A UTOPIAN CURRICULUM PART FOUR: VOGUING

PART FOUR: VOGUING

Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

Illustration by Iara Silva

As I continue to write this Utopian Curriculum series, it feels important to address questions raised from previous essays. In online conversations and email exchanges around parts two (Black Panther) and three (Sultana’s Dream), a particular point raised was whether something can be truly utopian if it is only positive and ideal for a specific demographic. It is apt, then, to dedicate part four to the art form of voguing.

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More Than Just Blood: Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler

Angie Spoto

Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

Illustration by Iara Silva https: https://www.instagram.com/iiaraz_/

I hadn’t felt my baby move yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I confessed this to a friend in a café, who, bringing his hands together in front of his chest and clawing his fingers, said, ‘Yeah, it might feel, you know, like Alien.’ And his hands exploded outward, raining imaginary blood across our lattes.

My friend touched on a fear of mine: that having a baby would be like hosting an alien creature in my body. A fear no doubt inspired by my consumption of science fiction. Immediately, the prospect of pregnancy makes me think of the 1979 movie Alien, which undeniably plays out humanity’s pregnancy fears in the form of chest-ripping, murderous alien children. There’s also the ‘mystical pregnancy trope’: women in science fiction media are regularly forcibly or accidentally impregnated by aliens (Sarkeesian). This trope appears in Stargate SG-1, the X-Files, and Torchwood among other television shows and films.

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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Emily Miller

Edited by Carolina Palacios

Art by Cat Faulkner https://www.jellyarmchair.com/

“The situation’s a lot more nuanced than that!” shouts the series’ protagonist in the first season theme song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The Emmy, Golden Globe, and Critic’s Choice Award winning series focuses on highly successful and deeply unwell Rebecca Bunch, who, after running into Josh Chan, her ex-boyfriend from summer camp, decides to move across the country from New York City to West Covina, California, to pursue Josh again. Rebecca spends much of the first season attempting to both fit into Josh’s life and convince the people around her that there weren’t any ulterior motives in her moving to West Covina. Meanwhile, Josh struggles with his parents’ and girlfriend’s expectations of him, while trying to figure out Rebecca’s place in his life.

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Chewing Gum

Maygan Eugenie Forbes
Editing by Rianna Walcott

Art: ‘Relax Yourself’ by Olivia Twist

http://www.yesoliviatwist.com/

The first episode of Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum opens with Tracey staring longingly at the crotch of her righteous boyfriend whilst he prays away impure thoughts, a scene frequently intercut with a frenzied montage of Tracey in orgasmic throes with her lover. She is swiftly brought out of her fevered daydream and shoved back down to Earth, when her celibate partner ends the prayer with a clipped “Amen”. As she is leaving her boyfriend’s house, Tracey turns to the camera and says, “sometimes he lets me stay and watch him sleep, I could never do that though because when I sleep I get wet dreams.”

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Gilmore Girls

Nadia Mehdi
Editing by Vicki Madden

Art: ‘Young Mother Sewing’ by Mary Cassatt

Gilmore Girls is a charming, idyllic television show with a large millennial fan base. The series focusses on mother-daughter duo Lorelai and Rory and their lives in the quirky New England town of Stars Hollow. Lorelai conceived Rory as a teenager and fled both her boyfriend and her wealthy, overbearing parents to raise Rory alone whilst living and working as a maid at an inn. At the outset of the show, we find Lorelai reaching back out to her parents, who have never quite forgiven her for cutting them out of her life, to ask for a loan to pay for Rory’s new private school (Rory is an archetypal brainiac with ambitions of studying at Harvard). From there onwards the show explores themes of family, friendship, work, love, ambition and all the small things that add up to make a life. Viewers most often describe the dynamic between Lorelei and Rory as more like best friends than mother and daughter – which is in fact the way creator Amy Sherman Palladino originally pitched the show (Lockett 2015) – and the Gilmore girls do indeed support each other through their individual and shared problems as best friends would. But the show is also a more general exploration of women and their relationships of all kinds, good and bad.

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