You will be reminded of the hilarity of the banana joke while reading the menu, which will contain everything you have ever wanted to eat in that moment, and there it is, open in front of you. In a list. You can tally how many of each piece of sushi you want and they will bring it to you, and the wonder of this catches you at the base of your throat, somewhere above your left lung. You are overwhelmed with gratitude, shaking with it. You will order everything, you actually will, but there is a particular thing that you like there that combines deep-fried rice and spicy tuna and when it arrives and you take a bite of it you can feel the soft fish and the sharpness of the chili peppers and the hard, sweet crunch of the rice. You will be eating across the table from your friend, next to a couple on a first date that doesn’t seem to be going very well, in a crowded restaurant, but you will also be crying. Giant tears will be dropping from your eyes at the sheer overwhelming wonder of this exact moment, and how lucky you are to experience it.
Then—as does everything, eventually—that moment will pass. When you glance down at the table, your tears are there, still pooled. Partially to distract your friend from your tears, but also because it is true, you will ask your friend, “You know what fucking sucks?”
He will look at you blankly. He has just been expressing concern about his own life and you are being a dick by interrupting him and averting the attention to yourself. But you could not fucking care less because you are alive and you have thought of something true to say.
“One thing that fucking sucks is thinking you’re going to die every day for three months.” You will say this venomously, like how people exaggerate meaningless things for the sake of comedy. Except here there is no exaggeration, no joke.
Your friend will burst out laughing anyway. He has a loud laugh, the laugh of a man who is secure in the world, a comforting laugh. The entire restaurant will respond to his laughter; some people will smile along with him. Then you laugh, too. You had forgotten about laughing the way you had forgotten about sushi. You laugh hard and long. Your laugh is frenetic, contagious. It always has been; it has just been dormant. Hearing it now makes others laugh, too. Soon everyone in the whole restaurant is happy, including the couple sitting next to you, and no one realizes that this is because you did not die. You had forgotten how easy it is to make people happy, how easy it is to be happy, yourself.
“That shit is the worst,” you will say to your friend, before picking up your chopsticks to begin eating again. You will roll your eyes for emphasis. You will both laugh again, because it is true.
Then it will be over. You will no longer be someone who has just emerged from a deathbed. You will just be an alive person, whole again, living your life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have always written about difficult subjects, even before my own medical issues became one of them. I am often asked how I can stomach the issues I write about, the stories I hear, and the events I experience. Below are listed the precise individuals who make my work possible, as well as the institutions who supported this particular effort.
I wish to thank my editor Naomi Huffman and my agent Dawn Frederick, as well as the editors and friends who helped shape the pieces herein—particularly A. S. Hamrah, Lauren Kirchner, Daniel Kraus, Chris Lehmann, Irma Nuñez Sless-Kitain, and the truly lovely readers of my weirdo newsletter that shares a name with this project. I must also thank the brilliant illustrator Xander Marro, a sharp thinker that I am honored to work with and be inspired by in this and other endeavors.
I remain grateful for the teams who have published the work included in this volume, particularly The Los Angeles Review of Books, Women’s Review of Books, The State, Talking Points Memo, Salon, The Baffler, and elsewhere, as well as the curators at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400, the Miss Spoken Reading Series in Chicago, and SPACES gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, who allowed me to further explore the ideas herein. As always, Nick Butcher, Nadine Nakanishi, Reinhard Puntigam, Tim Schwartz, and my cats Thurber and All Girl Metal Band put in no small amount of emotional labor to ensure that you would eventually have access to my printed thoughts on such significant matters as talking vaginas, sanitary napkin disposal bags, and straight-up lady cannibals, and for this I offer them my deepest apologies. Finally, I must thank the Salims: thank you, kindly, for all you do to ensure my health and happiness.
Part of this book was made possible by a Kone Foundation grant, which plopped me at the Saari Residency in Finland and gave me a few hours to write between other projects. Another part of this book, a big part—the part where you take the idea for a book and turn it into some paper that is covered in words and available for purchase at bookstores—was made possible by Write A House. This unique, permanent residency program, founded by Sarah Cox and Toby Barlow in Detroit, Michigan, did not merely offer me the gift of permanent publication storage for the first time in my life, but stuck me with the kindest and most healing neighbors a girl could ever dream of. The staff, board, volunteers, and donors will forever have my gratitude.
NOTES
Body Horror, an introduction
1.The cartoonist Gabrielle Gamboa and I made a comic to illustrate some data we’d pulled during the #31HorrorFilms31Days Twitter challenge annually posed by Daniel Kraus at Booklist. Hashtag contributors are urged to watch a film every day in October and then tweet a review/summary. In 2012, a few of us (Rob Kirby’s contributions stand out, alongside the above participants) further took note of basic demographic data on cast and crew, as well as key plot points. Further content analysis I performed on my own, because I secretly love doing math. “The truly scary politics of horror movies,” Gabrielle Gamboa and Anne Elizabeth Moore, October 29, 2013, Salon.com. Retrieved October 21, 2016: http://www.salon.com/2013/10/29/the_truly_scary_politics_of_horror_movies/
2.In her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel has two characters in a strip from 1985 discussing the minimal criteria for attending a film: that it include at least two female characters talking to each other about something besides a man. Even Bechdel was surprised, years later, to discover it still had currency. “I feel a little bit sheepish about the whole thing, because it’s not like I invented this test or said this is the Bechdel test. It somehow has gotten attributed to me over the years. It’s this weird thing. Like, people actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test,” Bechdel told NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air. (For the record, Alison Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace with these rules, and would prefer it be called the Bechdel-Wallace Test.)
3.“Tom Six: In 100 years people will still be talking about my human centipede films,” Hannah Ellis-Petersen, July 2, 2015, The Guardian. Retrieved October 24, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/02/human-centipede-director-tom-six-i-have-this-very-sick-imagination
4.“‘I don’t like human beings’: A chat with Human Centipede’s Tom Six,” Rich Juzwiak, March 21, 2015, Defamer. Retrieved October 24, 2016: http://defamer.gawker.com/i-dont-like-human-beings-a-chat-with-the-human-centi-1706049658
5.“Deadgirl—Interview with Gadi Harel,” Michael Guillén, March 8, 2009, ScreenAnarchy. Retrieved October 24, 2016: http://screenanarchy.com/2009/03/deadgirlinterview-with-gadi-harel.html
6.Deadgirl, in truth, does offer an interesting and knowing view on misogyny, for a film about a group of young men finding a young woman and mutilating her is, fundamentally, about what culture suggests is acceptable for men to do to women’s bodies. It is, however, a far cry from being a feminist film, in content or in production.
7.I suspect this has so far kept most filmmakers from making body horror films about nonbinary individuals, relying overmuch on the questionable notion that stripping away gender equates to a loss of personhood.
8.“Film review: Contracted,” Dennis Harvey, November 8, 2013, Variety. Retrieved October 25, 2016: http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/contracted-review-1200810688/
The shameful legacy (and secret promise) of
the sanitary napkin disposal bag
1.For more on this, see Vern Bullough’s, “Merchandising the Sanitary Napkin,” in the University of Chicago Press 1985 release Signs.
2.“Why don’t women patent?” Jennifer Hunt, Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, David J. Munroe, March 2012, National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved October 28, 2016: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17888?ntw
3.“The wage gap is stagnant in last decade,” September 2012, A factsheet from the National Women’s Law Center. Retrieved October 28, 2016: http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/poverty_day_wage_gap_sheet.pdf
4.“Women aren’t held back by an ambition gap. They’re just held back,” Bryce Covert, November 14, 2012, Forbes. Retrieved October 28, 2016: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brycecovert/2012/11/14/women-arent-held-back-by-an-ambitiongap-theyre-just-held-back/
5.“The most hazardous spot in women’s restrooms,” Ann Germanow, 2009, Building Services Management. Interestingly, the original letter has disappeared (http://www.bsmmag.com/Main/Articles/2009/09/FeminineCareProductDisposal.htm) since I published this piece with The Baffler in June 2014, although it was archived in February 2012, by the Internet Archive, retrieved October 28, 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20120228181704/http://www.bsmmag.com/Main/Articles/2009/09/Feminine%20Care%20Product%20Disposal.htm
6.These are tallied by way of Google Patents; gender was determined by name and further online investigation. Both processes are somewhat flawed.
Women
1.For the remainder of this essay, I will use the term “misogyny” to refer to all gender-based violence afflicting folks outside the strictly masculine end of the gender spectrum. I have no wish to erase trans and nonbinary folks, not even in language, but it is the term under consideration in the works of the artists I address here. I also desire the language that I use reflect the world as I genuinely experience it, and my experience suggests that femininity in any degree, regardless of the gender identity of the performer, is the real target of misogyny. (I may, however, be in error.)
2.All Despentes quotations come from the 2010 English-language edition of King Kong Theory, published by the Feminist Press in New York, and translated by Stéphanie Benson.
3.“I Spit on Your Grave movie review,” Roger Ebert, July 16, 1980. Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved November 2, 2016: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980
Model employee
1.“Does fashion week exploit teen models?” Jennifer Sky, September 9, 2014, The Daily Beast. Retrieved October 28, 2016: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/14/does-fashion-week-exploit-teen-models.html
2.“Jennifer Sky, Fashion week and exploitation,” Jennifer Sky, September 10, 2012, Guernica. Retrieved October 28, 2016: https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/jennifer-sky-fashion-week-and-exploitation/
3.Pop-up ad on the Model Alliance website circa 2015. Retrieved October 28, 2016: http://modelalliance.org.
4.“Models: Occupational Outlook Handbook,” December 17, 2015, Bureau of Labor Statistics (United States Department of Labor). Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/models.htm
5.See my in-depth analysis at Truthout: “The fashion industry’s perfect storm,” April 4, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://truth-out.org/news/item/8307-the-fashion-industrys-perfect-storm-collapsing-workers-and-hyperactive-buyers
6.“Yes, you should feel bad for models: we’re being told to diet—or go broke,” Sara Ziff, September 9, 2014, The Guardian. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/09/models-diet-go-broke-modeling-industry?CMP=twt_gu
7.“Protect children in the fashion industry from exploitation,” Jennifer Sky, February 3, 2014, YouTube. Retrieved October 31, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKJ99Gh0UN0
8.For more on these fascinating, denationalized zones, see my comic with Melissa Mendes at Truthout: “Zoned,” November 12, 2013. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19977-ladydrawers-zoned (Also included in my 2016 book Threadbare: Clothes, Sex & Trafficking.)
9.This rose dramatically by the 2015 report, when $13.23 was listed as the median hourly pay for models. Unfortunately, the living wage in New York rose just as dramatically, to $14.52, which narrows the gap between earnings and living wage only slightly.
10.Check MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, retrieved October 31, 2016: http://livingwage.mit.edu/states/36
11.“Stealing from the poor: wage theft in the Haitian garment industry,” Worker Rights Consortium, October 15, 2013. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://www.workersrights.org/freports/WRC Haiti Minimum Wage Report 10 15 13.pdf
12.“About,” May 2012, Vetan Chori Band Koro (Campaign to Stop Wage Theft). Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://vetanchoribandkaro.wordpress.com/about-2/
13.“Walmart warehouse contractor to pay $21 million to settle wage theft allegations,” Dave Jamieson, May 14, 2014. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/14/walmart-warehouse-wage-theft_n_5324021.html
14.Admittedly, this is only one in a sea of hundreds or thousands of class-action lawsuits filed against Forever 21, distinguishable only by its association with a particular warehouse. “Forever 21 employees file class action lawsuit,” January 19, 2012, Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/19/business/la-fi-mo-forever-21-lawsuit-20120119
15.“Yes, you should feel bad for models: we’re being told to diet—or go broke,” in The Guardian. (Ibid.)
16.“Fashion week’s models are getting whiter,” Jenna Sauers, February 18, 2013, Jezebel. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://jezebel.com/5985110/new-york-fashion-weeks-models-are-getting-whiter
17.“Despite gains, the Fall 2016 runways were still less than 25 percent diverse,” Jessica Andres, March 16, 2016, The Fashion Spot. Retrieved October 31, 2016: http://www.thefashionspot.com/runway-news/685109-runway-diversity-report-fall-2016/
Vagina dentata
1.“Pride and Prejudice,” Zöe Heller, September 27, 2012, New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 27, 2016: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/09/27/pride-and-prejudice/
2.“Interview: Wolfgang Büld,” MJ Simpson, February 9, 2013, MJ Simpson: Film Reviews and Interviews. Retrieved October 27, 2016: http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.com/2013/02/interview-wolfgang-buld.html
Consumpcyon
1.This and all other Atwood quotations come from the 1999 edition of The Edible Woman, published by McClelland and Stewart in Toronto.
2.“The epidemiology of irritable bowel syndrome,” Caroline Canavan, Joe West, and Timothy Card, February 4, 2014, Clinical Epidemiology. Retrieved October 31, 2016: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921083/
3.“The girl on the wedding cake,” Millicent Bell, October 18, 1970, New York Times. Retrieved October 31, 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/03/specials/atwood-edible.html
4.Page 16, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan (London: Penguin), 2007.
5.“Laying off the pizza for awhile,” My Life with IBS, Rachel, December 2, 2009. Retrieved November 1, 2016: http://ibsrachel.blogspot.com/2009/12/laying-off-pizza-for-while.html
6.“The girl who cried pain: A bias against women in the treatment of pain,” by Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzia, in Volume 29 of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. Retrieved November 1, 2016: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=383803
7.“Why do doctors take women’s pain less seriously?” Mary Jo Dilonardo, October 23, 2015, Mother Nature Network. Retrieved November 1, 2016: http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/why-do-doctors-take-womens-pain-lessseriously
8.Those invested in mainstream feminism could and should ask why autoimmune disease is not an issue of concern on the level of reproductive health, but I won’t spoil the fun for you by explaining it here.
9.“Changes in intestinal tight junction permeability associated with industrial food additives explain the risi
ng incidence of autoimmune disease,” Aaron Lerner and Torsten Matthias, Autoimmunity Reviews, Volume 14, Issue 6 (June 2015).
10.“Food labels and the trouble with trade deals,” May 20, 2015, Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 1, 2016: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-edfood-labels-20150520-story.html
11.Page 113, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
12.As quoted on page 9, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag (New York: Picador), 1978.
Cultural imperative
1.It may be interesting that my actual class status changed at this time: family relationships disintegrated, so I had no economic foundation to rely on, concurrent with the disintegration of my health, although that wouldn’t become evident for a few more years. I looked the part, in other words, but it was already evident to me that the way I was read had little to do with the resources I had access to.
2.Page 23, From Goods to a Good Life, Madhavi Sunder (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2012.
3.All Vandana Shiva quotations come from the 2001 edition of Protect or Plunder?, published by Zed Books in London, originally published as Patents: Myths & Reality by Penguin Books in New Delhi that same year. Page 12.
4.Page 17, Protect or Plunder?
On leaving the birthplace of standard time
1.“Route 66 history: welcoming Standard Time and time zones,” Marie Traska, The Curious Traveler’s Guide to Route 66 in Metro Chicago, November 4, 2014. Retrieved November 1, 206: https://curioustraveler66.com/2014/11/04/route-66-history-welcoming-standard-time-and-time-zones/
Body Horror Page 22