“The omnivore’s deception,” as I call it, is the idea that we can go on raising and killing other animals for food without harming animals, wrecking our planet’s ecology, or ruining our own souls.  But we can’t.  It’s time to abolish the animal food economy in its entirety. 

Why do you use the word “deception”?  

The meat, dairy, egg, and fishing industries deceive the American people about the terrible impacts of these industries on animals, on the environment, and on human health.  Meanwhile, critics like Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin, and others have misled the public by telling consumers that these violent animal industries can somehow be “reformed” and made “humane,” when they can’t be.   

But you use “deception” also in a different way… 

Yes, we also deceive ourselves.  We want to believe that there is a “nice” or “compassionate” way to go on exploiting and killing animals in the billions, when we know, deep down, that there isn’t.  We can’t have our meat and our consciences too. 

But haven’t humans been eating other animals since forever? 

The fact that a practice has been around for a long time is no proof of its moral “rightness.”  We know from history that unjust practices and institutions can persist for generations, yet be wrong.  Slavery lasted for thousands of years, but that didn’t make it right.  Similarly, just because we’ve been subjecting other species to cruelty for countless generations doesn’t mean that we should continue to do so. 

To play devil’s advocate, don’t other animals kill for food?  What’s the difference when we do it?  What about the lion who eats a gazelle?   

As obligate carnivores, lions have to eat meat in order to survive.Ěý That isn’t true of us.Ěý We therefore have a latitude of moral action that lions and other carnivores do not.Ěý Nutritionists have shown that vegan diets are in fact better for us than animal-based ones.Ěý Vegans have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Type-2 diabetes, and even live longer than “omnivores” who eat animal products.Ěý We can choose not to inflict violent harm on other animals, and we’ll even be better off for it.ĚýĚýĚý

So you’re saying that there is no “natural” imperative for us to keep raising and killing animals for food? 

Breeding animals in the billions, raising them in confinement, and slaughtering them is no more or less natural than paying taxes, streaming Netflix, or burning witches at the stake. If we chose to, we could shut down the slaughterhouses and recall our fishing fleets tomorrow.  And in doing so we would no more be acting “against nature” than if we decided to ban opioids or to raise the minimum wage.  Furthermore, the anthropological evidence suggests that for most of our time as a species, about 200,000 years, we have gotten the vast majority of our calories from plants, not from the flesh of animals. 

Can’t we kill animals without causing them to suffer? 

No.Ěý Each year, we kill 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals in the food system.Ěý There is simply no way to commit such mass violence without causing the animals trapped in the system to undergo unspeakable forms of suffering.Ěý Baby pigs are castrated and have their ears docked without anesthesia; improperly stunned cows are dismembered and skinned alive; pigs and chickens are often scalded alive after having their throats cut; fishing results in terrible suffering in fish, and so on.Ěý I could give many other examples.Ěý If we treat the lives of animals as worthless and disposable, then inevitably extreme cruelty and suffering will follow.Ěý

Isn’t the problem the factory farming system, industrialized animal agriculture? 

No, this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the animal food system. The reason animals are reared in miserable, intensive confinement is because there is no other way to produce animal products at scale for 8 billion human beings.  The problem therefore isn’t “factory farms”–it’s that we violently make use of animals for our purposes. Criticism of killing and eating animals in fact predates the factory farming system by 3,000 years.  Even small-scale animal agriculture is based on enslaving other beings and subjecting them to ruthless violence.   

Isn’t it dangerous to compare our treatment of animals to slavery? 

Animal domestication—the keeping and breeding of other animals for our exploitation and use—was in fact the model for human slavery in the ancient world.  And the two systems, slavery and animal domestication, were treated as similar practices for thousands of years.  Later, in the Antebellum South, racial slavery was justified by reference to our supposed “natural” domination over other animals.  Astonishingly, we find critics like Michael Pollan today defending animal agriculture using the same arguments that earlier critics once used to defend human slavery—such as the argument that “inferior” beings “consent” to being violently exploited by a more powerful group. 

So our treatment of other animals resembles other institutions of oppression or injustice? 

Yes—the animal economy has a great deal in common with other forms of domination, including totalitarianism.Ěý The levels of violence are similar, the degradation, the cruelty, and the kinds of rationales given in support of those systems are similar, too.Ěý Victims of systemic violence are always viewed with contempt, as “inferiors” who deserve what is done to them. And as in totalitarianism, we subject animals’ lives, bodies, and minds to total control, including through genetic manipulation and psychological torment.Ěý

What about animal behaviorists like Temple Grandin, or smaller-scale farmers like Joel Salatin, who argue that we can at least reduce suffering in farmed animals? 

Grandin, Salatin, and other critics who defend “ethical” animal farming all begin from the same starting point, which is to assume that animals’ lives are so worthless that we can go on killing them in the billions or even trillions, without committing any injustice against them.  But even if we could kill animals painlessly—which is a complete fantasy—I argue that it would still be wrong.  Other animals are worthy of their lives, they are individuals, conscious beings–“someones”—and they deserve to be treated as such, not to be subjected to violence. 

Is there a disconnect between our love for animals as pets and our appetite for using other animals as food? 

Yes.Ěý Pigs, chickens, cows, geese, sheep, ducks, and other exploited animals have been shown to be just as cognitively and emotionally complex and present as the cats and dogs we lavish with affection and treat as members of our own families.Ěý The contradiction between these two ways of living a human life—one lived in communion and love with animals, the other in violent contempt of their very lives—runs like an unmapped seismic fault beneath society, tracing the boundary of two irreconcilable value structures and modes of life.Ěý There is a better way to live a human life than with such hypocrisy and cruelty.Ěý

What is the new science of animal minds and emotions revealing to us about animals’ complexity and sensitivity? 

We are raised to think of intelligence or complex emotions as uniquely “human.”  But nothing could be further from the truth.  Pigeons are better than us at some forms of spatial reasoning; chickens have “words” to warn one another of different kinds of predators; chimpanzees exhibit short-term memory skills that are superior to our own; and fish exhibit intelligence that rival intelligence in primates, and so on.  Even invertebrates like mollusks and insects exhibit complex consciousness.  Many species, including rats, pigs, birds, and apes, meanwhile exhibit empathy for others, and will even sacrifice their own interests to prevent suffering in others.  The evidence shows, in short, that other animals are “someones,” unique individuals with distinct personalities and interests, including an interest in not being killed. 

Shouldn’t we also care about the lives of plants, too?  And what about the “rights” of AI? 

There is no evidence that plants have consciousness.  Unlike animals, plants do not have emotions or first-person experiences, which means they are incapable of forming meaningful social bonds with others, they aren’t vulnerable to psychological trauma, and so on.  So it is quite disturbing to see people denying the obvious qualitative distinction between plants and animals.  As for AI, there is no evidence whatsoever that AI will ever develop consciousness.  To talk about “AI rights” is a distraction from the far more important issue of how we treat beings known to have complex consciousness. 

How is the raising and killing of animals for food impacting our planet’s ecology? 

Two systems are undermining the conditions of all life on Earth today.  One is human domination of animals, and the other is capitalism.  Like entwined strands of DNA, these two systems form not so much distinct processes as elements of the same total structure of biological annihilation, a double helix encoding the end of terrestrial life.  And the two forces have come together in the animal food economy.  Animal agriculture is the main cause of the global mass extinction crisis, of land degradation, biodiversity loss, sedimentation of coastal areas, water pollution, depletion of freshwater aquifers, and so on.  In fact, the animal food economy is the single most ecologically destructive force on Earth today.  It’s even worse than global warming, which it contributes to.  Animal agriculture produces more climate-altering emissions than cars, trucks, and planes combined. 

Can you give some examples of the ecological savings that would come our way by shifting to a universal vegan diet? 

Animal-based foods, including the monocrops grown to feed animals raised for slaughter, account for 90% of agricultural land use in the US.  Compared to an animal-based diet, a vegan diet requires less than half as much water, cuts land use and water pollution by 75%, reduces the loss of wildlife by two-thirds, and yields three-quarters fewer climate emissions.  It takes 1,800 gallons to produce a pound of beef, compared to 220 gallons to grow a pound of wheat.  It takes 670 gallons of water to yield 3.5 oz of protein from dairy cheese, but only 91 gallons of water to grow potatoes and 24 gallons to grow soy to produce an equivalent amount of protein. Veganism also would be the safest way to geoengineer our way naturally out of the climate emergency:  shifting to a plant-based diet could free up 75% of the land now being taken up by agriculture; once reforested, that land could sequester up to 215 gigatons of carbon (GtC) over the next century, cooling the planet.  

Why do we hear so many critics now promoting a “carnivore” diet, if veganism has been shown to confer distinct health advantages? 

Meat is not like other products we buy—it’s closely tied to gender norms.  Mostly it’s men promoting meat-based diets, misogynistic influencers like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, whose conception of masculinity is rooted in violence against animals and domination over Nature and over women.  It’s no accident that the resurgence of a “pro-meat” lobby is occurring at a time of the MAGA movement, which embraces machismo, authoritarianism, and heedless expansion of the oil and coal industries.  The promotion of meat is part of a wider cultural shift against compassion, against empathy, against equality, against environmentalism. 

Is that partly why meat has become a flashpoint in the US culture wars?  What types of federal legislation are some Republicans putting forward in order to suppress animal welfare standards through the country? 

Republican legislators have been trying to pass the so-called Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression or EATS act, which would overturn thousands of local and state laws ensuring public food and environmental safety, and minimum standards of animal welfare.  Last year, meanwhile, governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation to prohibit efforts to market plant-based and cellular meats and other alternatives to conventional meat in Florida, portraying vegans as part of “global elite” conspiracy bent on achieving “authoritarian goals.”  This kind of lunacy is now endangering public health.  One reason the federal government has dropped the ball on avian flu is that government officials have been afraid of antagonizing the animal agriculture industry, which has resisted the on-site inspections and testing that could have led to more effective containment efforts against this deadly virus. 

We are hearing a lot in the news these days about avian flu.  Is the animal system placing us at risk of another devastating pandemic? 

The animal system is escalating the risk of deadly pandemics like avian flu.  Three-quarters of all emerging diseases are zoonotic, meaning that they originate in other species.  Animal agriculture increases the risk of such diseases astronomically–first, by destroying animals’ habitats, thereby putting other species in greater proximity to us and to one another, and second, by crowding animals together in misery on industrial farms, which weakens their immune systems and multiplies avenues for viral contagion and mutation.  That’s now happening with avian flu, which has become endemic to the US animal agriculture system. 

How dangerous is avian flu? 

The mortality rate of avian flu has been over 50% historically, making it up to 100 times more deadly than Covid.  The World Health Organization has warned that if the H5N1 virus mutates into a form transmissable between humans, it could kill up to 150 million people.  So we have every incentive to end animal farming, for our own safety.  That said, we should abolish the animal food system not merely because it’s in our self-interest to do so, but because it’s simply wrong to treat animals as mere “things” to exploit for our purposes. 

What do we stand to gain in ending our brutal use of animals, and our dependence on meat? 

We stand to gain a lot. We would secure our own future survival as a species, because the animal system is literally destroying the ecology of the Earth, the very means of life.  And there are significant health advantages to a plant-based diet.  But more importantly, we would make our species worthy of its own existence.  Right now, we have organized our economy and even our identity around mass violence, trauma, and violence towards our fellow creatures.  However, there is a better, a “higher” form of human existence available to us, if we relate to other animals differently. 

What would it mean to relate to other animals differently?   

By approaching other beings with love, rather than contempt and aggression, we open ourselves to a deeper kind of connection, not only towards others but to ourselves—a deeper communion with our fellow beings and with one another.  Millions of people already have close emotional relationships with their cats and dogs.  But all animals are worthy of being loved.  And as one cannot love what one seeks to destroy, it follows that we must end our exploitation and killing of animals in food, science, entertainment, etc. 

Many people think that being a vegan is difficult, and that vegans sacrifice pleasure for ethics.  Do you agree? 

Vegetarian cuisine extends back 3,000 years.  And every culture has its share of vegan foods–pasta with marinara in Italy, lentils and many other dishes in India, rice and beans and maize in Latin America, bread in Europe and Africa, noodles in Asia, and so on.  Of the estimated 250,000 edible plants on the Earth, furthermore, we consume only a tiny percentage.  So there’s a limitless variety of delicious foods to eat as a vegan.  I’ve been a vegan for over 30 years, and I eat a wider variety of fabulous foods today than I did before I gave up eating meat, eggs, and cheese. 

How will future generations judge our treatment of animals today? 

A day will come when we look back on our treatment of animals today with the same degree of moral revulsion that we feel gazing back at the horrors of slavery.  Our descendants, too, will wonder at our own apathy and indifference in the face of so plain and pervasive an evil.  It’s time for a new approach–a better way of being human. 

John Sanbonmatsu is Professor of Philosophy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. He is the editor of and author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject.

The fourth chapter ofĚý’s new book,ĚýThe Tragedy of Heterosexuality, imagines a dinner party with 60 of Ward’s queer friends and colleagues. They’re in the middle of a critical discussion about straight culture and the boredom, obliviousness and bad sex they associate with it. Also discussed are oppressive straight rituals like bridal showers ˛š˛ÔťĺĚý. Mostly, though, Ward and her queer comrades pity straight people who don’t seem to like each other very much, evidenced by men shit-talking the mothers of their children and straight women constantly complaining about the men in their lives.

The professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, pulls no punches as she offers a century-long investigation of the “misogyny paradox,” wherein men are encouraged to simultaneously desire and hate women. The message is unapologetically feminist, as is Ward’s central thesis: Straight men would do well to lean into conversations around consent, privilege and toxic masculinity — at the very least to demonstrate genuine empathy for the women they profess to love. Maybe they could even like women, she suggests, imagining a world in which straight men rename their sexual orientation “feminist,” as it would more accurately describe the depth of their respect of women. 

I recently spoke with  about how The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy were emblematic of the marital discord found in much of the 20th century; what straight men can learn from lesbians; and why she thinks queer people should worry about straight people.

Why are you, a self-described “femme dyke,” so concerned about straight people? 

Because I’m a feminist. Lesbian feminists in the 1970s were also crying queer tears for straight women because they were observing how difficult it was for straight women to be in relationships with men, and many feminists were strategizing about how to be allies to straight women. So part of this book is me returning to those questions about what it means to heal centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. In the same way that we’re grappling with centuries of white supremacy in this country, this book is very much about what it means for men and women to come together by loving and respecting one another, and liberating heterosexuality from misogyny by unraveling the legacy of gendered violence that shapes the context in which straight relationships occur.

If łŮłó˛šłŮ’s the goal, why is it more appropriate to worry about heterosexuals rather than be upset with them, and call them in rather than calling them out?

We’ve been calling them out for decades, and it hasn’t helped them. So this is about recognizing that heterosexual relationships are often fraught with inequities rigged into the system from the start. , whether it’s house work, parenting work or having bad sex that centers on men’s orgasms over women’s. Meanwhile, women’s passions and careers are sidelined, and they’re doing way too much emotional labor because their husbands or boyfriends won’t go to therapy and don’t have any close friends. The list goes on and on of all the ways people get caught up in cycles of straight misery. This is why the majority of heterosexual divorces are  by women. 

You note that one of the defining features of straight culture is complaint, which leaves feminist lesbians shaking their heads wondering why women stay with someone they find so pathetic. Has that been your experience, too? 

When I’m hanging out with a group of straight women, they just love to complain about their husbands and boyfriends. He doesn’t do his fair share; he acts like a child; he’s emotionally deficient. When you’re listening to that as a queer person, it’s perplexing. The first reaction is, Why doesn’t she just leave him? But we now know as feminists that blaming women who are in abusive relationships isn’t the way to go, and the first question should always be, Why is he treating her that way? 

It’s important to recognize that for people who are socialized into straight culture, those inequities aren’t only deeply normalized, but romanticized. So it’s hard for straight women to make sense of what they imagine to be a natural impulse in men because łŮłó˛šłŮ’s the message they’re often given — “men will be men” — and they don’t realize that they can demand men to be different.

You wrote this book out of solidarity with straight women, but your focus shifted to include straight men. Why? 

Mostly because I feel empathy for and connection with men. I have a number of good feminist men in my life, and I know what it’s like to desire women, to lust after women, to objectify women and to struggle to balance that with feminist politics. But what really struck me about the culture straight men are embedded in is that the desire for women is often talked about as an individualized experience. 

When you’re a lesbian and attracted to women, it’s usually inseparable from feminism. Because if you desire women, you also desire what’s best for women — women’s freedom, leadership and culture is deeply tied up with your sexual desire for women. That’s the piece łŮłó˛šłŮ’s missing for men in straight culture. In fact, the opposite is largely true: Many straight boys and men are raised to constantly signal their heterosexuality so nobody thinks they’re gay. One way straight boys and men often do that, aside from objectifying women, is to distance themselves from intimacy with women. Because being too close to women paradoxically raises questions about their masculinity. So łŮłó˛šłŮ’s another thread in this book — this weird paradox in heterosexual masculinity that men can want to fuck women to signal their heterosexuality, but it raises questions about his sexuality if he actually respects women, listens to them speak, shows interest in films centering on women’s characters or reads books with women protagonists. 

I’m trying to flip that script and say, if you’re so straight, how much do you really like women? Show us the receipts!

As a gay man, I was delighted by your call to 58 queer-identified colleagues and friends, asking them to answer two questions: 1) Do you prefer the company of queer people over straight people?; and 2) Is there anything about straight culture you find sad or off-putting? I was struck by the empathy in their responses.

There was a lot of sadness and concern, which is why I talk about the importance of queer people being allies to straight people. We’re told that it’s so difficult and lonely to be queer, but the more you really dig into heteronormativity and what it looks like once the wedding day is over, it can be deeply isolating. Queer subculture encourages us to stay politically engaged well beyond college and to maintain connection to queer life. That’s why we go out to gay and lesbian bars regularly well into adulthood. Whereas, there’s this narrative in straight culture to party it up when you’re young, but then once you get married, you settle down and move to the suburbs and your whole life becomes your family. There’s so much pressure to marry and have kids that it can be a deeply predictable experience because everybody’s following the same script.

Many of the queer people I spoke to referenced straight culture appearing “suffocating” and “soul killing.” Moments that are supposed to mark important rites of passage in straight people’s lives and the rituals they use to celebrate these things — , wedding receptions, gender reveal parties — are all so scripted that many of us queers feel pity about the dullness of it all. 

Unsurprisingly, then, “boring” was a through line in many of the responses. Why do queers find straight people to be so basic?

It has to do with sexual normativity. For the most part, straight culture is very invested in the gender binary and pretty rigid gender norms around masculinity and femininity. Most queer people have grown pretty tired of those. I have normative gender, but I think of my gender in terms of being a fem top or a feminist dyke. There’s a lot of complexity to how I understand my femininity that makes me feel like it’s something I’ve cultivated, not something that I was born with. Therefore, I can play with it, change it and articulate it in as many different ways as I want. There’s a gajillion examples of this in gay male subculture, including the hanky code and .

What can straight people learn from this? 

They could start by asking each other what they’re into sexually, instead of assuming that their genitals alone determined whether it’s going to be a good fuck. Maybe then guys would know whether a woman was more of a top or a bottom and what sex acts she was into, or whether she even wants to be fucked. Maybe she only wants him to go down on her. All of that stuff is already baked into the mix for queer people. Which really helps, not just with making sure that we have good sex, but also with communication, negotiation and consent. And so, there’s less faking. Straight women do a lot of faking to please men. 

Which brings us back to why it’s boring: We’ve seen the script play itself out in all of our straight friends’ lives, we’ve seen it on television, we’ve seen it in reality television and we’re just so tired of it.

Many straight people will likely take issue with your framing: “the misery of heterosexuality.” You’ve received some really ugly feedback, too. 

You’ve just gotta love the , because it always responds to feminist writing by saying some variation of, “There’s no such thing as misogyny, you fucking cunt whore, you should die!” I’ve received dozens of emails from men who think I should lose my job, and how dare I even have a PhD when I’m corrupting young people and ruining the world. None of these men has actually read this book, of course, they just read the title, which seems to be very triggering for them. Several suggested that they wished I’d been aborted, which was interesting because I imagine many of these men are pro-life. Maybe if you’re pro-life, though, łŮłó˛šłŮ’s like the greatest insult or something, I don’t know. 

You offer a remarkable history of the roots of straight misery. Early in the 20th century, some sexologists said that marriage was synonymous with sexual violence. Can you speak to that time — how women often considered men’s bodies “repulsive” and were driven mad on their wedding night? 

Some even committed suicide. Surprisingly, the earliest marriage self-help books were published by the Eugenics Publishing Company in the 1910s as part of white supremacist projects trying to keep white marriages together so that people who were believed to be of good genetic stock would continue to reproduce. 

The presumption at the time was that people married for primarily pragmatic economic reasons. It was a patriarchal system in which men would marry women not because they actually loved women or even liked women, but because women were property and essentially servants to men. They were also the only way men could have male heirs to whom they could pass on their possessions; so it was necessary to partner with women. But no one expected men to like their wives, or for women to like their husbands.

These books describe in detail a mutual loathing and repulsion and almost prison-like conditions of marriage, and they were struggling to figure out how to repair this. Physicians and sexologists knew they needed to somehow bridge the gap between men and women, because if they didn’t, men would continue to brutalize women and rape them on their wedding night, which was a threat to marriage. So they come up with a series of recommendations, some of which carry through to 21st-century marital self-help books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which is that straight couples should basically fake it till they make it. Women should recognize that men’s brutality, violence and disregard for their wives is a biological impulse, so they must give men space. And men should realize that their marriage won’t be sustained unless they provide a degree of gentleness with women. 

That call for sympathy seems to really pick up in the mid-century self-help books, right?

Absolutely. At that time, the presumption is that men are going out into the paid labor force and are just exhausted from having jobs. So that when they come home, the wife must understand that there shall be no noise and no distraction. She shouldn’t even talk to him; she should just have his food ready. She should always look beautiful, the house should be clean and the children should be tidy because anything could potentially set this man off. The focus mid-century is on giving women a checklist of duties to help their fragile male partners. The public sphere was such a harsh and difficult realm that men deserved a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude from women simply for having jobs. 

These rigid gender responsibilities were affirmed in television shows of the day like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, in which a mutual dislike among married couples is on display. Ralph threatens to hit Alice in nearly every episode of , and Ricky actually spanks Lucy in  until she cries in two episodes. The running joke at the time was how little married couples actually liked each other, especially how irritated the husband was at the sound of his wife’s constant yammering.  would become an exemplar of this in the 1980s, the conceit being how much Al Bundy deeply hated his wife.

Meanwhile,  begins publishing in 1952, which speaks directly to men’s desire for being free of these claustrophobic relationships. 

Playboy comes along and is so popular in part because it’s speaking to the heterosexual misery that men are experiencing. We primarily think of it as providing nude images of women that men can gaze upon, but it did much more than that. It created a social environment where men could be part of a community of readers who shared a sense that they’d lost a freedom that men crave, and that their wife was an old ball and chain and their children were a drag. Men could escape into the pages of Playboy, where it was possible to drink martinis while entertaining different young women. In this fantasy universe, compulsory heterosexuality wasn’t bearing down on men quite so heavily.

Skipping ahead to the 1990s, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus seems to cement this notion that men and women are so different that they might as well be from different planets. 

It was the No. 1 best-selling non-fiction book of the entire 1990s, translated into multiple languages and sold millions of copies around the world. That’s significant when you pay attention to the book’s message, which was that men and women don’t naturally like each other. Thus, the best that they can do is learn a set of tricks and manipulations that will get them what they want in the context of the transaction łŮłó˛šłŮ’s heterosexual marriage. Men were taught to touch women 10 times a day because women crave affection. Women were taught to express gratitude every time a man takes the trash out or pays a bill because men thrive on the feeling that they’re needed. 

And yet, I think one of the reasons people loved the book is that it effectively circumvented feminism by saying, “I hear that you’re miserable and this isn’t working, but you don’t have to take a feminist route. You can adopt a bio-essentialist argument that men and women are two different kinds of human beings who don’t share a common language or common interest, but have to come together in partnership nonetheless. Here are different tricks of the trade, and if you memorize them and use them, they’re going to work.” That was very appealing to people. 

Then, in the early aughts, the message changes slightly. For instance, in â€™s 2002 book, Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl — A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship, she presents three words “guaranteed” to turn any man on: “You are right.” Sounds familiar, no?

It’s not a change in the content by any means, and reverts back to strategies of the 1950s when women were directed to double down on subservience. What’s different in the 21st century, though, is it gets marketed to women as a kind of “girl boss” strategy that wise women can use to manipulate men. It’s sold to women as a savvy, innovative new way of manipulating men by pretending they have the power when in fact you have the power. But it’s just a merging of women’s subservience that was the dominant paradigm in the 1950s and the performativity of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It’s brought together in this notion that a smart bitch knows how to manipulate a man by telling him what he wants to hear, even when she doesn’t actually believe it.

Which brings us to today, when people like  give women permission to . 

Yes, she does. There are a number of books like that, that suggest women should just disinvest in men, kind of a “hoes before bros” sort of argument — let’s bunch together as women because we actually have each other’s backs. And yet, women continue to return to men. What’s missing that we have in the queer community is ethical polyamorous or ethical non-monogamous frameworks that women could use to help maneuver the complexities of opting out of heteronormative marriage. And so, these women, they’re aspiring for something. I understand the impulse, but I think there’s not any guidebook that they have available to them to truly opt out.

Meanwhile, on the men’s side,  (MGTOW),  and  start to crop up. How does the rise of the manosphere fit into all of this? 

At one end of the continuum, you have MGTOW, men who’ve decided that women aren’t worth it and so they’re “going their own way,” disinvesting in heteronormativity. They’re only going to have sex with sex workers and otherwise wash their hands of life with women. These men feel that heterosexuality has changed so dramatically that now women have all of the power, leaving men without access to the sex they feel entitled to by birth. On the other end of the continuum is pickup artists, who approach this problem by learning a set of seduction techniques to be more successful with women. Men in this movement often feel like failures and believe their lot in life is their responsibility because they never learned how to attract women. 

ąő’vąđ&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;, observing pickup artist bootcamps and seen men crying about their first girlfriend abandoning them, or how they were a virgin into their 30s, or just feel deficient because they don’t know what’s wrong with them. And I sympathize with them. They’re often socially awkward or immigrant men who feel like they haven’t mastered American gender norms. Others are just unattractive men, or men who feel they can’t compete. The problem with these men isn’t that they can’t find women who want to have sex with them, but that they’re not attracted to women who are attracted to them. Over and over I’d hear them say, “The women who are attracted to me are older, divorced, have kids and are a little chubby.” I’m looking at these men and łŮłó˛šłŮ’s exactly who they are, too! And yet, they find it repulsive in a woman. Almost exclusively, these men want young, skinny blondes. So it’s not that there aren’t women available, these men just have a very narrow fantasy about what’s desirable.

Are there any groups within the manosphere doing positive things?

 perhaps, a growing wing of the seduction industry in which you can pay $20,000 to go on an extended bootcamp that involves travel to various cities. They’re about the “total man.” When you pay for the Project Rockstar experience, you get a fashion consultant, a financial planner and a personal trainer. All the while, you’re also being trained in the “game,” or how to seduce women. What brings men to Project Rockstar is a desire to access “better” women, and they imagine financial success, better fashion and a more fit body are all a means to that particular end. https://www.youtube.com/embed/vN49VnJRLic?feature=oembed

But the message has also evolved from traditional pickup artist teaching. Trainers in Project Rockstar are millennial men who are very in tune with what’s happening in the broader cultural environment. They offer “emergency webinars” on how men should be thinking about the #MeToo Movement and how men should be thinking about toxic masculinity: How can they seduce women without being perceived as a creep? To answer this question, they almost adopt a pop feminist line, which is that if men are paying enough attention to what women want and are firmly rooted in their natural, chivalrous protective masculinity, they’ll be able to seduce women in a way that women find pleasurable. Since they believe straight women naturally crave men’s leadership and protection, they’re simply offering them what they really want.

Is this a net positive then?

It’s better, because it’s training men to think about women’s experience in the world. They spend a lot of time trying to get men to put themselves in women’s shoes, explaining that it’s not that women at the club are bitches, it’s that they’ve been approached by 20 different creepy dudes so they’ve got their bitch shield up, and łŮłó˛šłŮ’s what you’re experiencing. Rather than being angry about that, you should feel empathy for them, and learn how to work around it by bonding with that woman instead of being yet another one of the creepy dudes. 

But it remains a transaction, trading empathy with women for sex. None of these men are doing it because they believe in the inherent value of gender equality or women’s sexual autonomy and self-determination, they’re doing it because they have trainers who’ve told them this is the way that you’re going to distinguish yourself from other men. So it’s just creating opportunities for a little more identification and communication between men and women, not challenging the logic of misogyny at all. 

Still, I’ll take it. Sometimes we have to move incrementally or developmentally. Sometimes when I’m teaching I’ll appeal to straight men and say, “Y’know what makes for really good sex? Consent. If you want to have sex with a woman who’s hungry for that dick, you have to have a personal investment in figuring out how to have feminist sex, because feminist sex is hotter sex.” 

Speaking of feminist sex, given that way more lesbians than straight women report having orgasms during sex, how does the tragedy of heterosexuality extend to the bedroom? 

The very definition of straight sex is organized around what men want and their desires. In straight culture, the preferred shape and sensations of a vagina is based on the experience of a penetrative penis rather than the experience of the vagina itself. The emphasis is on having a tight vagina, whereas łŮłó˛šłŮ’s just not a thing in lesbian culture. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite: We celebrate a size queen, someone who can really get a lot in there! 

Heterosexual sex is a male invention, designed by and for men, and łŮłó˛šłŮ’s how it plays out in most straight people’s sexual relationships. What would it look like to think of straight sex from the perspective of women? I have a sociologist friend, , who suggests starting a lesbian sex challenge for straight couples, which would be 30 days of no dick-involved sex.

What’s your final piece of advice to straight men? 

Attraction to women doesn’t have to be based on oppositeness. It can be based on deep identification, intimacy and mutual respect. Once łŮłó˛šłŮ’s cultivated at home, it can extend more broadly to feminist men’s organizations and friendship among feminist men. When all of those pieces come together, men can start to see that their sexual orientation is already political, and that being a straight man means making a commitment to women, not just to their wives and daughters, but to womankind as a whole.

For many parents, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is a shadow that hangs over the early period of infancy, contributing to broken sleep for caregivers who hover watchfully over their baby’s crib. Unfortunately, in the journal JAMA Pediatrics reports that deaths attributed to the broader category of Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) increased between 2020 to 2022. SUID is an umbrella category that includes SIDS, as well as other causes of unexpected death during sleep that are labeled as undetermined or accidental suffocation. While overall infant mortality rates have declined, deaths from SUID rose from 89.9 to 100.5 per 100,000. Does this mean that all parents should be equally worried about their infant’s risk of sleep-related infant death? While SIDS is at its core unexplained, a broader analysis of infant sleep safety reveals the racial disproportionality among infants who suffer from sleep-related infant death. A closer look at the data points to the structural and systemic roots of this public health problem.

If you are pregnant or parenting an infant or young child, you have likely encountered guidance on infant sleep safety—at the most basic, that infants should be placed to sleep on their backs rather than their stomachs. If you received more detailed safe sleep education from an “authoritative” source, whether a parenting book, a pediatrician, or online, it may have included the guidance that infants should sleep on a flat surface like a crib, in the same room but not the same bed as an adult, and without objects such as blankets, pillows, or stuffed animals. These are developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics with the goal of preventing SUID. 

Because this guidance promotes safer sleep for all infants, many parents receive it as if all infants are at equal risk for SUID. However, as the recent JAMA Pediatrics research letter reinforces, SUID rates are “notably higher” for Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander infants than for white or Asian infants. From 2018-2022, American Indian or Alaskan Native infants were roughly 2.8 times likelier to die from SUID than white infants, and Black babies died at a rate 3.1 times higher than white babies. The article cites several potential causes for this racial disproportionality, including unsafe sleep position, tobacco exposure, and infant feeding practices. It also notes that preterm birth is higher among the same groups at higher risk of SUID; this is relevant given that pre-term birth is also a risk factor for sleep-related infant death. 

As I argue in my book Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety, the factors that put infants and mothers at risk for pre-term birth, and later SUID, are deeply tied to structural racism and systemic poverty. For example, the JAMA Pediatrics research letter notes that decreased prenatal care and weathering from stress both contribute to pre-term birth. “Weathering,” a term coined by public health researcher refers to the cumulative effects of the stress of racism on the body, with dire consequences for Black maternal and infant mortality. The stress of poverty is also frequently implicated in premature birth and its correlative, low birth weight. However, anthropologist Dana-Ain Davis makes the important corrective that for Black women, education and income do not protect against this negative birth outcome the same way they do for white women. These structural issues require collective solutions, but attention and resources are often unequally distributed towards individual-level behavioral change. 

For example, a recent New York Times article titled “A Troubling Spike in Sleep-Related Infant Deaths” creates a false distinction between factors that they deem “beyond parents’ control” (premature birth or illness) and what they call “potentially preventable risks (breastfeeding and providing a safe sleep environment). are stratified by race and class in the United States, with low-income Black women less likely to begin breastfeeding and to maintain it for economic and social reasons. As I explore further in Losing Sleep, the other “potentially preventable risk”—providing a safe sleep environment—is also racialized. Attempts to eliminate “unsafe sleep” practices like bed-sharing often target the individual behavior of parents of color rather than the systemic causes of high Black infant mortality. 

The increase in SUID rates is a troubling trend for a vexing public health issue, and it should inspire a renewed focus on the structural causes of infant mortality, as well as safe sleep educational practices that are led by the communities most affected. A focus on individual responsibility for infant sleep safety suggests that all parents should be equally fearful of SIDS, rather than directing collective action toward improving the health of marginalized populations, including pregnant people. 

Laura Harrison is a Professor in the Department of History & Gender Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is the author of Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety ˛š˛ÔťĺĚýBrown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy.

Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art. In this excerpt, Tompkins explores the representation of jelly in Snowpiercer.

Early in the 2013 film Snowpiercer, we watch a small mass of people—dirty, shabby, and imprisoned in a train car—waiting to be fed, being counted by armed guards. Part of the survivors of a failed global attempt to remedy global warming, the prisoners inhabit the rear carriage of a train that perpetually circles a frozen planet, waiting, it is implied, for the ice to thaw. There is much to be said about the apocalyptic imagery of the film—imagery that is no longer merely symbolic but that sits rather close to the real of the current planetary crisis. But what I would like to pay attention to here is one of the tiniest and most evocative details of this whole, ravishing film: the food of the prisoners of the last train carriage. These prisoners, designated as the lowest rung of the hierarchy that has emerged on the train, eat blocks of gelatin.

Dark brown and gold, uniform in size and shape, the gelatin blocks shake and catch the light as the prisoners of the back carriage hold and eat them, while they walk in circles, carceral imagery that is in loose imitation of an exercise walk around a prison yard. The blocks are equally repulsive and mesmerizing. But it is not until slightly later in the film, when the prisoners finally break through to a forward carriage, that the fully abject implications of the gelatin blocks become apparent: for seventeen years, the members of the rear car have been eating pulverized and gelatinized cockroaches. The scene in which the cockroaches are revealed makes that fact haptically felt by having the protagonist, Curtis (Chris Evans), and the character called Painter (Clark Middleton) open up and look into the large vats in which the cockroaches are ground up. Painter first cries out in shock; when Curtis follows Painter up some stairs to look inside the vat, he grasps the edges, bends toward the insects, and peers into the vat. Recoiling almost immediately and turning away, he exhales and inhales quickly, covering his mouth with his hand and then with his fist, seeming to almost gag, to fight to hold back his vomit, to force himself not to exhibit his physiological response.

The sensory effect of Curtis’s view of the thousands of cockroaches roiling about in the vat is emphasized by a swell in the rock music that accompanies the scene plus the unexpected color pop—that particular mix of cockroachy brown and warm gold—in a film that up until that point has been dominated by gray and blue tones as well as by the total absence of anything that resembles nature. The cockroaches are circulated and mashed by the rolling corkscrew gears; they are fervid, active, hot in color and film tone, technically quite an amazing display of CGI virtuosity. They flutter their wings and fly around and up out of the vat. What is inside the vat, I want to posit, is life: vital life, energized and roiling and active, the energy of a disposable species—available to be converted into pure sustenance for humans whose social value so clearly equals their own. In a world in which eating is devoid of aesthetic pleasure (indeed, one character upon receiving his protein bar wonders longingly about what steak must have smelled like while it was being cooked), we are beyond or below—or perhaps, in the terms of the train, at the rear—of the hierarchical relations that make possible a notion of taste as aesthetic discernment; instead, the cockroach bars fully anatomize the rear-car inhabitants’ status as human refuse. As in the plantation, the border camp, the prison, we are in the realm of survival, of zoe, or bare life itself.

Snowpiercer forces us to think about how the rendering of animal waste is a cultural practice within which the politics of trash—and capitalism’s genius move to repurpose trash into more efficient and vertically integrated profit models—joins the question of the animal to the ordering of the species. This joining includes, as Foucault wrote, vis-Ă -vis sexual deviance, the “sub-species” of humans so ordered. My argument here is that ł§˛Ô´ÇˇÉąčžąąđ°ůłŚąđ°ů’s use of gelatin as poor people’s food is not casual by any means, either historically or, as I will now discuss, aesthetically. While the nineteenth century saw the application of theories of thermodynamics to consumable materials in order to develop the notion of the calorie, early nineteenth-century scientists, including Claude Bernard and Liebig, experimented on themselves, on living animals, and on patients to try to understand how the human machine worked. In particular, they wanted to quantify the “nitrogenic,” or nourishing, qualities of food; they sought, among other things, to determine how much gelatin could be mechanically extracted from underused animal flesh and bones with the specific aim of discovering whether gelatin could be used to feed the poor and the ill. The scientific history of both of these technologies can be traced further backward to the period after the Napoleonic Wars, when the French Academie Scientifique convened a Committee on the Status of Gelatin to study emergent food technologies—newly separated as “science” from their traditional social location as “craft”—such as the extraction of gelatin and bouillon from meat and bones. For over three decades, from 1803 to 1841, several incarnations of the committee studied various methods for extracting all possible nutritive value from meat and bones, ultimately concluding that gelatin could not sustain life as a cheap meat alternative. This work received a great deal of French state support, and the news of the gelatin commission’s work reached the United States through newspaper bulletins and scientific lectures.

Gelatin thus has a complex history tied both to waste management and to the management of the poor. Keeping this in mind, I now want to turn to the question of the gelatinous as a materiality that might also bring its correspondence with the material conditions of the poor, the enslaved, and the working class into sharper relief. More precisely, how might we think through political affect, particularly minoritarian political affect, in relation to the gelatinous?

Read more in Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, and Rot

Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, and Professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and managing editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the winner of numerous book awards; in 2023, she won a James Beard Award for her essay “On Boba,” published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The poetry and stories in this work, excerpted below, cover court life, love affairs, gruesome murders, miracles, debauched parties, and much more. Through these accounts, al-Shābushtč offers readers a glimpse into the splendor of Abbasid culture, and meditates on the ephemerality of power, the virtues of generosity and tolerance, and the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty.

Another story of Jaḥẓah’s: I was in love with a singing girl called Sharwīn. One
night she got drunk at my house and shat in my dipper and spittoon before she
left. Al-Hudāhidč wrote to me:

I had a visitor, a dear friend,
a fine character wise in his ways.
Now you owe it to SharwÄŤn, who shat
in the dipper, the bowl, and the jug.
Hurry and visit, dropping excuses and delays,
and I’ll see you as drunk as she,
Making a mess on the rug.

Jaḥẓah sent an invitation to Ibn Tarkhān:
My friend, we’ve food aplenty
and a pot bubbling away,
As much good talk as you like,
and an endless supply of jokes.
The wine, when poured, is like
a lightning flash on a rainy night.
Our singer’s a mistress of modes;
the flute player is superb.
I don’t know where my heart’s gone; it’s not in its place.
My bosom has driven it out; it’s caught fire and now is ablaze.

The Foxes’ Monastery is the home of the errant,
a place to meet gazelle-like boys and girls.
Oft have I spent there a night with my friend,
pouring wine into cups, skillfully watered,
Yielding its spirit freely till the last drop ran out.
I forgave it then and paid more than I owed.
For a sweet young follower of Mary’s Son,
flirtatious, wanton, yet at times coy,
I poured wine, then sipped the dregs of his glass,
and had in my mouth the taste of nectar.
Ibn Dihqānah was a descendant of Ibrāhčm ibn MuḼammad ibn ʿAlč ibn
ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbbās. His given name was Abō Jaʿfar MuḼammad ibn ʿUmar.
He is the author of fine poetry, such as these verses, which Jaḥẓah recalled him reciting to him:
Ha! When I came between you and your friends
and showered you with gifts, ever generous,
You played me false and treated me harshly,
acting the tyrant, doing me wrong.
Why should I want the conclusion of your love
when you showed no respect for its beginning?

Here am I, eager to please you, long-suffering,
as if grasping a bright double-edged sword,
Eschewing what you loathe, and
willing to give up my eyes just to satisfy you.
What joy I knew, and what sorrow
when suspicion of you entered my mind.
If the heart reveals one thing and conceals another,
its true feelings the eyes will betray.

He heaves the deepest of sighs,
Stays awake when others are nodding,
Utters moans when drowsy or dozing,
Feeds his mind with longing,
Gives himself hope with “Perhaps”—
A lover who’s turned his plaint
Into friendship with his fellows.

Bring on the wine, for the cup flows over,
brimming with pangs of nostalgia.
I delight to hear Jerusalem’s monks
answering each other after night’s silence.
They’ve roused grief and sorrow in me as I remember
Karkh of Iraq, and my good friends there.
As the tears well up in my eyes and longing
strikes fire in my heart and burns,
I cry, “Dayr Mudyān, as long as you rouse lovesickness,
may you always be peopled, Dayr Mudyān.”
Does your priest know—and can he tell me—
how acceptance can bring joy to one who’s left you?
May rain and prosperity bless Karkhāyā and its people
who dwell between the mill and the garden.

    It is reported that AbĹŤ ĘżAlÄŤ ibn al-RashÄŤd would constantly go to this monastery to drink. He
took singing girls there, and would listen to music and carouse for days. He was utterly
shameless, and those who lived in the neighborhood complained of the nuisance he caused.
IsḼāq ibn Ibrāhčm al-ᚏāhirč,who was the representative of the authorities in Baghdad, came to
hear of it. He sent a message to Abū ʿAlī, rebuking him for his behavior and forbidding him from committing the same offence again. Abū ʿAlī burst out, “And what authority has Isḥāq over me? How can he order me about? Will he be able to stop me listening to my singing girls and drinking where I like?”

This is a poem by AbĹŤ l-Shibl on a black slave girl he was in love with. This
earned him many rebukes but he was crazy about black girls.

A scold has fired her full stock of rebuke at me,
blaming me about duskiness and ink-black eyes.
Damn it, how can I be consoled for pearls
with pitch-black faces like small shells.
Between their thighs they have mounds
where the hair burns with the fire of hell.
May God torment no other believer with them,
or cause my organ to wither.
For I’m mad about black; white women leave me cold.

He had a black slave girl he loved who was called Tibr.

You’ve treated me unfairly, namesake of gold,
you’re killing my soul just for fun.
You’re the cousin of strong-scented musk,
but for you who’d gather it—it would be scentless.
In blackness and perfume, musk’s your kin!
What a splendid kinship!

MaᚣābčḼ, the slave of al-AḼdab, the dealer in singing girls, used to sing this
song and many other compositions by ʿAbdallāh. She was the main transmit-
ter of his poetry and most knowledgeable about his settings. She was known
for her beauty and her fine performances, and ʿAbdallāh loved her. One of his
poems that she sang was:

Friends, on Palm Sunday,
pour me old wine from KarkÄŤn
With someone I love,
though her religion’s not mine.

Here are verses ʿAbdallāh composed on MaᚣābčḼ and set to music. He
sang them in her presence and she learned them from him. Mutayyam
al-Hishāmiyyah also sang them.

I’ve fallen in love with a foe. May God shower blessings on my foe.
My kith and kin and my neighbors—I’d ransom their lives for her.
She’s firm and upright as cane, but bend her and she’ll yield.
Sure of the love in my heart, now she’s all flirtation.

Abū l-ʿAynāʾ passed ʿAbdallāh ibn Manṣūr’s house one day. He asked his servant, “What’s the news of Abū Muḥammad?” “He’s just as you would wish,” he replied. “Then why don’t I hear the house full of the wails of the bereaved?”

Abō l-ʿAynāʞ related: A woman in Basra fell in love with me without seeing me. She had
simply heard how well I expressed myself. When she saw me, she thought I was ugly and said,
“God damn! Is this him?” So I wrote to her:

She heard about me but snubbed me on sight, 
saying, “Ugly, squinting, with a miserable body!”
Maybe you don’t like my squint, 
but I’m cultured and clever,
Not a fuddy-duddy or a stuttering dolt.
She wrote on the back of the letter: “You motherfucker, did you think I wanted to give you a job in the chancery?”

“I said to ʿUbbādah once, ‘Can a queer exist without debauchery?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘but he won’t be any fun. He’ll be like a judge without a vice.’”

A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East

The Book of MonasteriesĚýtakes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥčrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-ShābushtÄŤ, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time. Translated into English for the first time,ĚýThe Book of MonasteriesĚýoffers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.

Abstract:
Ventilators are one of the signal technologies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Debates about the fair allocation of this scarce resource dominated disability activism, news and social media for much of 2020—especially as hospitals around the world considered rationing protocols that excluded certain disabled people. New York was one of the first states to come up with a plan for allotting ventilators during pandemics; these guidelines, drafted in 2007, became broadly influential as healthcare centres and governments developed Crisis Standards of Care for COVID-19. Drawing on interviews and records from the New York Department of Health archives, my lecture reviews the history of debates among clinicians and ethicists that underpinned the preliminary New York State Ventilator Allocation Guidelines, and the public feedback that informed the revised guidelines of 2015. I’ll also discuss more recent criticisms of the specific exclusion criteria and triage protocols (e.g. SOFA scoring) levied by disability bioethicists and activists during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that “ventilator allocation” is commonly misunderstood to refer solely to discrete devices and the rights of individual users. Moreover, a disability theory of distributive justice, informed by the disability justice movement, is required not only to eliminate ableism at the level of individual diagnosis and treatment, but to ensure broad access to ventilators with regard to class, race and region.

Ěýis Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and co-founding Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journalĚýCatalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In addition to her wide-ranging scholarship at the intersection of disability and technology, she has made the Center for Disability Studies a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. She is recently coeditor ofĚýCrip Authorship: Disability as MethodĚý(ĂŰĚŇ´ŤĂ˝, 2023) and a special issue of the journalĚýOsirisĚýon “Disability and the History of Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Upcoming publications include the edited collectionĚýHow to be Disabled in a PandemicĚý(ĂŰĚŇ´ŤĂ˝, February 2025), funded by the National Science Foundation; a coauthored book with media scholar Jonathan Sterne on blind reading practices and time stretching technology; and a collaborative research project with anthropologist Michele Friedner, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on “The Global Cochlear Implant.”

This year’s presentation is part of the 2025 winter term courseĚý. Instructors: D. Glowacka & S. Dodd.

The rally was part of a mass movement to free BPP co-founder Huey P. Newton, who was caged at the Alameda County jail on felony indictments for murder, assault, and kidnapping. Attending the rally again brought back the same emotions she had as a teenager at the March on Washington. She vividly recalled that Huey’s mother took the rally stage. Her words, full of love and care for her son, assured Ericka that she was on the right path, following her calling.

In their effort to find the BPP headquarters, Ericka and John drew upon their memories of a brief trip to New York, where they saw members selling the Black Panther, the organization’s newspaper. Because of this, they knew they would eventually find Black Panther members doing the same in Los Angeles.

They soon came across a male BPP member selling the newspaper, which they purchased; then they asked him the location of the BPP headquarters. “They are in a building called the Black Congress in South Central Los Angeles,” he replied.

They quit their factory job and settled in Los Angeles to work full-time for the Southern California BPP chapter, founded by Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. A week later, they arrived at the Black Congress Building and a member quickly put them to work selling the BPP newspaper, cleaning the BPP office, answering the phones, typing material, attending political education classes, and watching over the office because of police surveillance. The BPP recognized operational tasks, manual labor, and administrative tasks as valuable activist work.

John was adamant about justice and equity. Bunchy asked John to help him lead the Southern California BPP chapter in Los Angeles. They became close comrades, and as co-leaders of the LA chapter, they embraced a leadership style undefined by gender. BPP members requested the same tasks from men and women in the Los Angeles chapter. Eventually, Ericka even served as a spokesperson for the chapter, just like her male counterparts.

Ericka and John struggled to financially survive while working for political change. Within the following year, Ericka became pregnant with her and John’s child, Mai. As BPP members, Ericka and John lived communally in a two-level apartment on West Century Boulevard in Los Angeles with other comrades, including fellow BPP member Elaine Brown.

Spencer-Antoine explains that this intertwined living and activist environment served as a “collective structure” that enabled “the total commitment of its membership.” In doing this, she writes, “they attempted to meet the needs of its cadre for food, clothing, and shelter.”

They regularly shared clothes. They made money where they could, for example, selling BPP newspapers, but for Ericka, John, and others in their communal household, it was still not enough. Their unwavering dedication to the people took a heavy toll on their personal needs, necessitating more funds and resources.

The harsh reality was that the state did not allow those without much money to survive and support their families, prompting a need to increase their food supply. Ericka applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare), which enabled her to purchase groceries. Her welfare check became the primary source of income for the household, but it was still not enough to feed everyone.

In Point 10 of the BPP’s Platform and Program, the Black Panthers demanded the right to “land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace.” These core values did not align with those of a capitalist society; for that reason, John and Ericka needed to adopt innovative methods to survive. John believed in the BPP’s political ideology of the human right to quality food.

Ericka and John often frequented Safeway, the local grocery store, sometimes with others. John did not want Ericka and their baby to be without food. He wanted to protect and provide for them, so he would graze and steal food as he and Ericka walked down the grocery aisles with growling stomachs.

“Nobody should have to pay for food. Nobody should go hungry. Eat this. Safeway’s not going to struggle if you eat this food,” Ericka remembered he said to her. “So łŮłó˛šłŮ’s what we’d do.” He taught Ericka to be fearless in the expansion of her political consciousness.

For the BPP, community support was another critical aspect of survival. While in Safeway, Ericka and John came across a friendly Black woman cashier who knew them from their regular visits. They would attempt to purchase $150 worth of groceries for their communal household with Ericka’s welfare check.

Since they did not have enough food stamps, the clerk rang their groceries up at a lower price of only five dollars as she softly made eye contact with them and smiled to communicate compassion and understanding.

“All of us ate off of my welfare check, not including the food that John stole,” Ericka remembered. John eventually stopped stealing once the clerk offered them assistance. Support from the community helped BPP members sustain themselves and the people they served each and every day.

Communal living involved shared responsibilities and total commitment to BPP tasks. A typical day of communal living included heading to the BPP office after breakfast to “do whatever work it took.” This included advocating for the release of BPP members from jail and cultivating relationships with people in cafés, local stores, and barbershops, and on the streets of Los Angeles.

In 1968 Ericka served as a BPP spokesperson with others, attending high-profile celebrity events to seek support from Hollywood progressives and fundraise in the evening. Because of their presence, community engagement, and service to the people, the community embraced the BPP.

The BPP developed friendships with many people, from the mothers, fathers, and grandparents who often kept Ericka and other pregnant BPP women well-fed, to teachers, grocery owners, state workers, teenagers, and high-profile entertainers in Hollywood. Ericka recalled a Hollywood actress and friend giving her a crib that overflowed with baby clothes.

Ericka and John agreed to raise their daughter, Mai, born in December 1968, as a married couple, although they never lawfully married.

At the same time, communal party relations seeped into their partnership. Like many BPP members, they engaged in nontraditional sexual relationships. Against the backdrop of the “free love” movement, the BPP experimented with sexuality and shared relationships.

For Ericka, sexuality was a way for her to imagine a fuller life. Her simultaneous relationships with both men and women reflected the cultural moment. She recalled that some men were unable to release hypermasculine ideas about sexuality, which prevented them from being open about their male lovers. On the other hand, Ericka recalls women being more forthcoming about their intimacies.

Her experiences support social and cultural studies scholar of education Ronald K. Porter’s analysis that “the excavation of homosexuality in the context of the Black Panther Party reveals ‘a whole host of characters and actions adding both breadth and depth to the Black and LGBTQ experience in America. Historian Tracye A. Matthews’s scholarship echoes this sentiment about sexuality and employing alternative relationship structures.

These sexual pleasures and freedoms were sometimes fraught. “The fact that they viewed themselves as revolutionaries engaged in a war against injustice complicated matters of sexuality and gender relations,” Matthews argues.

For some, their everyday battles with political repression and fear of death intensified their need to find pleasure and explore eroticism. At times, their approach to sexual freedom led to arguments, infighting, sexual exploitation, or even sexual abuse.

BPP member Elaine Brown recalled that John gave her a hatchet to protect herself against unwanted sexual advances by BPP men. In arming Elaine to fight her assailant, John advocated against male chauvinism. He was progressive about gender politics and empowered women to protect themselves against male violence. He believed that women should have their own agency.

Ericka was fully committed to the BPP and worked around the clock even while pregnant. She recalled, “I was nine months pregnant and couldn’t get around as easily. Pregnancy did not slow down the work of BPP women. There wasn’t anything I wasn’t being asked to do.” By this time, she was surrounded by an increasing number of other women who had joined the BPP.

She soon met Angela Y. Davis, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, who became a dear friend and comrade in the struggle. Angela was initially a member of the Black Panther Political Party, a group whose “role was to develop theoretical analyses of the Black Liberation Movement, as well as to build structures.”

The Black Panther Political Party was a separate organization from the BPP founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and was part of a consortium called the Black Congress, which contained many groups, including the BPP, Maulana Karenga’s US organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the Community Alert Patrol, among others. The Black Panther Political Party reshaped itself into the Los Angeles Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (LA SNCC), which would function to support the student-driven civil rights organization.

Despite having SNCC’s name attached to it, it was independent of the national organization. Once LA SNCC dissolved, Angela joined the Communist Party USA (CP USA) and the Che-Lumumba Club, a Black cadre within the Communist Party. She also joined the BPP, where she met Ericka and John in 1968.

Initially, she felt a closer comradeship with John than with Ericka because of the day-to-day organizing that Angela and John conducted out of the same office. John persuaded Angela to run the political education program and the liberation school. Angela helped develop the curriculum with John and taught young people in the neighborhood.

The curriculum included studying texts such as Vladimir Lenin’s , which explored the relationship between the state and the proletariat revolution. In the text Lenin explained,

“Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress, crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for emancipation.”

As an educational text, Lenin’s ideas represented how the BPP thought about the state and the power of the proletariat and workers in the revolution. In recalling these experiences, Angela reminisced about the steadfastness of an illiterate Black male teenager who had an intense desire to read Lenin.

With his persistence and Angela’s guidance, he learned how to read. The heartening experience let her know that the “joy of learning is something that has to be awakened in people” and is not always found in formal education.

Upon meeting Ericka, Angela instantly connected with her and was impressed by her undeniable passion for political activism. Angela remembered thinking that Ericka possessed a remarkable amount of inner strength. She admired Ericka’s natural qualities, such as her goodnatured spirit and love for people.

Their friendship endured even after the BPP told those with membership in other parties to choose between the organizations. Angela decided to leave the BPP and remain in the CP USA; however, she remained active in the defense of the BPP.

By 1968, the BPP membership consisted predominantly of women. According to BPP scholar Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, by this time women “represented approximately sixty percent of the Party’s membership.” Greater participation by women in the BPP prompted discussions on male chauvinism and sexism, and women’s vocal protests advanced the BPP’s position concerning gender.

According to Ericka, the work was not divided by gender in Los Angeles; however, there was significant gender inequity in some other chapters. Ericka described an incident at a meeting while visiting the Oakland national headquarters with other BPP members from northern and southern California during her pregnancy.

Women were in the kitchen cooking. After preparing the food, a woman announced, “Brothers, you can eat now.” Ericka did not understand what the woman meant, so she asked the person next to her for clarification when the announcer stated, “Sisters, brothers eat first.”

Ericka was famished and pregnant. “Oh no, please excuse me while I go in the kitchen and fix my plate,” she declared.

Ericka’s interruption was necessary because she refused to delay taking care of her body and her child’s needs. The other woman’s request demonstrated internalized sexist and misogynistic ideals that placed women and children beneath men. It took stamina and courage for Ericka to openly defy the cultural norms in the room and assert her humanity and that of her unborn child.

Ongoing debates on the reproduction of gender norms within the BPP broadened the organization’s reach. LeBlanc-Ernest noted that “as the Black Panther Party expanded in 1968, so did women’s participation in Party activities.” The BPP shifted its tactical analysis to one that prioritized community programs and de-emphasized armed self-defense during this period.

“The Panthers had boldly and legally picked up the gun—and had been forced to lay it back down,” argues Spencer Antoine. The BPP expanded its community programs, including free programs that served the social, economic, political, educational, healthcare, and medical needs of Black and poor people in the United States.

In response to the shortcomings of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, these initiatives provided Black communities with crucial access to essential services and resources. Johnson’s legislation “established the vision for the subsequent research and analysis of minority poverty.” The War on Poverty, according to sociologist William Julius Wilson, failed because “the emphasis was mainly on environments of the poor.  This vision did not consider poverty as a problem of American economic organization.” The federal government’s management of economic difficulties and the institutionalized forms of oppression against people of color were fundamental problems inherent in 1970s racial politics that the War on Poverty did not address.

Impassioned by the 1960s assassinations of nonviolent civil rights leaders, the BPP saw its radical display of community service as another form of self-defense to challenge institutional violence and police terror within Black communities. Its message was one of community empowerment and community protection. Its revolutionary spirit coupled with its community programs made the BPP a target of ongoing government assault and violence from programs such as COINTELPRO.

External forces, notably the FBI, played a significant role in shaping the gender dynamics within the BPP. In 1969 political repression had a profound and devastating impact on the BPP; ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill emphasized that the “Black Panther Party was literally sledgehammered [by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program]. Of the 295 counterintelligence operations the bureau has admitted conducting against Black activists and organizations during the period, a staggering 233, the majority of them in 1969, were aimed at the Panthers.”

The police and other government forces gained information on the BPP to destroy, distort, and misrepresent the BPP to the public. Because of sexist and racist ideas, FBI agents often targeted male BPP members. Amidst the intense governmental repression of that era, the BPP adopted a strategy of closing ranks and implemented quality control measures, resulting in the expulsion of numerous members.

Notably, women were placed in more leadership positions. As LeBlanc-Ernest noted, “Expansion of female participation became critical for the organization to function effectively.” Women became central to the BPP programming.

*

Political repression soon hit close to home for Ericka as the FBI claimed the lives of both John and Bunchy on the campus of UCLA. Leading up to the tragedy, members of the UCLA Black Student Union (BSU) requested support from John and Bunchy to assist them in a highly charged meeting concerning the directorship of the High Potential Program, an equal opportunity program.

John served as the captain and later deputy chairman of the LA chapter, and Bunchy was the deputy minister of defense and a UCLA student. The BPP revered Bunchy. He educated himself during his time in prison, politicized and organized the Slauson gang, and recruited many of them into the BPP. The BSU with John and Bunchy were in discussions with another group, Maulana Karenga’s US organization.

Ericka remembered Bunchy as always well-dressed, projecting a regal nature and strong sense of integrity. He was a grassroots intellectual who taught political education, emphasizing a pedagogy of community love. Ericka, who was highly attuned to care politics, was particularly moved by his teachings, which emphasized that care work did not reproduce gender norms within the organization.

John and Bunchy were fearless BPP leaders who considered women equal partners in the struggle. On January 17, 1969, tension reached its zenith at a meeting in Campbell Hall when John and Bunchy were shot. Ericka contended that the FBI infiltrated the BPP, the US organization, and the UCLA campus, and murdered John and Bunchy. The FBI strategically leveraged the differences between the BPP and US into a major conflict.

The scholarship of Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall on COINTELPRO illustrates the kind of FBI memos, cartoons, and letters fabricated to prompt tension between the BPP and the US organization. They shed light on a 1968 FBI internal memo by J. Edgar Hoover that directs offices “to fully capitalize upon the BPP and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension.”

In doing this, offices were then instructed to produce a biweekly letter on the “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” COINTELPRO’s efforts to violently dismantle the BPP were illegal, intricately planned, and ghastly.

Ericka recalled that two weeks before the FBI killed John, she had a dream in which the state had taken him away. Dreams are described by Chicana feminist writer and scholar of cultural and queer theory Gloria Anzaldúa as a “form of experience, a dimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.”

In the event that Ericka’s dream “experience” foretold what was to come, she immediately told John about her dream as soon as he walked in the door. “They took you away,” she said as she embraced him tightly. He “peeled my arms off of him and held me and looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m here now. Where’s the baby?’”

His poignant reply, “I’m here now,” conveyed the profound realization that they had to embrace the present moment, acutely aware that death was looming. “It was in the air all around him,” explained Ericka.

She directed him to the room Mai was sleeping in; he closed the door so he could be alone and held Mai for hours, as if pronouncing his final goodbye. They never mentioned the dream to one another again. They deeply sensed “a knowing” about what was to come. Ericka always listened to her intuition, which she learned from her mother.

John felt called to attend the meeting on UCLA’s campus that day. His intuition warned him of the potential life-threatening consequences. Nevertheless, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make for the cause.

Ericka was at home with her three-week-old daughter when she learned of the shooting. Soon thereafter, other traumatized BPP members gathered at her house.

“Ericka Huggins left the world then, it seemed,” according to Elaine. “I watched her stand at the kitchen sink, her long, thin body surrendered, her eyes glazed.” Ericka did not even have time to grieve the loss of her husband because within a matter of hours, the police arrived at her house to arrest her and the other BPP members.

As police were preparing to arrest Ericka and the BPP members, other comrades, including Angela Y. Davis, had begun arriving at the house to offer support and solidarity. Walter Bremond, the head of the Black Congress consortium, who was also with the group of comrades, took Mai into his care.

Walter was the only person Ericka could think of at the time to call to take Mai overnight, although she was unsure how long she would be gone. She trusted him and his wife to care for her baby. Ericka recalled of the police, “They booked us on something ridiculous. They wanted us off the streets. They treated us like members of a gang.”

In concert with the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the local police used whatever tactics they could, including anti-gang tactics, to disband the organization. Although women were less likely to be targeted by the FBI, both men and women remained under surveillance. Their gender did not preclude women, such as Ericka, from experiencing COINTELPRO repression.

As a target of the state, Ericka encountered intimidation, violence, and harassment. In this instance, police ordered her and the other BPP members out of the house. One officer even pointed a gun at baby Mai while she was in her mother’s arms, as recalled in the introduction of this book. Once Ericka was able to calm the officer down and get him to lower his weapon, the two male officers put her in the backseat of a police car with a white officer.

The police transported all the other BPP women in one vehicle to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. The men traveled in another car. Ericka assumed that they were taking her to the police station, but they stopped at the morgue first to taunt her and did not even allow her to identify John’s body.

“We’re gonna make sure your husband’s really dead. Okay, Huggins?” one of the male officers said. Then they verbally abused her by racially insulting her daughter. She remembered that the woman police officer never said a word or tried to stop her colleagues from being violent toward her.

Experiencing the weight of individual and institutional cruelties, the now widowed Ericka was confined in jail in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. For the first time, she allowed herself to weep.

Ericka described the FBI infiltration she saw while detained at the police station. She watched agents who had posed as members of the US organization interact casually with the Los Angeles police department.

“We were sitting at the Seventy-Seventh Street Police Station in Los Angeles at that time. Two men in African print shirts who Party members knew to be members of the US organization came into the police station, not in handcuffs like all of us, not escorted in for questioning like us, but freely walking….[They] stopped to answer the police.”

Ericka was now certain that the FBI wanted to destroy the BPP. In the midst of tragedy, glimpses of policing agencies’ orchestrated acts against the BPP emerged. Hours later, a group of comrades and family members, including Angela, Ericka’s brother-in-law Evan, and the husband of one of John’s sisters, bailed her out.

As her comrades offered aid, support, and their deepest sympathies, Ericka looked at their long faces and asked, “Why is everyone so sad?” She reminded them that they “needed to find the courage to stand up and fight because there would be a great deal of struggle ahead.” Unbelievably, Ericka’s spirits were high. At that moment, Angela considered Ericka “the strongest Black woman in America.”

We know this sentiment because it is captured in Angela’s personal, published letter, which was designed to interrupt the official script and official archive. In her 1971 letter to Ericka, she described what it was like to see Ericka unbroken and ready to take on the world:

“You had been immediately arrested on a manifestly fabricated charge— conspiracy to retaliate, or something equally ridiculous. We were hurting with your pain. While we watched your approach—you were now walking through the jail’s iron gates—our silence was throbbing with inexpressible pain. And as we were desperately searching for words to convey our unyielding solidarity, it was your strong, undaunted voice that broke the silenceĚýĚý Your unflinching determination as you clenched your fist and said, “All Power to the People,” prompted me to think to myself, this must be the strongest, most courageous Black woman in America.”

Personal testimony offered an alternative history to political struggles. Angela began by indicting the U.S. justice system for what she believed was a “manifestly fabricated charge” against Ericka in its attempt to silence her political activities.

Instead, she inserted a direct reference to pain, humanizing Ericka. Angela expressed collective empathy and sorrow: “We were hurting with your pain.” Her transition from “we” to “you” showcases her individual feeling and political connection with Ericka and the community activists who shared her sentiment.

Angela’s letter is a public document, one that politicized the personal. She recognized Ericka’s absence as the authorities purged her from the record when she wrote, “Our silence was throbbing with inexpressible pain,” and she reflected on the collective inability to challenge institutional power when she compared powerlessness to speechlessness.

Her letter identified Ericka’s example as more than speech but also defiance against institutional injustice. In Huey’s words, “All Power to the People’ sums up our goals for Black people, as well as our deep love and commitment to them. All power comes from the people, and all power must be ultimately vested in them.”

Ericka’s “clenched fist” thus represented a declaration of emotional intensity and deep love. As she chanted “All Power to the People,” she underscored the values of the BPP: community practice of love, action, authority, and change, all rooted in the collective strength of the community.

Constant infiltration and trumped-up criminal charges plagued the BPP. Under siege, the BPP struggled to reclaim its identity as a community advocate in the public imagination. The BPP consistently challenged the FBI’s violent onslaught, and its self-determination and resistance linked it to the long history of Black protest.

Ericka highlighted the parallels between Black women’s activism in the BPP, the resistance efforts of formerly enslaved women, and Black women’s organizing during the civil rights movement, emphasizing that “all of them had the same goals in mind.” Their shared goals included the liberation of Black and poor communities. In doing this, they encountered obstacles, including racism, sexism, and classism.

Likewise, Angela Y. Davis wrote, “The status of Black women within the community of slaves was definitely a barometer indicating the overall potential for resistance. This process did not end with the formal dissolution of slavery.” Both Ericka and Angela recognized those women as the forerunners of 1970s Black liberation.

Mary Frances PhillipsĚýis Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

On the morning of Sunday, Jan. 19, I turned to my son, Rafik. He was building something with blocks, his small hands working furiously to stack them higher and higher. I watched as the tower wobbled and fell. He laughed and started over again. He kept rebuilding, and it kept falling, over and over. I could feel it inside me, somehow — joy and sorrow fighting for control, just like my son’s toy tower. One moment, his laughter lifted me; the next, the weight of everything we’d lost crushed me.

Rafik’s tower reminded me of Gaza. Amid the ceasefire, people will return to their homes, not knowing if they are still standing or if they will find only rubble. Some homes, like his tower, might still have a few pieces left — a wall here, a doorway there — but the rest will be buried under an avalanche of destruction. But they will begin again. They will dig through the debris, piece by piece, rebuilding what they can. It isn’t hope in the traditional sense. It is a stubborn refusal to give up at a time when the world keeps knocking them down. Rebuilding Gaza will take more than bricks and mortar. It will take resilience, patience and a collective will to rise again, despite the impossible odds, and it will take remembering what was lost while holding on to the belief that what comes next will still be beautiful.

In Gaza, we’re born with the wit to master Advanced Drone Escape 101 and How to Breathe Through Dust 202. By the time this war began, I was already a seasoned student. I had passed the tests five times already, miraculously surviving five destructive wars in just 25 years. So I was familiar with the drill: grab your documents, your children and whatever food you can carry, and run. But knowing the drill doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t stop your hands from shaking as you pack your son’s backpack with diapers and water bottles instead of toys. It doesn’t stop your heart from pounding as you count the seconds between the whistle of a bomb and the impact, as you wonder if this will be the one that finds you.

The first days were a blur of noise and chaos. The smell of burning flesh poured down the streets, and the sound of drones buzzed overhead around the clock. And the dust — God, the dust. It coated everything, It turned the world into a monochrome nightmare. I would wake up with it in my mouth, in my hair, in my lungs. It was everywhere. I remember wiping it off my son’s face, his wide eyes staring up at me. “This is not the world I wanted for you,” I would say.

I remember interviewing a family who had just lost their home. The father stood in the rubble, clutching a broken vase, and said, “We will rebuild.” His voice was steady, but his hands shook. I wanted to scream, “Why should you have to rebuild? Why is this your burden to bear?” But I didn’t. Instead, I nodded and took notes, as if his pain were just another story to file. Later, I would write about his resilience, his determination, his hope. But, at that moment, all I could think was, “This is not resilience. This is survival. And survival is not enough.”

The world watches Gaza as if it’s a dystopian reality show, applauding our resilience while doing nothing to stop the suffering. They don’t see the father who wakes up screaming because he can still hear the bombs. They don’t see the mother who feeds her children one meal a day and calls it a feast. They don’t see the child who draws pictures of houses with red roofs and smiling suns because it’s the only way they can imagine a world without war.

One night, as I crouched in a makeshift shelter in northern Gaza with my family, I heard a voice outside. It was my neighbor, Um Ahmed, holding a piece of bread. “I thought Rafik might be hungry,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to share your last piece of bread in the middle of a war. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. Instead, I took the bread and thanked her. I swear to God, I pretended her kindness was not a knife to my heart. That night I lay awake, listening to the sound of drones and wondering how much longer we could endure. The answer, it seemed, was forever. Because in Gaza, we are not allowed to stop.

The sound of explosions has been my heartbeat since I was born. I was just a few months old when the Second Intifada began in 2000. Now, 25 years later, I’m living through the same miasma of war, death and survival all over again. Before I fled Gaza, I would always tell my son, “It will be over soon.” But it wasn’t. It never is. Even back then, I knew the world wasn’t fair. I didn’t have the words to explain it, but I felt it in the way his mother’s voice cracked when she sang him to sleep. War was never just an event in Gaza. It was the air we breathed, the water we drank, the ground beneath our feet. It was everywhere, and there was no escape.

By the time I was 8, I had already lived through my first war. The 2008 war was the first time I saw a body. It was a neighbor, a man who used to sell oranges on the corner. His cart was still there, overturned, the fruit scattered and crushed underfoot. I remember the smell — sweet and rotten. It was like death had a flavor. I remember thinking, “This is what war does. It takes the ordinary and makes it grotesque.” Abu Sami had a laugh that could fill a room, not just another statistic on the news, or a name on a list of the dead. To me, he was the man who gave me free oranges when I was a child, who always had a joke and a smile. War didn’t just take his life, but his humanity, crushed in a body bag.

The 2012 war was shorter, yet louder and more brutal. The 2021 war was longer but no less devastating. By then I had my firstborn, Rafik, and the fear was different. It wasn’t just for myself anymore but for him. I remember holding him during the bombings. Knowing the history of where I, his dad, was born, the history of this place, I knew that war was not an exception but a rule. My son looked up at me with wide eyes, trusting me to keep him safe, and I felt the weight of that trust like a stone in my chest. I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay, that the world was a good and just place, but I couldn’t. Because in Gaza, the world is not good or just. It is cruel and indifferent, and it will break your heart if you let it.

And now, this war — the longest, the cruelest, the most personal. It began as it always does: with a sound. The first bomb fell in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023, shaking the ground beneath my feet and sending a plume of smoke into the sky. I remember standing in the street, my press vest heavy on my shoulders, and thinking, “Here we go again.” I looked at my son. As his face turned familiarly pale, I felt a surge of anger — not just at the bombs, but at the world that allowed this to happen. Again. And again. And again.

I was a journalist by then, and for the first time, I saw the war through the lens of my camera. It was easier that way, to hide behind the camera, to pretend I was just an observer and not a participant. But there were moments when the facade cracked. I remember interviewing a family in Jabalia, a town in northern Gaza that had been flattened by Israeli bombs. The mother was holding a photo of her son, who had been killed the day before. She thrust it at me, her hands shaking, and said, “Tell the world what they did to him.” I took the photo, but I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? That the world already knew? That it didn’t care? That her son would be forgotten as soon as the next headline came along? I wanted to scream, to tear my hair out, to do something — anything — to make them see. Yet there was nothing I could do to ease their pain. I must have seemed like some kind of hero to the father, someone who could bring his son back. But in truth I was just another father, scared and terrified for my own son. I wasn’t an Avenger. I was just a man who tried to hold on to hope while the world crumbled around us.

As a journalist, I am expected to document my own genocide with impartiality and professionalism. But there is nothing professional about survival. Reporting from the ground, I faced the harshest of circumstances — constant targeting, starvation and displacement. Every day was a battle: dodging bombs, scavenging for food and moving from one makeshift shelter to another, all while trying to document what we were enduring and tell the truth of what was happening. The weight of survival and the responsibility of bearing witness often felt unbearable, but I kept going.

The days here are long and empty. I spend hours scrolling through photos of Gaza, trying to go back in time. I can still smell the sea, salty and sharp, carried on the wind as the sun dipped below the horizon. I can still taste my mother’s maqluba, rich and comforting, the rice perfectly spiced, the chicken falling off the bone. No matter how hard I try, I can never quite replicate the taste of home in exile. These are the things I miss the most — the ordinary, the mundane. The things I took for granted now feel like fragments of a life I can never reclaim.

“We will return soon,” I tell Rafik, but I don’t know if it’s true. How can I explain to him that home is not a place but a feeling? That Gaza is not just a city but a part of us, a part that can never be taken away, no matter how far we run?

Even our moments of connection with home from afar have become bittersweet. Like the time I met another Palestinian in an old Cairo cafe, and we spent hours talking about home. We didn’t need to say much. The pain was in the silence, in the way we both looked away when the conversation turned to the future. Because as uncertain as the future is, hope is fragile. We talked about the smell of jasmine in the spring in Gaza City, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, the taste of zaatar fresh from the street vendors. These memories were anchors, tethering us to a place we could not return to, but they were also torturous. They reminded us of what we had lost.

On Sunday, I stood on the balcony of my home in exile in Cairo, holding a cup of tea that had long gone cold, and waiting for the ceasefire in Gaza to take effect. For those still there, it was the silence that announced it. The sudden absence of fear, the stillness after 15 months of bombardment, starvation and displacement, left me suspended. The initial calm was so profound, I was told, it felt unnatural and oppressive: no drones, no jets, no explosions, just the faint hum of seemingly distant traffic and the muffled voices of people in shock. On the news, people stood holding their breath as if they were waiting for the next explosion. This time, silence was louder than bombs. The quiet dragged me back to memories of all that we had lost and forward to the uncertainty of what might be ahead.

I tried not to let exhaustion overshadow joy for my people in Gaza, despite knowing too well that silence is not peace. It’s the absence of war, and there is a difference. The world has permitted us to stop dying, at least for now. And maybe this is worth a sigh of relief. Around me were my two sons: Zain, 3 months old, born into exile from a genocide, too young to know what it is; and Rafik, 3, old enough to know he survived one. I watch them play, and my heart is torn between gratitude for their safety and grief for the home they may never know. Scrolling images of celebrations on social media, Gaza’s destruction stared back at me, and one image caught my eye: a child’s drawing, scrawled on a piece of paper that had somehow survived the bombs. It was a house with a red roof, a smiling sun and a family holding hands.

I was thinking of everyone I know in Gaza — my neighbors, my friends, my family. Were they celebrating? Mourning? Or were they too exhausted to feel anything at all? I wanted to call them, to hear their voices, but the lines were down again. It’s strange, in a way, how war twists even the simplest things into impossibilities: a phone call, a hug from afar, a moment with the people you love.

I see resilience in the way my sons laugh, in the way they play, in the way they still believe in a better tomorrow. And I see it in myself, in the way I keep writing and telling our story, even when it feels like no one is listening. Because the world may forget us in the pause between the bombs, but we will not forget ourselves. We will not let our story be erased. I think of the child’s drawing I found in the rubble, the house with the red roof and the smiling sun. I think of the child who drew it, and I wonder if they are still alive. I wonder if they still believe in the world they drew. I think of the call to prayer, echoing through the streets at sunset and telling us that even in the darkest times, there is still faith.

How can we ever return to “normal” after the bombs have stopped falling? Even as the ceasefire brings a fragile pause to the devastation, the heartbreak remains. My dear friend from college, Hasan Abu Sharkh, was killed today, just four days into this supposed peace. An Israeli sniper shot him in eastern Rafah as he attempted to return to his family home. Hasan, to me and to everyone who loved him, was a voice of laughter that cut through the hardest days. He was a source of kindness in a world that offered so little of it. We studied side by side, and we dreamed of futures far from this war and leaned on each other through the unspoken weight we all carried. I was writing this story when the news of his killing came, and it shattered me. My hands froze on the keyboard, and I was unable to process how someone so full of life could be reduced to another victim of this nightmare. Hasan was cruelly taken from us, from me, like so many others before him. His life didn’t end amid the chaos of war but in its quiet, devastating aftershock.

Hasan was the textbook definition of a nerd. He juggled two majors at once: English Literature and English Language Teaching Methodologies. His whole life was ahead of him. He told the worst jokes — the kind that made you groan — but we laughed because we loved him more than we loved the punch line. During late-night study sessions in college, he’d cook the most questionable dishes and we’d eat them anyway, not because he was a good cook, but because we were starving. He’d launch into the most tedious stories about his favorite movies first thing in the morning, and we’d listen because, according to him, łŮłó˛šłŮ’s what “loyal friends” did.

None of that — not his bad jokes, his terrible cooking or his boring stories — justifies a bullet to the head. Not when he was just trying to see his home again after 15 months of carnage. Not when he’d escaped death so many times before. He deserved to live. He deserved to keep being our endlessly annoying, irreplaceable best friend. And now, in these moments of so-called peace, Hasan’s absence makes it clear — there is no going back to “normal.”

The ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s just a pause, and pauses don’t heal wounds, they just give you time to feel them. Our trauma now remains as fresh as the day the war began. We are expected to be grateful for exile. To the world, we are seen as lucky, not punished. After all, we are now “safe.” They slap a label on us: “Survivors.” But what the world doesn’t understand is that we are human beings, not just symbols — of resistance, of endurance, of persistence — that survival is a miracle and safety can never replace home. We are ordinary people who are too fragile to keep living through the extraordinary. I know that wish is just that — a dream. And no matter how vivid, dreams can’t bring back what’s been lost.

Mohammed R. Mhawish is a Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza.

Fanatical and extreme as it may be, I find it very hard to think of any shadings or nuances in a character portrait of Christopher Columbus.

Grant him the originality and fierce ambition needed to set that western course. But what else is there to say? Here was a man greedy in large ways, and in small ways–to the point where he took for himself the reward for first sighting land from the Pinta lookout. Cruel in petty things, as when he set a dying monkey with two paws cut off to fight a wild pig; cruel on a continental scale, as when he set in motion what de las Casas called “the beginning of the bloody trail of conquest across the Americas.”

There were a few worldly men around, too, who were not “of their time.” Pedro Margarit, who sickened at the treatment of the Arawaks, who left Hispaniola and spoke against Columbus at Court. In another theater, a man such as the Portuguese Alfonso de Albuquerque, who treated his subjects in Portuguese India as fi they were people.

We may try to redeem him by stating that he was a man of his time. That is certainly true. And it is to the greater glory of those men who were not “of their time”: de las Casas, who in vain fought for half a century to save the Indians; Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who preached in Santo Domingo in 1511, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness.” (He was recalled shortly thereafter.) It would be the lives of those very few men who would, it such were possible, save the honor of that Holy Faith in whose name a continental massacre was committed.

But men like these were pathetically few in number, and still are. The Spaniards cut off the hands of the Arawaks who didn’t come in with enough gold. More than four hundred years later, Brazilian entrepreneurs cut off the ears of the Indians who didn’t come in with enough wild rubber. The Spaniards threw the Indian children in the sea, shouting, “Boil in hell, children of the devil.” The United States General Westmoreland announced, “An Oriental does not prize his life like we do.” He used new and improved napalm, while the Spaniards in Hispaniola used green wood for burning the Indian caciques in order to make them suffer and scream longer as an example for the others, of course…

Perhaps we will come to say that Columbus was not only a man of his time, but that he was a man of his race. The word “race” may no longer be accepted in science because it cannot properly be defined. That does not prevent us all from knowing quite well what is meant by “the white race”; but let us say then that Columbus was a typical man of the (white) West. And the West has ravaged the world for five hundred years, under the flag of a master-slave theory which in our finest hour of hypocrisy was called “the white man’s burden.” Perhaps the Master-Race Nazis were different from the rest of us, mostly in the sense that they extended that theory to their fellow whites. (In doing so, they did the subject races of this world a favor. The great white-race civil war which we call World War I weakened Europe and broke its grip on Asia and Africa.) I am not ignoring the cruelties of other races. They were usually less hypocritical, though; they were not, in Marx’s phrase, “civilization mongers” as they laid waste to other lands. But they too fill the pages of history with man’s inhumanity to man.

What sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. No other race or religion or nonreligion ever quite matched the Christian West in that respect. Of course those others did not as a rule have the technology and the means to go on and on. The West did, and does–that same persistence has given it its power for good and for bad. We may end then by saying that Columbus was but one frightening example of the corruption of unchecked power, such as precisely the West used to wield.

And there was nothing to check the Spaniards, whose steel, horses, and gunpowder made them invulnerable. Any check on their power would have had to come from inside themselves. Inside themselves was lust for gain and the Christian faith. The two did not appear to be in conflict.

Undoubtedly, the Spaniards were Christians. But that manifested itself in surprising ways. De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground. Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Thirteen Arawaks were hanged each time. Why? This was “in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles.”

De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable (“and I know his name and the names of his family in Seville”) instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a sound, and “roasted them slowly, as he liked.” Men, women, and children on Columbus’ Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs. It was considered good military policy to give these dogs a taste for Indians.

De Bry, an etcher from the Dutch Lowlands, has illustrated the conquest. Those faces, under the pointed helmets, with the little triangular beards, look on coldly as the Indians are strangled, burned, and cut down. They are the stuff of nightmares.

The curse of the conquest still lies over most of Latin America. Here the encomiendas continue in a more subtle form, and the very few still own the very many. South of the United States border, October [14] is now commemorated as “the day of the race. ” The race, that is, as it now exists, of mixed Spanish and Indian and African stock.

You cannot find fault with that. That race, la raza, is a reality. These children of conquerors and slaves are the only achievement of the conquest, the only wealth it produced. For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars, anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.

Perhaps in the children of la raza lies the hope for a final reconciliation of this war that Europe and its white outposts have waged on America and Africa.

But up north we call October [14] “Columbus Day.” Are we committed then to continue in that bloody track? Shouldn’t we try to have our thoughts, on the anniversary of the day it all began, run in a new direction? Shouldn’t we change that name?

Our false heroes have long burdened our history and our character. Shouldn’t we wind up that Enterprise of Columbus and start thinking of a truly New World?

Hans Koning (1921-2007) was a journalist and novelist. He is the author of Columbus: His Enterprise, The Almost World, The Conquest of America, Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History, and many other books of fiction and nonfiction, plays, screenplays, travel books, and articles for magazines like the New Yorker. Four of his novels were made into films. Koning was born in Amsterdam (as Hans Koningsberger), fought with the Dutch Resistance and the British Army during the Second World War, and traveled widely before settling in the United States.

An excerpt from Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture byĚýFrances NegrĂłn-Muntaner

There are cultural icons that never seem to die no matter how much dirt you throw on them. And the multi-faced West Side Story—Broadway show, Hollywood film, staple of high school drama programs, inspiration for the 2000 Gap campaign featuring “the latest Spring styles and colors of the Khakis and the Jeans,” and possible remake featuring a “real” Puerto Rican cast—refuses to bow out after way too many curtain calls. Like the Spanish-American War for the Island nationalist elites, the 1961 film version of West Side Story, directed by Robert Wise and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, can be dubbed the diaspora’s “trauma.”

A symptom that West Side Story remains a constitutive site for American ethno-national identifications is the fact that although the film is neither the first nor last portrayal of Puerto Ricans as criminal men and “fiery” women, hardly any boricua cultural critic, activist, or screen actor can refrain from stating their own very special relationship to West Side Story. References to the film tend to convey a sense of shame or pride in the speaker’s ethno-national identity, a desire for valorization, and/or a struggle to articulate an oppositional voice in American culture.

Jennifer López, the highest-paid Latina actress in Hollywood today, recalls that West Side Story was her favorite movie as a child. “I saw it over and over. I never noticed that Natalie Wood wasn’t really a Puerto Rican girl. I grew up always wanting to play Anita (Rita Moreno’s Oscar-winning role), but as I got older, I wanted to be Maria. I went to dance classes every week.” For the Bronx-born López, causing the Jets and the Sharks to rumble in West Side Story may signify that a boricua can indeed be valuable enough to play her own stereotype in a major American motion picture, but for the San Juan–born entertainer Ricky Martin, starring in the infamous musical means contributing to the stereotypes that make him a cultural oxymoron as a middle-class “white” man. Martin has in fact repeatedly rejected the possibility of a starring role in the remake because “It’s kicking my culture. And I’m not gonna feed that.”

The journalist Blanca Vázquez, whose editorial work in the Center for Puerto Rican Studies publication Centro was crucial in fostering critical discourse on Latinos in the media, has also underscored the importance of West Side Story in her own identity formation: “And what did the ‘real’ Puerto Rican, Anita do in the film? She not only was another Latina ‘spitfire,’ she also sang a song denigrating Puerto Rico and by implication, being Puerto Rican. I remember seeing it and being ashamed.” The Island-born cultural critic Alberto Sandoval shares in the shame as the film came to define him after he migrated to the United States: “And how can I forget those who upon my arrival would start tapping flamenco steps and squealing: ‘I like to be in America’? As the years passed by I grew accustomed to their actions and reactions to my presence. I would smile and ignore the stereotype of Puerto Ricans that Hollywood promotes.”

In contrast to the purported materiality—however discursively produced—of the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, the nearly universal consensus by spectators, critics, and creators of West Side Story is that the film is not in any way “about” Puerto Rican culture, migration, or community life, that ultimately, it refers to “nothing.” Even West Side Story’s creative collaborators have been consistent in representing the work as non-mimetic. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim, for instance, initially rejected the project on the grounds of his ignorance of Puerto Rican culture and lack of experience with poverty: “I can’t do this show I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.”

“West Side Story is then nothing short of a Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation (1915): a blatant, seminal (pun intended), valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national ‘consciousness.’”

Without a touch of irony, Leonard Bernstein also noted the extent to which he researched Puerto Rican culture before writing the score: “We went to a gym in Brooklyn where there were different gangs that a social organization was trying to bring together. I don’t know if too much eventually got into West Side Story, but everything does help.” The “superficial” way that Puerto Ricans were represented made one of the original West Side Story producers, Cheryl Crawford, insist that “the show explains why the poor in New York, who had once been Jewish, were now Puerto Rican and black. When someone said the piece was a poetic fantasy, not a sociological document, she replied, ‘You have to rewrite the whole thing or I won’t do it.’” Yet if West Side Story was not intended to be “real,” and many boricua spectators insist that it does not accurately represent us as a “people,” what accounts for its reality effects? Why is West Side Story a founding site for Puerto Rican–American ethno-national identifications?

The film’s durable canonization, I would argue, is not arbitrary on several counts. West Side Story is the earliest—and arguably the only—widely disseminated American mass culture product to construe Puerto Ricans as a specific, and hence different, U.S. ethnic group, ranked in a particular social order, living in a distinct location, yet informed by a uniquely American racialization process. While it is not the only media intervention to represent Puerto Ricans within a legal or sociological discourse (12 Angry Men and The Young Savages, for instance, preceded it), West Side Story remains the most cohesive cultural text to “hail”—and perhaps even more important for a discussion on ethno-national shame, to see—Puerto Ricans as a distinctly American ethnic group.

West Side Story is then nothing short of a Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation (1915): a blatant, seminal (pun intended), valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national “consciousness.” Irresistibly, Variety offers a typical West Side Story review: “Technically it is superb; use of color is dazzling, camera work often is thrilling, editing fast with dramatic punch, production design catches mood as well as action itself.” Or as Stanley Kaufman insists in the New Republic, â€œWest Side Story has been overburdened with discussion about its comment on our society. It offers no such comment. As a sociological study, it is of no use: in fact, it is somewhat facile. What it does is to utilize certain conditions artistically—a vastly different process.”

Indeed, West Side Story—unlike the crime-saturated evening news—incorporates Puerto Ricans into the United States through a media product valued for its Shakespearean inspiration, aesthetic quality, financial success, and popularity with audiences, a timeless American “classic.” This coupling recalls the historian Francisco A. Scarano’s observation that “domination is an ambiguous process, a form of creating distance, of othering, and at the same time creating intimacy or bonding.” The unanimous regard for the film’s quality, which simultaneously shames Puerto Ricans through its racist emplotment and valorizes us by the attachment to an appreciated commodity, continues to seduce audiences into multiple fantasies of incorporation—sexual, social, and (variously) ethno-national.

West Side Story is also not a product of Island high culture but of American popular entertainment, which does not depend on literacy or education to be consumed. If the cinema “homologizes . . . the symbolic gathering of the nation,” the film further demarcates the United States, not Puerto Rico, as the “national” space. In this sense, even if West Side Story represents AmeRĂ­cans as a subaltern group, the subjects so lowered have more in common with Nuyoricans than the heroic boricuas from the Island’s nationalist fiction, since they are working-class, not blanquitos; English (not Spanish) speaking; urban, not mountain dwelling; racialized, not European; and fully engaged in modernity, even if at a disadvantage.

Equally relevant is the fact that West Side Story constitutes Puerto Ricans as criminal (men), and victimized (women)—two gendered sites of shameful identification that nevertheless socially constitutes many boricuas in excess of ethno-nationality. Educated AmeRĂ­can spectators, who tend to be the most stung by the shame of West Side Story, have attempted to offset it by offering a “positive” counterdiscourse, on the “good” side of the law. In doing so they have, however, resorted to the same definitions of justice that criminalize Puerto Ricans and ignore the degree to which boricua popular culture reveres outlaws and identifies with alternative codes of honor. Boricua popular culture, in fact, often embraces violence by individuals as a means of addressing asymmetrical power relationships. “The right to individually enact coercive reprisals directly, without official institutional mediation,” writes Kelvin Santiago-Valles, was “recognized and affirmed among the ‘native’ laboring classes” during the first five decades of American rule. Similarly, I witnessed in screening West Side Story to young Puerto Ricans in the Philadelphia barrio during the mid-1990s, that teenagers repeatedly affirmed that the film was not racist, for “łŮłó˛šłŮ’s [gangs, violence, death] how it is.”

West Side Story is hence compelling as a founding narrative because it raises both the disgrace-shame of the privileged and the discretion-shame of the majority (see chapter 1). As Blanca VĂĄzquez has observed, what may be the most shameful aspect of West Side Story to educated U.S. boricuas is not only its racism, but its insinuation that many Puerto Ricans—specifically gendered as women—want a part of the American Dream, and that this identification can often be painfully pleasurable. Ultimately, the film’s main and long-lasting effect is not that it divides “the Puerto Ricans from the Anglo-Americans, Puerto Rico from the U.S., the West Side from the East Side, the Latino race from the Anglo-Saxon race, the Puerto Rican cultural reality from the Anglo-American one, the poor from the rich,” as some critics have claimed. In a queer way, the film incorporates the specter of Puerto Ricans into American culture and provides what no boricua-made film has delivered to date: a deceptively simple, widely seen text that dwells on the still constitutive axes of migration, class, gender, race, and sexuality. West Side Story has in fact offered U.S. Puerto Ricans a world stage on which to negotiate their ethno-national identity, prophesying the replacement of boricua high culture by the mass media as a site of cultural reproduction.

If West Side Story has constituted Puerto Rican ethno-nationality as shameful, yet some spectators enjoy it and others decry it, how is the film playing (with) “us,” Puerto Ricans and/as “Americans”? From the many ways that spectators complicate and enjoy the subjection of cinema, I will begin by highlighting the “make up” of West Side Story—how it visualizes boricuaness—by using the queer vernacular methodology of “reading” its performances as do the judges and onlookers at a drag ball. Arguably, one of the pleasures that the film offers boricua spectators is how it fails to “get” them as Puerto Ricans.

While little known, the film’s origin story provides a valuable entry point. West Side Story is based on a 1949 play called East Side Story, a love story between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy frustrated by both families. “As early as January 1949 Robbins had come to Bernstein with a proposal that they make a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet,” wrote Meryle Secrest, “using the conflict between Jews and Catholics during the Easter-Passover celebrations as a contemporary equivalent.” After some thought, however, the collaborators Jerome Robbins (choreographer), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Arthur Laurents (writer) put the project on hold partly because the proposed story line was too similar to Anne Nichols’s Abie’s Irish Rose, the longest-running show on Broadway during the 1920s.  â€œI said it was ´Ą˛úžąąđ’s&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;Irish Rose to music,” Laurents commented, “and [Robbins] wouldn’t have any part of it.”

Read as a national allegory, Abie’s Irish Rose is about how American “whites” were invented out of a broad spectrum of European ethnicities, immigration histories, and classes. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, the final resolution is staged as an integration of Jews and Catholics through marriage and upperclass mobility—a triumph of “whiteness” as a new identity for the children of European immigrants, regardless of their religion. By the end of the play, Abie and Rose, for instance, celebrate a hybrid Christmas with their children, who are fraternal twins. The twins, named Rebecca and Patrick in honor of Abie’s mother and Rose’s father, respectively, will clearly grow up to be neither Jewish nor Catholic, neither Irish nor European, but “all-American.”

At the height of the late 1940s, Bernstein felt that Abie’s conflict was outdated. World War II had created a new context for Jews in the United States; anti-Semitism was at an all-time low and many first-generation Jews and Irish were integrated as Americans, despite a lingering discomfort. However, the basic premise of “impossible love” based on a socially imposed norm continued to be compelling to Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents. “We’re fired again,” wrote Bernstein, “by the Romeo notion; only now we have abandoned the Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh, and have come up with what I think is going to be it: two teenage gangs, one the warring Puerto Ricans, the other â€ČŮąđąô´Ú-˛őłŮ˛âąôąđťĺ’&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;´Ąłžąđ°ůžąłŚ˛š˛Ô˛ő.”

According to Bernstein, the new idea emerged spontaneously—and far from the action:

I was at a Beverly Hills pool with Arthur Laurents. I think I was in California scoring On the Waterfront. And we were talking ruefully about what a shame that the original East Side Story didn’t work out. Then, lying next to us on somebody’s abandoned chair was a newspaper headline, “GANG FIGHTS.” We stared at it and then at each other and realized that this— in New York—was it. The Puerto Rican thing had just begun to explode, and we called Jerry, and łŮłó˛šłŮ’s the way West Side Story—as opposed to East Side Story—was born. 

The Puerto Rican “thing” was nothing but the recasting of a colonial migrant community into a distinct and “nationally” recognized ethnic group, now also seemingly available for queer erotic fantasies.

In adapting the play, the film’s creators maintained Catholicism as a plot continuity (although the East Side’s Italian boy became Polish), but Jewish identity disappeared, a critical displacement since the creators of the film were all Jews. The erasure of Jewish characters, however, did not mean that the questions that have affected Jewish integration into the United States vanished. As Michael Rogin and others have commented, Jews in New York have been productive appropriators of subaltern culture—particularly African American—in an effort to address their own complex process of sometimes shameful transculturation. This process recalls Toni Morrison’s comments regarding American literature, “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.”

While blackface was only partially used in the staging of West Side Story, the play’s music is heavily indebted to jazz and Latin American rhythms, and the casting in both the play and the film could be broadly understood as a minstrel act. In addition, for gay Jewish artists who were working in highly visible venues and in some cases living complex lives as heterosexuals, telling stories close to home through other means was not uncommon throughout their careers. Despite the fact that some have pointed to the surprising ease with which the producers changed one ethnicity for another as a symptom of racism, “passing” and hence substituting ethnicities was part of Jewish (ambivalent) survival strategies in the United States, which, of course, have much in common with (white) queer practices of integration into heterosexist spaces.

The casting of white actors presents a second opportunity to approach West Side Story as a transethnic masquerade. Mason Wiley and Damien Bona wrote that the Mirisch brothers, executive producers of West Side Story, had “toyed with the idea of casting Elvis Presley as the leader of the American street gang, with his followers played by Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Paul Anka.” No major male stars, however, were actually cast as any of the “white” Jets, although Natalie Wood and George Chakiris were hired to play the two Puerto Rican leads. Predictably, only secondary Shark roles went to Latino actors.

JB NICHOLAS / SplashNews.com

Since Puerto Ricans are a differently racialized people and some are indistinguishable from whites or African Americans (as coded in Hollywood cinema), boricua ethnic specificity had to be easily seen and heard. Otherwise, the visual economy separating the Jets from the Sharks—and Maria from Tony—would be lost. To stress the difference between ethnic groups, Puerto Rican characters spoke in a shifting, asinine accent, and the hair of the Jets was dyed unnaturally blond. Not surprisingly, George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, was “brownfaced.” Given the history of Hollywood representation of Latino working-class men and Chakiris’s own record in the production (he had played the leader of the Jets in the theater) brownface underscored Bernardo’s ethnicity; makeup was a clamp used to avoid any ethnic misreading of his “realness.”

Ironically, even if designed to make him more authentically boricua, Bernardo’s brownface and eccentric Spanish pronunciation had the opposite effect and were responsible for what many observers found to be an unconvincing performance (which nevertheless landed him an Oscar). Simultaneously, although Natalie Wood’s brunette type was less contested on the basis of appearance, the authenticity of her voice was questioned and even mocked. Not only was Wood’s singing voice dubbed, but her “speaking accent helped her earn the Hasty Pudding Club’s award for worst actress of the year.”

Jerome Robbins had requested Rita Moreno to audition to play Maria in the Broadway show, but once the play was transformed into a Hollywood production, the likelihood that a Puerto Rican actress would be granted the lead role considerably diminished, given the collusion of racism and commerce in film history, and the prevalent taboos on interracial romance. Although Rita Moreno is light-skinned, the union of Tony and Maria could have created anxiety in 1961 (although not in 1941, during the heyday of the “South of the Border” films of the Good Neighbor Policy era). One way to alleviate this anxiety was to allow white audiences to enjoy the interracial seduction by casting actors as Maria and Bernardo whom everyone knew to be white, and making sure that Moreno wore heavier makeup to avoid any confusion with the virginal Wood.

Even though it does not “see” Puerto Ricans, West Side Story visualizes a provocative proposition partly informed by the American Jewish experience: that for many immigrants, identity in the United States is, so to speak, a matter of makeup. Due to the instability of the category of “race,” ethnics must then be made up with dark powder, bright colored ruffled costumes (women), dark colors (men), accents, and incessant movement. By default, “white” men must be made up of yellows, browns, and light blue, the women, orange. The conspicuous absence of blacks—even Puerto Rican blacks—makes the “epidermal” differences secondary, even an aesthetic affectation.

This “made-up” representation contrasts with the processes of transculturation taking place in New York between Puerto Ricans and their neighbors, and underscores not only why artifice was required to uphold fading differences but also why this could even be a source of enjoyment for boricua spectators who wished to retain a distinct cultural identity. As the writer Esmeralda Santiago recalls, New York Puerto Ricans during the 1960s “walked the halls between the Italians and the morenos, neither one nor the other, but looking and acting like a combination of both, depending on the texture of their hair, the shade of their skin, their makeup, and the way they walked down the hall.” West Side Story’s overkill in representing race reveals not the power of racism as an epistemology or the impenetrability of Puerto Rican culture, but how the only way left to disavow transculturation is through color-coding, lest you eat the wrong M & M.

Expectedly—and despite the heavy makeup—the film never entirely succeeds in maintaining the illusion of difference. The dance scene in the gymnasium, for instance, succinctly taps into the transculturated core of “American” identifications. The Puerto Ricans “look alike,” as do the Anglos; but at the same time, many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from Anglos. The single exception is Maria, whose name and white costume connote her as a “virgin,” untouched by American culture and uncontaminated by racism. That the film’s arguably “perfect” character is also the most patently “fake” suggests that the narrative cannot resolve its rips at the seams.

While thematically the film insists that ethnic groups should stick to their own kind, the gym stages the swan song of anti-miscegenation as white bodies cannot help but perform to Latin-inflected music, even when the dances are not identically choreographed. As Stuart Hall observes, despite the “inauthentic” way that blacks are often consumed by the mass media, their incorporation has effected certain shifts that may be lost in a purely thematic analysis of a cultural text: “Style becomes the subject of discourse, the mastery of writing is displaced by music, and the body itself becomes the canvas for representation.” If not in plot, West Side Story is stylishly transcultural and transethnic.

Ridiculously, as West Side Story is staged and restaged, it will become “more” Puerto Rican, black, queer, and “Latino” at the same time that the play will continue to raise prickly issues. In the 1980 Broadway revival, a black actress, Debbie Allen, played Anita and Josie de GuzmĂĄn, a light-skinned Puerto Rican from the Island, was Maria. To her surprise, de GuzmĂĄn was “made up” (as Rita Moreno before her) to look Puerto Rican: “When they darkened her long silken hair for the part of Maria she revolted at first. ‘Oh my God, I am Puerto Rican—why did they have to darken my hair?’ she thought. They darkened her pale skin too, and after a bit she liked that, wanting to get literally in the skin of Maria.”

Yet it is in seducing the audience to look at Maria whereĚýWest Side StoryĚýforces both ethno-national makeups to blush. In the character’s most famous number, “I Feel Pretty,” Maria reveals that she feels pretty (visible) only when Tony, a white man, sees her. In Maria’s quest to be seen by only one man, however,ĚýWest Side StoryĚýallows other subjects to watch, enjoy, and unsettle his allegedly single authority.

Frances Negron-MuntanerĚýis an award-winning filmmaker, writer, journalist, and cultural critic. She is the co-editor of Puerto Rican Jam and author of Anatomy of a Smile. She currently teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.