman; all except for once or twice did it advance the plot. There are also a LOT of consent issues and rape mentions used as horror that I don’t feel added to the story.

The most disappointing thing was how Special Agent Tamara Preston (“TP”), Gordon’s new protege, is just used as eye candy. From the dossier, we know she’s smart, sarcastic, and the top of her class, but most of what she does on screen is just saunter around the office in heels bringing people coffee. I was hoping she’d be like the other FBI agents, in the sense that Cooper, Albert, and Denise all have their own views of the world, their quirks and inconsistencies, their hopes and dreams–you know, like actual humans. I can’t really tell you what Agent Preston’s are because after 18 episodes, I STILL DON’T KNOW. You have this fantastic character, David, DO SOMETHING WITH HER.

~~~Major spoiler~~~

Michael Ontkean, who played Sheriff Harry S. Truman in the original series, has retired from acting and didn’t return for this season, which made me cry fandom tears. To account for his absence, in the series Harry is ill (with what, it’s unclear) and his brother Frank is filling in as sheriff in the interim. The other characters spend a lot of time talking about how much Cooper meant to Harry when clues about Cooper, who disappeared 25 years ago, start showing up; when Cooper returns, the first thing he does is go looking for Harry. It broke my little queer heart. Even if Ontkean didn’t want to come back, I like that Lynch included their relationship, even if it’s a bit subtextual. They’re obviously in love, okay? I wish the series had ended in episode 17, with Coop essentially driving off into the sunset to go find his boyfriend; episode 18 is very David Lynch and didn’t really do it for me.

My verdict: definitely read The Secret History, and consider watching the show. I’m looking forward to the Final Dossier. And I will go down with this ship.

I started listening to the Lore podcast by Aaron Mahnke about a year ago. I love spooky stories about folklore and superstition, and for the most part, the show delivers. There are episodes about haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, the Jersey Devil, changelings–pretty much any spooky thing you can think of.

CW: torture mention, medical horror, discussion of domestic violence.

My biggest criticism of the show is that Mahnke doesn’t always take it far enough with social commentary and that there are no content warnings. For the latter, I can usually guess from the description what the show might be about, but several episodes, including the one on Countess Bathory, which had really graphic descriptions of torture and sexual violence.

For the former, I know reviewing a series of events across cultures and time means you can’t always be an expert on everything, let alone motivations, but when it’s clearly misogyny, I feel you ought to say something. For example, in story of Bridget Cleary, a woman who was brutally murdered by her husband in 1895 under the pretense she was a changeling or a fairy (Episode 10 of the podcast, Episode 2 of the show), Mahnke glosses over the misogynistic elements of the crime. You see, being an outspoken, financially independent woman or AFAB person is fucking dangerous thanks to the ever-present danger of being murdered by a Masculinity-So-Fragile man, especially a husband or lover. So say that.

My partner and I tried to watch TV version and got about three episodes in before we had to stop. Both of us are generally okay with written and audio horror, but something about having to watch a woman barely survive an illness only to be beaten and LIT ON FIRE by her jealous husband as well as watching actors pretend to perform lobotomies was too much for us to handle.

I’d say we joke about all the ways we would have been murdered in the past for being who we are, but it’s not actually a joke. Being gender-nonconforming, being clever, being queer, being independent, having mental illness–it’s hard to imagine a past in which we don’t die of misogyny (read: mental institutions, witch trials) or preventable illness. (Which is why I love stories about Boston marriages and other queer AFAB folks beating the system somehow.)

Also, I know this is more a function of what filmed historical reenactments look like in the 2010s, but I also couldn’t help feeling like it was Drunk History with fairies and misogyny and no drunk historians. (I am sorry.)

So, while I’ll stick with the podcast, I think I’ll have to review the topics for the show before watching the TV show again. If you want Lore with more gore, have at it.

“Bette Davis, sumptuously horrific in the title role, in Baby Jane.” Bette Davis as Jane, fake smiling and carrying a tea tray.

A lot of my focus on queer horror this year has been on better representation of queer creators and characters in horror. But what about the films queer folks have reappropriated for themselves?

David Greven’s “Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the 1960s horror-woman’s film” is an analysis of 1960s melodramas that were reappropriated as camp by (primarily) gay and bi men.

Greven writes,

As David Halperin discusses in How to Be Gay, the political uses of women’s melodrama by gay men “can be summed up in a single, simple formula: to turn tragedy into melodrama.”

As Halperin continues,

“The historical function of gay male culture has been—and its ongoing political task remains—to forge an ironic perspective on scenes of compulsory, socially validated and enforced performance, to decommission supposedly authentic social identities and return them to their status as willfully or witlessly iterated roles.”

The analysis spans three pages and discusses–with major spoilers for all films, which include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Now, Voyager–another side of “queering film.” That is, not queer-coding, when queer creators hint at attractions/gender identities or when straight people frame queerness as villainous, but a kind of repurposing of narratives, celebrating the melodrama of older women and seeing connections in being marginalized and desexualized. (I would argue that claiming these films as camp is the 1960s-70s answer to of queer fans shipping characters in the 2000-10s.)

The Camp response to the films has so thoroughly framed their reception in the past four decades that discussing their significance—to say nothing of their radicalism—is necessarily to challenge these film’s seemingly inextricable associations with Camp. Such a challenge itself creates a set of difficulties that will need to be worked through in order to arrive at a new understanding of the films that is neither hostile nor indifferent to Camp but also refuses a certain thorough immersion in Camp principles that, while keeping the legacy of the films alive, has made it almost impossible to think about their significance in any other register.

Greven also points out how the films have not been included in “serious film analysis” and why:

One implicit effect of the Camp framing of these films has been their subsequent exclusion from other kinds of analyses. Though an immense body of rigorous feminist scholarship exists on the classical Hollywood woman’s film, comparatively little feminist work has been done on “campy” horror-woman’s films of the 1960s. With the powerful exception of Peggy Phelan’s experimental, poetic analysis of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in her brilliant Mourning Sex, there is no major feminist film theory treatment of which I am aware of the cycle of horror-woman’s films of the 1960s.[12] (I would be happy to be proven wrong on this finding.) And to the extent that these films have been discussed in feminist terms, they have not been well-received.

My challenge—both to myself and to Camp discourse, and also to feminist film theory—is to imagine a response to the films that treats them as continuations of, rather than a radical break with, the woman’s film of the classical period. While there are many other possible responses to the woman’s film—which has also been received as a Camp phenomenon, especially in terms of the valuation of stars such as Davis and Crawford as Camp icons—one of these responses is sympathy, which forges communities of empathy and feeling. The woman’s film in America is a continuation of the genre of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, exemplified by Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, the phenomenal 1852 global bestseller written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Read the full article on Jump Cut.

Also:

Phone Voice: What’s your favorite scary movie?

Randy Meeks: Showgirls. Absolutely frightening.

Poster for Brides to Be, which shows two brides on a wedding cake; the right side of the cake and bride on the right are being swept away in the wind; the bride on the left is holding onto her.

Queer horror in the Pacific Northwest? Heck yes.

Brides to Be (2016) is a film based on the short film Together Forever, in which Robin and Jenna get engaged. The original film is not a horror film, but the sequel, in which Robin, Jenna, and Jenna’s best friend Nate try to set up for the wedding, definitely is. This is a haunted house film as well as a love story, and I really enjoyed getting to see a film with queer heroines, especially two queer femmes who look like the queer femmes I know in the PNW. Also, that twinkle-light aesthetic is how I want my apartment to look 24-7.

Some spoilers ahead.

As much as I enjoyed the director’s genre-bending, queer-positive film, I feel like the narrative could have been tighter. There were a lot of plot holes and unexplained sequences, including

-Whenever Jenna or Robin has an ghostly episode, which is roughly every 15 minutes, why do they just move on as if nothing is wrong?

-Why are Robin, Jenna, and Nate there at the site alone overnight? Is the venue a B&B or does it only have two rooms? Where are all the other guests? (This isn’t an elopement with a photo shoot–we’re told there are guests and that it’s a “big wedding.”)

-Jenna is having trouble writing her vows; she confides in Nate that feels like Robin is so with-it and together and that she can’t be like that. This is never followed up on or explained–is Jenna estranged from her family? Out of work or working an unsatisfactory job? Is she out and supported in her community? Does she have other friends besides Robin and Nate? Does she compare herself to Robin? Does Robin make her feel bad for not having a supportive family and community or not achieving her personal or professional goals? We don’t ever see or hear about Jenna’s problems, or, if not problems, low self-esteem or anxiety/depression to really make her fears seem real.

-Literally WTF is the timeline here–I know the sun goes down at like 4:30 in the winter, but how did we go from brunch doughnuts to driving in the day to a night that lasts forever, in which the three have time to check in, try to set up the entire venue themselves because Gordon didn’t do anything and has no help, have a nighttime photo shoot, have sex, have showers, explore the house, have multiple naps, drink, etc?

Major spoilers below.

Whose horror?

One point of interest in this film is who is suspect and who is the site of horror. In films made by and for straight cis people, queerness and queer/trans people’s bodies are the site of horror–think Silence of the Lambs, Sleepaway Camp, and Valley of the Dolls 2. In Brides to Be, straight people, specifically straight cis men, are the site of horror. Part of it is the constant wondering about discrimination–is Gordon, the venue event planner, actually sick or is it because the wedding party is two brides? Is Bob, the replacement planner/caretaker, creeping on Jenna and Robin because he’s the creepy caretaker or because he fetishizes queer women? Is Nate’s betrayal because he’s always loved Jenna still childhood and she chose another woman instead of him (fucking cry me a river, Nate) or because the house is haunted? Is it sapphophobia or ghosts?

Even though we see the house possess Jenna and Robin as well to a lesser degree, we never find out if Nate’s and Gordon’s treatment of them is queerphobia and how much is the house. And that’s honestly the reality we queer and trans folks live in. People who discriminate against us and murder us don’t always just tell us, which makes it easier for violence against LGBTQ folks to not get labelled as a hate crime and makes intent in queer/transphobic interactions hard to prove.

Also, I was super confused by Nate’s treatment of Jenna because I assumed he was a gay friend (who ARE straight people?) right up until Robin and Jenna told him he’d meet a nice girl; so then I assumed he was bi because I want to believe that bi friends respect each other’s relationships. Clearly I read into that differently than what the creators intended.

All in all, Brides to Be feels like an important film in the beginning of a new age of queer horror–one in which we are the heroes and in which maybe, just maybe, our love can conquer all. Or at least fight off ghosts.

*It’s never stated explicitly in the film whether Robin and Jenna identify as lesbian, bi, or queer, so it may also be the case that Jenna isn’t attracted to men at all.

Over the summer, I had the chance to see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors at the Seattle Art Museum. This was my first time seeing any of her work in person, and it was well worth getting a new membership for me and my partner.

These photos focus on the art that was not the Infinity Mirror Rooms, since you can’t really take a quick photo without getting yourself in it, too. Photos of the Infinity Mirror Rooms can be found on the SAM website, though.

All photos are mine unless otherwise noted; all art works are copyright Yayoi Kusama.

The SAM site has a good introduction to Kusama’s work:

yayoi kusama: infinity mirrors
jun 30 – sep 10 2017

Infinity is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is easy to contemplate when you step inside one of artist Yayoi Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms in the new exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. This major exhibition examines the contemporary Japanese artist’s significant 65-year career and contextualizes the notion of infinite expansion and accumulation in her work, culminating in her visually stunning Infinity Mirror Rooms. Visitors can immerse themselves in five of these kaleidoscopic environments where the viewer is endlessly reflected within fantastic landscapes—alongside examples from the artist’s beginnings: her mesmerizing and intimate drawings, her early Infinity Net paintings which grow on a canvas like cell formations, and her surreal sculptural objects covered with strange growth formations. These key works join more than 90 works on view, including large and vibrant paintings, sculpture, works on paper, as well as rare archival materials.

The 87-year-old artist continues to work at a brisk pace in her Tokyo studio. The exhibition features the North American debut of numerous new works. Her most recent painting series, My Eternal Soul (2009–present), may be the greatest surprise. Exuberant in color and paired with sculptures that bear titles such as My Adolescence in Bloom, they mark a striking progression in the use of Kusama’s signature symbol of the polka dot. Also in the US for the first time is the recently realized Infinity Mirror Room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016, a field of yellow, dotted pumpkins spreading into infinity.

The 1960s were a crucial time for Kusama’s creative development. She was invited to show with the German Zero group, which had an interest in participatory installations. She embraced performance in her photographic documentation and began producing films and staging Anatomic Explosions, collective happenings in New York City where she took up residence in the late 1950s. Central to the exhibition is a recreation of Kusama’s original 1965, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, in which she displays a vast field of polka-dot covered, white tubers in a room lined with mirrors. This room merges Kusama’s Accumulations, which had previously existed as sculptural objects, into the illusion of an infinite space.

“I am deeply interested in trying to understand the relationship between people, society, and nature; and my work is forged from accumulations of these frictions.”

In a radical move that connects to participatory art, Kusama created The Obliteration Room in 2002. Kusama provides a white domestic interior of sofas, tables, chairs, and everyday objects and visitors are invited to complete the work. Kusama’s concept of obliteration finds new expression as the pristine white room is gradually covered in an accumulation of brightly colored dots, with the intention that the installation will transform during the run of the exhibition.

Yayoi Kusama. My Heart Soaring in the Sunset, 2013. Seattle Art Museum.

To me, the appeal of Kusama’s work lies is the pleasure of creating a motif or object one loves, like polka dots or pumpkins. The narrative reminds me, in a way, of creating fan art or taking selfies–art created for the artist’s pleasure that is often written off as vanity or being self-serving. When marginalized artists create the art they want to see, it’s easy to say “you’re just pandering to [an identity] audience” or “that isn’t real art [because it wasn’t commissioned by a white man from a white man].”

Yayoi Kusama. The Obliteration Room, 2002-present, installed 2017.

In the Infinity Mirror rooms, the audience becomes part of the art in the act of taking photos. (Only All the Eternal Love I Have for Pumpkins was closed to photography.) In the Obliteration Room, museum-goers have the chance to add colorful round stickers to a completely white room with household objects, including a table with plates and glasses, a bookshelf, a bicycle, and a couch. The viewer can join in creating art as well as becoming part of the art.

Yayoi Kusama, “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity,” 2009. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; David Zwirner, New York. © Yayoi Kusama. Via Hirshorn

The Infinity Mirror rooms also address the concepts of infinity and eternity, the place of self in the world, and the obliteration of self into something eternal. (Not to sound too Utena.)

Installation view of sculptures Surrounded by Heartbeats, With All My Flowering Heart, All About My Flowering Heart, My Love is Buried in Ten Petals, and A Tower of Love Reaches Heaven.

Installation view of sculptures The Season of Red Buds and A Tower of Love Reaches Heaven.

According to the signs at the museum, Phalli’s Field and Boat Acculumation were a way Kusama to work through a fear of phalli. I also see this as a means of reappropriating the power of the phallic symbol. We see towers and obelisks all over the U.S., where Kusama did much of her early work, but they’re always straight lines and made of hard materials. Kusama’s phalli are stuffed but soft-looking and the multitude of them distracts from the singular imagery. Additionally, it’s easy to laugh at a dick boat, and some of that laughter can take away the cultural power of the phallic symbol.

 

Yayoi Kusama. Boat Accumulation.

If you get a chance to see this in person, I can’t recommend it highly enough. The 20-30 seconds you get to spend in each Infinity Mirror Room is a treat, and while some of them lend themselves well to selfies, when going in to the Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity and others with lights, just enjoy it.

Did you see the exhibit? What did you think?

In this gender reader: how to discuss nonbinary genders in Japanese, gross anime tropes, a shôjo manga release and a 20th anniversary, and more!

Image: Chihiro from Spirited Away runs through the town as the spirits come out to go to the bathhouse

LGBTQ

Julian Ryall. “What’s It Like Being a Gay* Student in Japan?” South China Morning Post. 15 Oct. 2017.

(*Also covers trans issues.)

“In a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ society, teachers receive directives but no training to support anxious, closeted children when they are ‘outed.’”

Vera Papisova (trans. Mariko Peeling). ジェンダーとは女性と男性の二択ではない！　「ノンバイナリージェンダー」について知っておこう。Vogue Girl. 26 May 2016. Translation of “Here’s What It Means When You Don’t Identify as a Girl or a Boy,” Teen Vogue, 12 Feb. 2016.

One of my friends who teaches English in Japan asked my advice on Japanese vocabulary for nonbinary genders, and luckily, Vogue Girl, the Japanese version of Teen Vogue translated this article into Japanese.

Note: One of the issues with LGBTQ rights and awareness in Japan is that many of the words to describe sexuality and gender identity are loan words from English and require translation. You often see explanations like B: バイセクシュアル = 両性愛 where the term has to be translated and explained, and the translation isn’t always caught up to how the term is used in English. Japanese has a word for bisexual (両性愛, ryôseiai, “attracted to both genders”) and for pansexual (全性愛, zenseiai, “attracted to all genders”), the Japanese translations typically only have “both men and women” for bi, while English-speaking bisexual communities have a more expansive view of attraction to “same and different genders” or “genders like me and not like me.”

Kathryn Hemmann. “Queering the Media Mix: The Female Gaze in Japanese Fan Comics.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20. 2015.

In dōjinshi, or self-published fan comics, female readers create their own interpretations of stories, characters, and relationships in narratives targeted at a male demographic. In BL (boys’ love) fan comics, which are notable for their focus on a romantic and often physical relationship between two male characters, the female gaze has created its own overtly homoerotic readings and interpretations that creatively subvert the phallocentrism implicit in many mainstream narratives. The interactions between texts and their readers found in dōjinshi illustrate how cycles of narrative production and consumption have changed in the face of active fan cultures. Because of the closely interrelated nature of the components of increasingly international media mixes, communities of fans have the potential to make positive and progressive contributions to the media mix ecosystem.

(You may know also Dr. Hemmann as my co-panelist/author on our work on the trope of “cross-dressing” and on gender in 1970s shôjo anime.)

Anime and Manga

Cecilia d’Anastasio. “Come On, Anime.” Kotaku. 29 November 2017.

In the category of “gross anime things,” let’s talk a little about an increasingly popular gross anime thing commonly referred to as “Really 700 years old.”

That’s when a 700-year-old demon with the body of a young girl who, somehow, finds herself in a sexually compromising position. Yep.

Nina Coomes. “What Miyazaki’s Heroines Taught Me About My Mixed-Race Identity.” Catapult. 16 October 2017.

When I was seven, my family moved from Nagoya, Japan to Chicago, though we often returned to spend summers in Japan. The summer I got my hair cut short was two years into my family’s residence in the States. Still reeling from our trans-Pacific upheaval, I was happy to return to what once was home, yet had found Japan suddenly tinged with a steely alienness. And that summer, it was not just home that seemed alien to me. My body was beginning to lack familiarity, too, and a slow, cold realization was dawning.

“Seven Seas Expands to Classic Shoujo With Release of Riyoko Ikeda’s CLAUDINE Manga.” Seven Seas Entertainment. 15 Nov. 2017.

Born as “Claudine” …[and experiencing gender dysmorphia that*] doesn’t reflect the man inside, this heart-wrenching story follows Claudine through life, pain, and the love of several women. Master shoujo mangaka Riyoko Ikeda, considered part of the influential Year 24 Group, explores gender and sexuality in early twentieth century France in this powerful tale about identity. Riyoko Ikeda’s career of over forty years is most defined by her epic The Rose of Versailles, and she was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2009.

*original copy is unintentionally cissexist; that said, after reading the plot summary of the manga, the book seems to fall into the tropes about “tragic transgender people” so, ugh, Ikeda-sensei….
Erica Friedman. “Retrospective of a Revolution – 20 Years of Shoujo Kakumei Utena.” Okazu.  22 Oct. 2017.

When the series was running on Japanese TV and we were talking about it obsessively on the original Anilesbocon Mailing List (which was rendered defunct by Yahoo in 2001) the series was often spoken of as a subversion of a magical girl series. And certainly, one could see it as such. It takes the stock characters of any anime and manga set in a school, layers on a “purpose” that isn’t saving humanity, or making people happy, or even stealing back people’s precious belongings. That purpose is flatly stated to be a “revolution” – although what that meant to the world is never explained.

Note: Utena is bi, and when a bisexual girl drives off with another queer girl, that doesn’t make it a “lesbian” relationship or ending. It can be a queer ending, or a bisexual ending, but we bisexual folks don’t use “lesbian” to describe our relationships. See the GLAAD Media Resource Guide.

“The Shadow Faced Influence of Junichi Nakahara.” 2016.

A look at the art that inspired the silhouette art in Utena and other anime, including Yuuri Katsuki’s description of the narrative of his “On Love: Eros” routine.

Gender in the Workplace

Elise Hu. “Japanese Lawmaker’s Baby Gets Booted From the Floor.” NPR. 24 November 2017.

When a municipal lawmaker, Yuka Ogata, brought her 7-month-old baby to her job in a male-dominated legislature, she was met with such surprise and consternation by her male colleagues that eventually, she and the baby were asked to leave. Officials of the Kumamoto Municipal Assembly, of which she’s a member, said although there’s no rule prohibiting infants, they booted her citing a rule that visitors are forbidden from the floor.

Elisabeth Sherman. “Japan’s First Female President of a Sake Brewery Says She’s ‘Lucky to be a Woman.’” Food & Wine. 14 Nov. 2017.

[Kayo] Yoshida has transformed her brewery into one where creativity and youthful energy reign. The majority of her employees are under 35, many of which are women; Yoshida says that Umenoyado employees a “female-to-male ratio of over 40%.

Something fun: Japanese mascots getting stuck in turnstiles, doors, and other things.

I have a new book (and film) review of Makoto Shinkai’s your name. on Contemporary Japanese Literature. 

your name. is a novelization of director Makoto Shinkai’s your name., an animated film that tells the story of Mitsuha, a high school girl from rural Gifu prefecture who wishes she could be a boy in Tokyo in her next life. After an incredibly vivid dream in which she wakes up as “Taki,” a high school boy living in downtown Tokyo, she discovers it’s not a dream at all – and Taki is also switching bodies with her. As the two teenagers try to navigate each other’s lives and relationships, only able to communicate with each other only by writing notes in each other’s cell phones when they switch, they begin to unravel a mystery involving Mitsuha’s town.

As a nonbinary queer person, this film and book raised a lot of existential questions for me about physicality, memory, and bodies. Check out the full review here, and thanks again to Kathryn for letting me discuss this book!