Hello dear ones,
This is perhaps some of the scariest and messiest writing I’ve shared here to date. I hope that as you read it, you can notice the moments when you feel resistance arise in your body, where judgment comes to the surface, or the impulse to distance yourself from those that I’m writing about — fictional characters and myself. I want to be here in the mess with you, and I hope that we can do so in a way that honours a shared commitment to care, curiosity, and compassion. If those feelings feel hard to access after reading this writing, I ask that you hit pause, step away from the keyboard, and spend some time reflecting before you leave a comment.
Also wanted to share that I’m almost at 100 paid subscribers!!! Once I hit that mark, I’ll be donating 10% of each month’s subscription earnings to a different mutual aid call. So if you wanna support me and those in need of mutual aid, you can upgrade your plan and become a paid subscriber, by followint the steps here.
A few reminders and FYIs before we dive in:
Submit your questions for episode 6 of OPENINGS, my monthly advice podcast. You can do so by sending me an email at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line OPENINGS SUBMISSION. Please keep submissions to 250 words or less.
Sharing is caring. Another easy way to support this work is to share this post with others who you think might benefit from this writing. You can hit the button below to share:
Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
I breathe a sigh of relief and feel excitement run through my body whenever I see someone proclaim their love for Jenny Schecter. For those who missed the hot mess that is original L Word, let me tell you about Jenny. Note: Spoilers ahead. The show begins with Jenny, a struggling writer, moving to LA and into the home of her boyfriend Tim. Jenny is bisexual but doesn’t really know that until she meets a whole bunch of hot lesbians, and one named Marina, cheats on Tim, tries to win him back, and then he leaves her. We slowly start to learn that Jenny has some serious trauma, and in later seasons it’s revealed that she was raped when she was a child.
Unfortunately Jenny’s story arc is that she becomes increasingly more self-involved as the series goes on. At one point in the show, she adopts an old dog, pretends to be someone else, takes that dog to a vet who happens to be the girlfriend of a lesbian who wrote a bad review of Jenny’s book, and seduces her. It’s not a good scene.
Labeled as a narcissistic, sociopath, and annoying, most people hate Jenny. Even Mia Kirschner, who played Jenny, describes her character as follows: “[she’s] a very despicable character who lies, cheats, behaves and treats other people horribly for no reason, and is extremely selfish, self-indulgent and so terribly truthful... and she does not hesitate to hide any it.” The series ends with Jenny’s mysterious death in Bette and Tina’s pool.
You can see why loving Jenny is something that so many of us keep to ourselves. Yes, she does many, many shitty things, including being super transphobic to her ex Max. It’s awful to watch. And, Jenny’s character is, to me, one of the realest on an otherwise very, very fake show about a group of skinny, beautiful, mostly femme lesbians living in LA where they can afford beautiful homes. Her trauma isn’t a get out of jail free card. But it is context for why Jenny is so self-focused: her survival has depended on it. On a reddit thread entitled “Jenny isn’t 100% awful,” one user offers a reading of Jenny that really resonates with me: “I’m exhausted about sexual trauma stories that are about overcoming. How many of us are damaged and don’t end turning absolute shit into spiritual gold? Jenny is very realistic and true to me, as a portrayal of someone deeply damaged by sexual assault and who probably has BPD as a result of that trauma. As someone with sexual trauma, I actually find this portrayal of just how damaging trauma can be to be really feminist. Letting the damage show is an important part of telling the truth.”
Another character that I love, though this one is somehow less controversial: Villanelle from Killing Eve. An assassin for a group called The Twelve, Villanelle has similarly been described in similar terms to Jenny. After breaking into Eve’s home, Eve tells Villanelle: “I know you’re a psychopath,” to which Villanelle responds: “You should never tell a psychopath that they’re a psychopath. It upsets them.”
Like Jenny, we will eventually learn more about Villanelle’s backstory: as a child, Villanelle was dropped off at an orphanage by her mother because she felt a “darkness” looming over her. We learn that prior to this, her mother has been cold and withholding. Villanelle has some attachment trauma. As a teenager, she’ll castrate her teacher’s husband out of jealousy, spend five years in a Russian prison to be broken out by the Twelve, and is trained to become one of their assassins. She kills without any sign of remorse; and, in fact, it’s quite the opposite: she takes pleasure in her kills.
Unlike Jenny, most viewers of the show love Villanelle. In an article for The Atlantic, the assassin is described as “cold, calculating, and callous” as well as “cocky, playful, and ostentatious.” While “she doesn’t meet the entertainment industry’s perpetually moving goalpost of female characterization, likability, yet she is nearly impossible to not root for.” Villanelle “subverts feminine stereotypes”; whereas Jenny becomes the poster child for the kind of woman we don’t ever want to become.
Why am I thinking about queer villains? Because we’re not supposed to care about them. At least not the IRL villains. In today’s radical queer scene, there is a different villain: the person who causes harm. I have been this villain. When an online campaign began to deplatform me, I watched as people that I thought were my friends unfollowed me without saying a word. I’m not going to rehash all of the details here. If you want to learn more, you can read my public statement here. I know that I’m not the only one this has happened to. I’ve watched, both online and IRL, as people abandon those accused of causing harm — perhaps out of fear of association; perhaps because, while believing in transformative justice, they don’t have the skills or capacity to do the work of holding those they know accountable.
Of course, as Mia Mingus and Kai Cheng Thom have reminded me, we can never truly hold another person accountable; they have to step into that work. But we can, however, turn to those we know and say “I’m concerned about what I’ve been hearing. I’d like to talk to you about the claims being made.” While it is not the job of those who’ve been harmed to do so, the truth is that the best people to support us in being accountable are those who know us in some capacity. Ironically, people opt out of connection in the name of community accountability; but community accountability requires us to be in connection with those we know — and maybe even love — who have caused harm. Because we’ve built trust with that person, we can have the hard conversations that are needed in these processes. When we opt out, when we don’t even make an attempt at dialogue, we become complicit in that person continuing to perpetuate harm.
One of the many things that transformative justice has taught me is that there are no “good” or “bad” people. If we extend this further, then we must question the hero/villain binary as well. It truly doesn’t help us. The reality is that we are all capable of causing harm and we will cause harm. This doesn’t mean that we don’t take active steps towards mitigating harm. We can and must learn to recognize where we are fucking up, where we need to unlearn, and we must be accountable for our shit, whether that means going to therapy (if it’s accessible) or finding other ways to heal our trauma.
I’m drawn to queer villains because I can see parts of myself in them. During my teen and early adult years, I hurt people and I’m sure I harmed people. I used to feel so much shame and self-hatred about all of the things that I did to survive, which included prioritizing myself and my needs above those who wanted to love me by cheating on boyfriends (often with the boyfriends of my friends), lying and stealing from my dad, recklessly using substances. I used to feel like I should never talk about past. And since the callout, I have felt the impulse to hide away what happened, lest you see me as a villain too. What has led me to resist that impulse is the desire to hold space for the messiness of being a human in the world.
In her memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado talks about her love of queer villains and argues that “We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.” Because the truth is, she writes, “some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind.”
If we can stop framing one another as good guys and bad guys, if we can resist the impulse to dispose of the so-called villains, then I truly believe we’re practicing transformative justice. There is an ethics to opting out of relationality with those who’ve caused harm. One that we must reckon with as queers. I want us to hold space for moral complexity; I want us to build our capacity to see people do shitty, harmful things without judging them. I want to see us step into brave and challenging conversations with one another so that accountability, transformation, and healing can truly happen. Because anyone of us could be a Jenny or a Villanelle. Even in our worst moments, we all deserve care.
Gratitude: getting to facilitate two workshops on boundaries has been so nourishing for my heart and I’m so grateful to all of the folks who signed up to do that work with me; I’ve been connecting with two new humans who’re letting me set the pacing of our dynamic in ways that feel so life-giving; my cats, for all of the cuddles they insist on giving me on the regular; visiting Toronto and getting to see so many of my dear loved ones and doing many mundane things together like trips to IKEA.
Sadness: am still just a sad sack human right now. I’ve always been a pretty happy, excitable person, despite all of the shittiness and trauma I’ve lived through. Being sad feels like I’m not myself. I am trying to learn that sadness is a part of me and it needs to be held.
Joy: I’m one chapter away from finishing my book manuscript!!!; feeling invigorated by the thinking I’ve been doing for Queer Wounds and the possible post doc on the horizon; I’m not as sad as I was last month, or the month before that. Progress is happening little by little; made a care package to send to a human I’m getting to know and am remembering how much I love giving gifts.
Wanna learn more about transformative justice and/or up your skills in this arena? Rania El Mugammer is running a series in partnership with Free Up! that I’ve attended in the past and is SO GOOD! Free Up! is an 8 part abolition & transformative justice learning series where 100% of the ticket sales go to the Prisoner Emergency Support Fund.
The first workshop is “Intro to Transformative Justice: Beyond Punishment & the Carceral State.” You can get tickets here. And if you wanna check out the whole series, click here.
Very wise, thoughtful, feeling provoking words.
“While it is not the job of those who’ve been harmed to do so, the truth is that the best people to support us in being accountable are those who know us in some capacity.”
Wow. Where would I be if people who knew me and cared for me held me accountable? What if people had held those who harmed me accountable?
Who should I be holding accountable?
ah. yes. It is freeing to be humanized, in not being perfect. It feels liberating to admit "Yeah I've made some mistakes, I have harmed and hurt people, and I feel guilty about that, but Im also working on not repeating those actions."
The only thing that came up for me, which I'm not sure you addressed directly, is how once you've done the vulnerable thing of telling someone that they have hurt you, and it was received well, but they continue to repeat the harm, at some point maybe it is ok to opt-out. But I agree that we often just react to hurt and harm by shutting down and avoiding that person, when we could possibly grow and heal with them by turning towards connection with them.