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Mackenzie

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Review

Madeline Bogoch is a writer and film programmer based in Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg. Her writing has been published in _Public Parking_, _C Magazine_, _Peripheral Review_, _Galleries West_, and others. Madeline is the Director of Media Collections and Distribution at Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Co-director of the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF), and has additionally curated screenings with Vtape, VUCAVU, and Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

“If my exterior presentation matched my interior I would look like an alien as well. But alas, I’m just a femme.” So writes Jackie Wang in an Ambien-fuelled zine titled _The Phallic Titty Manifesto: Queer Sex and the Naming of Parts_, which is included in her new collection _Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_. Alienation and its symbolic avatar, the alien, are recurring motifs across the text offering a rare thread of continuity throughout the entries, which appear in a wide range of styles. Wang, an American poet and scholar, is perhaps best known for her 2018 monograph _Carceral Capitalism_, a caustic critique of racial capitalism and the prison industrial complex. Whereas _Carceral Capitalism_ filters personal narrative through a political and theoretical lens, _Alien Daughters_ inverts the formula: the author’s experience of consuming intellectual history and fomenting politics is prioritized over the texts or ideologies themselves. Drawing significantly from Wang’s personal archive of poetry, zines, and blogs, the collection chronicles the author’s formative eras through four sections titled “The Hard-Femme Years,” “The Punk-House Years,” “The Desert Years,” and “The Getting-My-Shit-Together Years.” The source of the unpolished intensity in Wang’s blogging and zines may be due to her apparent indifference to its reception. It’s simply, as she puts it, “the inevitable byproduct of one thinking girl’s life.” 

Wang writes from the position of a curious outlier. She is a voracious reader and thinker, and the collection covers a period in the author’s life which is emotionally volatile but creatively charged. At one point she laments that she needs “access to this cistern of intense feeling if I am to write,” implying that the two conditions are inextricably bound. In high school, she wrote a diaristic zine after binge reading Anaïs Nin, and while living in a dysfunctional punk house took refuge in a campus library pulling long hours and “arguing about absurd topics such as whether Spinozism could be reconciled with Marxism.” This attitude is the closest thing we get to a working definition of “extreme girlhood,” which Wang articulates as more of an appetite than an aesthetic.

At some point between graduating college in Florida and moving to Baltimore in the early 2010s, Wang began her still-extant Tumblr _Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns_. This peak era of Tumblr also saw the rise of the sad girl mood boards the platform has become known for, but which Wang describes feeling at odds with. In an entry on Jackie O (her namesake) and Lana Del Rey, Wang questions her place within this canon of melancholic women, asking herself, “Where do you fit in this white-girl archive of feelings—their ways of suffering?” 

In an early post written for the literary blog _HTMLGIANT_, the author expresses ambivalence about an archetype she calls the “Plath Girl,” a figure who bears a striking resemblance to the prototypical “sad girl” of Tumblr. Wang admires her brooding nature while contending that she herself is too “awkward, ethnic looking, and weird” to adopt such a persona. In contrast, she dubs herself an “Alien Girl” while parenthetically musing about the “horrifyingly self-destructive and obsessive babies” the two personas might produce. If the Plath Girl weaponizes vulnerability, then Wang takes another approach—leveraging it for art with verbosity and intellectual insatiability.

Wang moves through the world with a porousness that facilitates both adventure and misfortune. This effusive style complements her tendency to wander, both literally and philosophically. Her stream-of-consciousness approach unfolds a spiritual bent, manifesting as a recurrent obsession with dreams, poems that read as incantations, and a parasocial kinship with surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Wang’s extreme girlhood, she decides, ends at 29—the age I’m told is punctuated by Saturn’s return, an astrological phenomenon in which Saturn’s orbit lands at the same point it was when you were born, resulting in a period of rapturous exit from youth.
 
When I once lamented to a friend about a teenage tattoo of mine, he responded that it was a message from my younger self that had cut across time, a comment that softened any lingering regrets on my part. In Wang, I detect a similar, acquired tenderness toward her former self. This affection crystallizes in the entry for which the collection is named, which is one of its highlights. The piece is addressed to an audience of “young women of color who write,” but Wang qualifies that “this is as much addressed to me as it is to you.” Delivered with a gentle cadence, she reflects (in future tense) on the economy of identity in the arts, laying out the stakes of navigating these socially fraught spaces without compromising oneself in the process. Among other things— including the sanctity of weirdness—she advises against justifying bitterness as a moral crusade, offering the cautionary and sage refrain, “The more you hate people for winning the game, the more you will believe in the game yourself.”
 
The entries have been left largely intact from their original and varied forms. There are occasional periods of dissonance that lead me to squint, trying to discern the overall meaning, as though attempting to perceive the image hidden within a Magic Eye. Because _Alien Daughters_ is a book of moods, the tone tends to fluctuate like weather patterns. The prevailing mood—or climate, to indulge the analogy further—is a dull ache for the creative liberty to not give a fuck, and the collateral damage induced by the rising expectations of professionalism. In a characteristically daring inversion of the girlhood ritual of burning old diaries (a very Plath Girl move), the author recalls a conversation in which a friend asks how she “will dispose of her juvenilia” to which she replies, “I’ll publish it.” 

Writer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

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_Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_ was published by Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2023.



_Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_ — Jackie Wang

Bettina Pérez Martínez (she/they) is a curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work focuses on Caribbean identity and relationalism, Puerto Rican history and its current politics, decoloniality, diaspora, ecology, and climate change in the Caribbean region. She is a 2022–2024 Bridging the Divides Fellow, a Mellon Foundation initiative, and their work has been published in _esse_, _CENTRO Journal_, _Beyond the Gallery_, and _Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency_.

“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” originates from a phrase used by Justice Edward Douglass White in 1901 during the _Dowes v. Bidwell_ Supreme Court case. The case would delineate the political status of the newly acquired territories by the United States, following the Spanish-American war of 1898, and how they would exist in relation to the United States. The phrase described the archipelago of Puerto Rico as at once foreign for constitutional purposes, while remaining under the sovereignty of the United States. As Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo present in their speculative documentary _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ (2021), this ambiguous colonial relation to the United States continues to negatively impact the reality of Puerto Ricans. 

As the viewer enters the gallery, a corridor appears, built from reflective silver and gold emergency blankets that recall materials used for spacecraft technology. The corridor leads to a vast room, where _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ is presented as a four-channel projected film. The scale of the projection results in an all-encompassing physical experience, forcing the viewer to direct their attention from screen to screen, actively shifting their sense of space. This feeling of spatial disorientation mirrors the film’s interwoven personal narratives of displacement in the necropolitical context of colonialism, and an ongoing climate crisis in Puerto Rico. 

The film begins with footage from a NASA space launch in Florida, with two adjacent screens presenting scenes from inside a plane. Overlaid onto the image of the plane’s interior is an interview with Lizbeth, who recently moved to Florida. Lizbeth describes being forced to leave Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. Alongside thousands of Puerto Ricans that desperately sought to leave the archipelago following the destruction left by hurricanes Maria and Irma in September 2017, Lizbeth acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the Puerto Rico they left, that Puerto Rico will never exist again. It is estimated that 250,000 people have left the archipelago as a direct result of Hurricane Maria and the storm’s aftermath. 

Following these catastrophic storms, the United States provided little help, avoiding accountability via Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory. The intimate personal reflections narrated in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ offer a more humanized portrayal of the ongoing socio-political, economic, and environmental crises experienced by Puerto Ricans. As Puerto Rican author and sociologist Guillermo Rebollo Gil writes in "As It Regards the Ones We've Lost" (2016), “the world in the colony is so tiny and beautiful and heartbreaking, it fits in a dance floor.” 

The image of the dance floor also carries a deeper, painful significance in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_. In 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, during a salsa night at the gay club, where he killed 49 people, and wounded 53 more; 90 percent of the victims were Latinx and half of that percentage were of Puerto Rican descent. In their text “Slow Dancing with Strangers” (2023), Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo express that _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ paid tribute to this tragedy that deeply affected local queer, trans, and Latinx communities, by centring the dance floor as a metaphor for a site of community and resistance. It’s an especially important metaphor given the ongoing state violence that continues to target Florida’s queer and trans individuals. In 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed various anti-LGBTQ2IA+ bills that ban trans medical care, remove sexual orientation and gender identity from school curricula, and allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ2IA+ patients. 

Throughout the filming process, the artists extended the metaphor of the dance floor by portraying the diasporic subjects of the film as dancers orienting themselves on a new floor: that of Central Florida. Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo document a karaoke bar where subjects sing famous Puerto Rican boleros while surrounded by visual elements reminiscent of home, such as images from the Puerto Rican countryside, and advertisements for the local beer, Medalla. The film also presents other gathering spaces, such as a supermarket with various Puerto Rican staples, and a food court with decorations recreating the colonial architecture in Old San Juan. As these approximations are presented, one of the film’s interviewees, Teresa, calls Florida “a simulacrum.” Diasporic communities displaced from their former homes in Puerto Rico by ongoing colonial violence recreate familiar cultural, social, and historical markers in the colonized lands of Central Florida. As the climate crisis continues to impact the Caribbean, more people will become displaced and be forced to migrate. In exploring the multiple losses experienced by Puerto Rican diasporic subjects, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo’s visual language rejects the conventions of disaster porn, and instead presents communal gatherings and intimate moments of collective joy under impossible circumstances. The artists portray the liminal and disorienting experience of various Puerto Rican diasporic subjects creating new approximations of home, wherever home may be. 

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“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” ran from 8 February to 30 March 2024 at Dazibao, Montreal.


“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” — Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo