hill / Sobande Look, Don't Touch

Reflections on the Freedom to Feel
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916637-07-8
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 26, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Inklings

What does the command 'look, don't touch' suggest about the (lack of) freedom to feel in society? layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande reflect on society's nurturing and obstructing of emotional expression, physical touch, and connectedness between different species and spaces. Through the music of feeling across genres from nu-metal to hip-hop, the spectacle of 'self-help' social media content, and powerful pop culture portrayals of (im)mortality and 'monsters', Look, Don't Touch moves beyond the language of 'being okay'. It embraces tenderness, dreaming, love, solidarity, messiness, release, and ultimately, feeling.

layla-roxanne hill is an independent writer, researcher + organiser, living + healing in scotland. she thinks + feels about many things, including anti-colonial struggle, care + belonging + the way our conditions move us to act. layla-roxanne is co-author/dreamer with francesca sobande of Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2022) + the freely available graphic novel + animation, Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us (2023). she is active in the trade union movement, holding elected positions within the bureaucratic machinery. layla-roxanne likes rabbit holes, finding peace + connection + to lift heavy. Francesca Sobande is a writer and researcher, who lives in Cymru (Wales). Her books include Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (University of California Press, 2024), Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 (SAGE, 2022), and The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Francesca is co-author/co-dreamer with layla-roxanne hill of Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2022) and the free graphic novel and animation Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us (2023). Her bylines include Disegno, Paste Magazine, and The Vinyl Factory. Francesca enjoys midnight skies and all things emo <3

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hill, Layla-Roxanne

Sobande, Francesca

Leseproben

Chapter 2: I’m Not Okay: On Emotions and Monsters My Chemical Romance at Stadium MK in Milton Keynes, May 2022. Photograph by Francesca Sobande <3 Emotions are felt and shared. They are chemistry – combustible and cooling. These include emotions expressed through and beyond verbal speech, facial expressions, and body language. This point is conveyed in 2022’s Sensory: Life on the Spectrum – An Autistic Comics Anthology, edited by artist and curator Bex Ollerton. Bringing together contributions from thirty autistic creators, the anthology addresses different sensory experiences, forms of communicating, and feelings of connection. It’s a creation that, with care, deals with the relationship between emotions and all things sensory. As alluded to in the previous chapter, despite the numerous ways that emotions emerge and are expressed, suggestions to “speak to someone” often dominate discourse about what to do if you don’t feel “okay”. Rarely does such advice account for the fact that “feeling okay”, and the sense of stability associated with it, is not relatable to all. For example, some ideas of “okayness” which frame intense feelings/feeling intensely as nothing but disruptive/destructive, can promote damaging ideas of emotional numbness and dismiss how people really feel – often, “not okay”12. Moving Beyond “Okayness” Dictionaries are a patchy place to start when trying to decode and decipher the details of words and their meanings. At the same time, dictionaries are a source of information about how norms and idea(l)s are expressed through the professed definitions of words. A case in point is what is revealed by looking up “okay” and its claimed origins. In the online Oxford English Dictionary, the word “okay” is explained with the use of terms such as “satisfactory”, “well”, “all right”, and “all correct”. There are also more lukewarm expressions such as “acceptable” and “adequate”. Fundamentally, the idea of being okay relates to a sense of “suitability” and “sufficiency”. To be okay is not to be glowing or to feel grand, but it’s also not to be mired by grimness or ground down in acutely distressing ways. Maybe this makes “okayness” a sort of non-state – a nothingness rather than enoughness. Are you really “okay”? Societies are filled with messages telling you who is, and how to be, okay. In this chapter we question what it means to (not) feel/be okay, when so much is not right in the world – from the genocidal actions of governments to pervasive health inequalities and the many violences of capitalism. How can, and why should, anyone feel “okay” during all of this? This book is not a fatalistic account of life or an advocation for anguish. We aren’t disregarding needs and desires to feel and be in ways that involve much more than hollowed out ideas of “wellness” which are pushed by corporations. Instead of rejecting the pursuit of full-hearted feelings – be they intimacy, ecstasy, liberation or peace, we call into question the very idea of “okayness” and its detrimental impacts. There needs to be much more than the glib refrain that “it’s okay not to feel okay”, for people to be materially supported in addressing the struggles in their life and the structural causes of them. While recognising the limitations of our own thoughts on all of this, and without framing ourselves as “experts”, we consider how certain ideas of “okayness” are constructed and contested. We do this as part of how we think through and with inter-connected emotions and experiences that are often treated as conflicting: hope and horror, joy and grief, desire and disgust, and – guided by the work of Lama Rod Owens – love and rage.13 We share thoughts on this from a place that affirms the vital work of those who encourage young people to express when they don’t feel okay. In Cardiff (Wales), this includes Head Above The Waves – an independently run, not-for-profit, mental health organisation, raising awareness of depression and self-harm in young people: “Self-harm affects around 1 in 12 young people, yet it remains an issue people struggle to handle, talk about, and understand. We aim to change this.”14 We also acknowledge the work of Mychal Threets – a US librarian whose viral social media posts and videos include supportive messages for children (and adults) about mental health, reading, and self-expression, which is another testament to the enduring legacy of the spirit of children’s TV show Reading Rainbow (1993–2006). As part of our discussion of related matters, we reflect on the societal makings of “madness”, including how some notions of “okayness” can be maddening by sustaining a status quo that polices and pathologises people. Before elaborating on the pretense of “okayness” and what may be gained by letting go of it, we focus on the (Black) Gothic – namely, the AMC TV show Interview with the Vampire, and its engagements with emotions, the erotic, and (in)sanity. But first, let’s talk metal and monsters. Of Metal and Monsters While writing Look, Don’t Touch we watched, listened to, felt, read, reflected on, remixed, released, and returned to many ideas, images, and imaginings. These included representations of gothicness, black metal and nu-metal music, and monsters. Edited by Daniel Lukes and Stanimir Panayotov in 2023, the collection black metal rainbows details the depths and divergences of a music genre/subculture known for its heaviness. Lukes and Panayotov remark that “[s]onically, it can be harsh (it can also be very soft and tender).”15 When thinking about gothic horror and its atmospheres, we’re reminded of such words which relate to how harshness and softness can exist together, wholistically. Much like how black metal is a terrain of both the transgressive and the tender, the gothic can be an outlet for hope and horror. Based on the influential 1976 book Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, the gothic horror TV show of the same name (2022–present) has captured hearts, drawing us into the immortal lives of vampires who burn with desire, and some of whom also desire to burn. This is a world where you both love and bite deeply. The writing that led to this show started out as a short story by Rice, which she turned into a book, months after the bereavement of her young daughter. While Interview with the Vampire is a gory story, it’s also gloriously tender in its treatment of subjects such as intimacy, shame, kinship, “madness”, and the raw magnetism of desiring beings who find each other (again and again and again…). Unlike the film Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), which was also based on Rice’s book, the TV show does not simply skirt around themes of queerness which were part of the original source material. Also, unlike the book, the TV show foregrounds Black queerness, as poignantly explored through the characters of both Louis and Claudia (discussed in more detail later). Building on the affection and eroticism that is present on the pages of Rice’s book, the TV show Interview with the Vampire portrays climactic experiences of intimacy, drawing parallels between the referenced idea of “un petit coup” (the little drink [of blood]), and the unspoken but well-known concept of “la petite mort” (the little death) – a French euphemism for post-orgasm. Across two seasons (so far), the show traverses experiences of romance, death, sexuality, race, gender, age(ing), and love. It’s an outlandishly enthralling portrayal of beings who are, to draw on the 2005 lyrics of indie band Bloc Party, known for having a “taste for blood”. In an introduction to a 2008 edition of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, reflecting on its cultural impact, author Audrey Niffenegger writes: “It’s hard to imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Interview with the Vampire”. Expanding on the significance of Rice’s tale, Niffenegger claims: “Every era creates the monsters it needs”16 – society paints certain ideas and people as “evil”, “ferocious”, and “unknowable” to maintain the power of others who are positioned as “pure”, “friendly”, and “familiar”. For example, in a crucial account of “The (Un)Changing Nature of Constructions of South Asian Muslim Women Post-9/11”, Maryam Jameela explains, “[o]ne particular figure popular in horror and fantasy genres that use monsters to work through white anxiety is that of ghosts, particularly in relation to how trauma is processed and moved on from. Ghostly apparitions in fiction have a long history of representing a past trauma, or requiring action in order to exercise them and their unfinished business.”17 Similarly, portrayals of vampires can voice such sentiments. Characters in the TV show Interview with the Vampire reflect an amalgamation of monsters needed at the time the book was written (1970s) and those conjured up in response to the crises of contemporary times (2020s), including forms of contagion and (lack of) physical intimacy during the...