Becoming an American Girl in the Season of the Witch

By The Bobby

“Perhaps signifying the holiday’s origins as a marking of the line between life and death, most of these pranks were ‘threshold tricks.’ Assaults on fences, gates, windows, and doorways were most the common.”
- Mark Alice Durant
"Glowing Turnips, Pointy Black Hats and Insomniac Aliens:
The Hybrid History of Halloween"

“When I look out my window, so many different people to be. And it’s strange. So Strange.”
-Donovan
"Season of the Witch"


1979: Chinese Princess*

My kindergarten’s indoor play area featured a painted cardboard house. A group of girls had crowded inside. Wondering what was going on, I started to walk through the cardboard door. “Sorry,” a girl said, “This house is just for princesses.”
“I am a princess.”
“You don’t look like one.”
“I’m a Chinese princess.”
“Well…This house is just for American princesses.”

1980: Princess Leia’s evil twin.

Courtney and I both wanted to be Princess Leia. Apparently in that whole far away galaxy there was only one girl. We remedied the problem by inventing her evil twin. She looked pretty much the same as Leia, but was, you know, evil.

1981: Chinese Princess Redux. The Empress of the Slide.

Courtney and I held court on the platform at the top of the slide. The entry was narrow and could only be accessed by one ladder. If you got to the platform first, it was easy to control who was allowed to get off the ladder and who had to inch their way back down to the sawdust. The fact that we weren’t letting everyone on made everyone want to try.


1982: Flapper (Nobody at Lincoln Elementary School knew what a Flapper was.)
1983: Cleopatra (Nobody at Lincoln Elementary School knew who Cleopatra was either.)

1984-86: Poodle skirt, saddle shoes, etc.

My mother, who came of age in the 60’s, was disgusted, but it was the only safe option during those ugly years. It was “what all the girls were wearing.”

1987: Criminals

Courtney and I shoplifted children’s felt cowboy hats from Payless. We wore them with black clothes and said we were criminals. Danielle was having a slumber party but we ditched it when we discovered that we would be expected to participate in chaperoned trick-or-treating. We wandered around and ended up at our old elementary school playground where a group of sophomores were drinking Boone’s Farm. They were only a year or two older than us, but it didn’t matter. We were in 8th grade and they were in high school – normally we didn’t exist to them. That one night though, they let us sit on the hood of their car and when we asked for a drink they didn’t roll their eyes. They just handed us the bottle. We took tiny sips and dreamed of high school.

1988: Plastic Masks and Peppermint Schnapps

1989: No Costume.

For a year, Amy and I lost interest in the rest of the world. We watched Star Wars or Hard Day's Night.

1990: No Costume. Bonfire

There was a bonfire and barn dance at Alan Calvert’s place. His mother had hired a DJ and made apple cider. Five or six of us snuck away, up the hill to the trailer where Alan’s much older brother lived. He was unusually generous with his stash, and we were sixteen and greedy. Steve asked Amy and me to ask for more pot. I told him to ask himself. He said that if I asked, Alan’s brother would be sure to say yes. I thought Steve was crazy, but tried it and, to my amazement, he was right. We spent the night running through the pixilated woods, laughing our heads off.

1991: No Costume. Bonfire II

Steve and Amy were away in college. The whole football team dressed as cheerleaders. They spent the day grabbing each other’s breasts and asses. I dreamed of graduation.

1992: Mushroom. (Inside and out).
1993: Seasons (Winter).

Spring lost one of her dresses in the back yard (she started with three). Summer laughed so hard she fell off the porch. Fall left early. Winter finally kissed Eric Matthews.

1994: No Costume. Amy puked in the cemetery.

1995: No Costume. The Halloween Debate.

Tim thought Halloween should be genuinely scary. People should dress as monsters, goblins, etc. – and they should really get scared. He was a vampire most years, then a zombie, and then stopped dressing up. I thought Halloween should be about blurring boundaries – trying on a different identity.


1996: Morton Salt Girl.

Tim was working nights. I went to a party comprised mostly of men in drag or dressed as puns (cereal killer) and women in “sexy” versions of stock characters: sexy witch, sexy cat, sexy nun, sexy strawberry shortcake. Brenda came for a little while and left without telling me after an hour. She later told me that she’d stolen some of my prescription sleeping pills and taken them with her beer. She thought it was funny.

1997: Homemade Carnival Masks.

Sky said that as she was walking to meet me, she was appalled to see four tween girls dressed as prostitutes. After a block or so she figured out that they were supposed to be The Spice Girls. We went to Portland hipster bars and pretended to have fun. The other girl, whose name I forget, got too drunk and kept falling on the sidewalk.

1998: Definitely no costume.

Tim and I had left Portland, but didn’t know yet that we were moving to Savannah. We were stranded in my hometown. I took him to the elementary school playground and we smoked cigarettes. I was terrified.

1999: The Ocean.

I was working for a costume designer in Savannah. Her shop was closed because part of the roof had caved in and she was involved in a lawsuit with the landlord. The shop was in an enormous, dilapidated warehouse. The lights didn’t work, but the phone was rigning constantly (it was Halloween). She gave me and Tim keys and flashlight and told us to take whatever we wanted.

2000 – 2002: No Costume.

We’d always turn the porch light off, but kids would ring the doorbell and demand candy anyway.

2003: No Costume. A Variety of East Village Bars.

It’s since become a common place, but Tim and I finally agreed about Halloween. Apparently, once we reached a certain age, Halloween became “Dress as Whores Day.” And not just “dress in a revealing or sexually provocative way” – people can do that anytime. We were among an unlikely group that included some thirty-something schoolteachers dressed in red vinyl bustiers and Lycra skirts. When we asked what they were they supposed to be, they paused and said, “uh. Vampires? Or witches?” Everywhere we looked there were throngs of grown men and women dressed, essentially, as whores. And it made perfect sense.

Viva Dia de las Putas!

Get Thee Behind Me Satan...

Because you make people nervous when I'm describing the holiday of holidays.

It's hard to even begin to describe all of the ginormous awesomeness of Halloween, the stabbiest, most spinster-y, good-time holiday. It can probably only be left to a list, a provisional one, to be added onto by Punch and Bobby.

1. Halloween has never made any sense. Other (lesser) celebration days have clear narratives, easily explained at every age. (Birth of baby Jesus; positive impact of trees; glorious, sad, but mostly glorious war.) All Hallow's Eve has a sketchy link to harvests or fall or the Old World, but the best part is no one really cares about meaning. It's basically just about fun, but the fun brought on by horrible, horrible fear and the vast and terrifying spirit world.

2. It is the one day a year when it makes total sense to wait for someone to approach you with your destiny, which you at first will not believe and deny vigorously, pointing out your normalcy, but will eventually accede that there were portents to your magical powers, though they were latent, and now you must reluctantly take up the mantle of fighting the Devil as you learn about the serious responsibility of shooting flames from your hands and also about the tenuous balance of good and evil.

3. 364 days a year, we are taught to fear: women who live alone with cats, people who look different, strangers, pirates, people who rise from the dead and can only survive by eating normal people's brains, the ushz. One day, one beautiful, beautiful day, we rejoice in them and revere them to such an extent that we dress our precious children as them, until the streets are filled with tiny spinster lesbians, dungeon & dragon enthusiasts, and sweet, sweet zombies. Until neighborhoods are teeming with miniature deviants, talking to people they don't know, clamouring to be rewarded for their queerness. And we do reward them with a bounty of food that usually comes with limits or warnings. So you see, we teach children that the archetypes and individuals we are taught to fear are worthy of emulation, are a good time, are sometimes them, and here we set the stage for later noble lessons on love and deconstruction.

stabbily yours, j

The Monkey's Paw

J's Halloween Legacy

Birth-1984: Cat. Not in sense of “pretending to be a cat for Halloween," literally wanted to be a cat, practiced whenever felt the need, ESPECIALLY in social situations with strangers, and momma forced others to accept, told to “dream big”. Also dressed in cat paraphernalia for halloween. Above is a picture of moi as a cat on Easter (in dress) and a couple years later, with cat toy and actual cat, Momma Kitty. Clearly, had some queer temporality going on pretty strong, where "queer" means "crazy nutball" and "temporality" means "complete disregard of conventional standards of appropriateness."

1985. The purple unicorn. That really should stand alone, like the cheese, but will go on: purple leotard (already in possession), lavender tights under the leotard, weird headpiece that tied under the chin, also purple, with a yellow horn on it. Horn dropped into eye—giant yellow phallus of doom. Went to school in this get-up. Am perhaps not lez, but instead gayest man on earth. Must rethink narratives.

1986. Trauma led me to want a real costume. At costume store, see giant banana, think is amazing, won't be made fun of like weird DIY unicorn year. (Please read that sentence again, especially the "won't be made fun of" juxtaposed with "giant banana." Go ahead.) Anyway, costume is SO expensive, like forty dollars, and Daddy says, "that's too much for a halloween costume." "Daddy, please, the purple unicorn, please." Daddy: "you'd have to wear it for several halloweens. You can't buy something for forty dollars that you only wear once." Me: "I would. I would wear it forever. Please. Please." Daddy: "ok, but I'm going to hold you to this promise." (In law, you aren't actually allowed to make contracts with minors, in a moment, you will see why.)

1987-1991. Banana Years. See close-up taken some time in grade school, notice how my are poking out in extreme way. Was a basically a teenager before released from the contract. The Banana got smaller and smaller until it was basically a banana crop top. Please see the close up of utter misery. Learned that Daddy is actually Devil as well as corporate lawyer, see now that these are not mutually exclusive as had been taught to believe. Finally gave banana costume to housekeeper hired late in our lives when she unearthed and got really excited and to me it was like a monkey paw.

1992-1998. Dressed as some version of old spinster, with an emphasis on ugly, loosely grouped together under Witch. Was determined to practice early for fate of dying alone.

All Hallow's: On Being the Wrong Kind of Person

1982-1990 Little Orphan Annie. Two main reasons for this: 1) it is cheap to put together – I am redheaded and already surrounded by dogs and other children in crappy clothes; 2) though still quite young, I already look like Halloween in a dress.

1991 Things Kansas made me do (part I). This year: bucktoothed old man mask, one of Grandpa's pipes, Dad's "I fought the lawn and the lawn won" t-shirt with pillow shoved under to look like an old man stomach. (This bricolage becomes a better Halloween strategy, if only nominally, when you're no longer in the 6th grade. Note: 1) how no one else seems to be dressed up; 2) that no one is looking at me, probably because I am terrifying; 3) the girl in the background holding a rifle.)

1992-2000 Nothing, explicitly. Implicitly, straight person and/or "girl." I think you’ll see that, year round, this is an enormous failure.

(1995 Exception: Headless Hillary Clinton, or Things Kansas made me do, part II. If dressing as an old man is one option for a budding Kansas lesbian with a man-body, then the other is a horrifying headless effigy of Hillary Clinton. Both costumes were meant as satire but ended up as a kind of self-mockery. (While the old man provoked nervous laughter, Headless Hillary made everyone afraid. But too afraid to say anything about it.) Perhaps this is too high-flown, however. Most likely I just found a bunch of crap in the basement and threw it together into something barely coherent. This nonchalance about dressing up gets me in trouble later when I partner with a girl who loves Halloween but lacks ambition. Her perspective, as I understood it, was that I pretty much ruined Halloween by thinking a person could just make something meaningful out of crap from a basement, and that my lassitude rubbed off, preventing her, year after year, from making that epic Medusa costume. References to Headless Hillary and girlfriend's copious wine consumption could not disrupt this narrative.)2001 The Pope. The only other interruption of my abstinence between 1992-2006. I was in love, and making an Episcopal mitre out of cardboard and felt meant getting to hang out at the crappy apartment of the girl I liked, who at that time still refused to sleep with me.

2002 The lost year I spent drunk in New Mexico. I have no idea what happened on Halloween. Probably something bad.

2003-2005 Trauma, of the relationship variety, by which I am punished for not being the right kind of Halloween person. (see 1995)

2006 In a vain – and hasty – attempt to make amends for being the wrong kind of person: Gene Shalit Joins the Navy (curly wig and eyebrows made of chest hair kit from Halloween Headquarters’ bargain bin, Navy uniform, wide-eyed innocence.) This costume, of course, only reinforces the point.

2007 Turns out I'm still the wrong kind of person.

2008 Ideas welcome.

-- Punch

Rumor Has It

In Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl and the accompanying CW TV show, the plot is book-ended by a blog written by an anonymous character who calls herself/himself “Gossip Girl” (GG). In the book, there are therefore two narrators—the narration provided by GG and the third-person omniscient narration of the “actual” story. GG starts and ends the books and provides sporadic commentary at the beginnings of some chapters.

The function of GG is not to move the plot or give the moral framing, and by “moral” here I mean whatever lesson or code the characters must understand. Instead, GG serves as a parody of the ponderous first person narration that permeates both young adult media and works targeted at Women (here, I mean whoever is assumed to occupy the marketing space that can be identified by “chick” as an adjective). In young adult novels intended primarily for Girls, this narrator turns inward, setting the emotional landscape that must be overcome or understood, as in Judy Blume’s Are you there God, it’s me, Margaret? which starts with an italicized diary-like commentary: We’re moving today. I’m so scared, God. In the chick oeuvre intended for Women, this voice-over functions more directly to set up what will be learned, as in voice-over for Sex and The City, which represented snippets of Carrie’s appalling column: “After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breath and reboot.” (Sidenote: in this episode, Miranda’s mother’s death is un-critically paralleled with Carrie’s computer crashing.) Carrie’s column owes much (sadly) to the saccharine meditations of The Wonder Years voice over: “All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners & change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak & hope. All the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us.”

In contrast, GG’s lineage is more directly linked to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, especially in her status as an simultaneous insider/outsider: “Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.” But although GG owes much to this style in form, she does not in substance—she is not the angsty masculine individual who smokes in the corner and rebels through whining (“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad”). She is gossip as a phenomenon, and as such is a reliably unreliable narrator, proclaiming statements that are later revealed as false or at least misleading by the third-person omniscient narrator. In an unexplained lead on her blog, GG proclaims: “S seen dealing on the steps of the Met” (37), referencing one of the leads, Serena van der Woodsen, who the third-person omniscient never describes dealing drugs in the story. But of course, what makes GG as gossip brilliant is that her narration is not concerned with reliability, but with stories qua stories, which in turn makes the narration unreliably reliable. GG meticulously reports sightings confirmed by the third-person omniscient; she is never seen to make up where or when or who, only why and what. Gossip here is the making of stories that are unhinged from ideas of truth, and therefore also from the lesson narration that this framing device mocks. Certainly, S was dealing, but in the sense of dealing with, the primary preoccupation of teen novels.

Here the stories of the anonymous GG are like Sedwick’s nonce taxonomy, ideas about people that are told once, made and un-made into “new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world” (from Epistemology of the Closet.) Nonce has several meanings: in technology, it is a number generated for a specific use, sometimes random, sometimes as a marker. Nonce here means “number used once” or “number once”. Outside of tech, nonce means “for now” or “for one purpose.” Gossip’s taxonomy, or ordering and hierarcherizing of the world, is not dependent on its reliability—that the shared information be true for always or for every purpose—it is inherently particular. Unlike the universalizing impulses of narration in chick and young adult genres, GG relies on this instance, often closing with “that’s all for now” (emphasis mine, 38, 117).

In defense of gossip, it is often suggested that gossip serves as an important method of information transmission among marginalized groups, and that it is devalued because it is identified with these groups and because the information passed on is resistant to dominant ideology. (There’s a logical fallacy with this reasoning: (a) gossip is identified with marginalized people therefore (b) its information must be resistant.) Certainly, though, this view has merit. When the power structure makes stories, they are called knowledge, and these stories reproduce and validate those in power. So it should come as no surprise that those devalued by this knowledge have their own sources and methods of knowledge that are in turn ridiculed and policed. And gossip does on occasion resist dominant ideology by the mere fact that it is sometimes about passing information about people illegible in the structure. That being said, certainly anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of what we mostly call gossip knows, it’s often one of the most effective means of policing difference and thus reinforcing power structures.

What Sedgwick says in defense of gossip is more nuanced, and ultimately, more descriptive than laudatory. She recovers gossip as a tool, sometimes the master’s, sometimes the slave’s, but one that receives devaluation because of where it is found and who is supposed to wield it, not what it does. She explains: “I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world. … projects precisely of nonce taxonomy.” Gossip therefore functions as process for negotiating an epistemology and an ontology of those authorized to use it.

GG’s narration represents examples of all of these descriptions of gossip: there’s a certain amoral grappling with who exists in the world of the Upper East Side, of what kinds of people make up the inside and what kinds of people this leaves on the outside. Sedwick’s description of gossip, of the precious, devalued arts, is beautiful, but Gossip Girl points to an additional trait, which I think contributes equally to its marginalization as a knowledge process and its perseverance. Gossip is fun. It’s super fun. In the sort of Derridean deconstruction of knowledge, it is essential to point out that it is privileged as serious. The aforementioned ponderous narrations that GG parodies therefore can claim access to knowledge only through some amount of seriousness. Freeing up knowledge from this particular hierarchical construction allows then for a breaking away from the idea of guilty pleasure. Gossip girl is already on to us; she makes this clear with her sign-off, proclaiming boldly: “you know you love me.” Yes, yes we do.

xoxo, J

A few words about Water Lilies...

a ponderous little French film about queer sex, deviance, and synchronized swimming (part I)

by Punch

Yesterday I saw a weird little French movie called Water Lilies. Roughly, Water Lilies is about teenaged sexuality, synchronized swimming, and obsession. (By virtue of being French, it is impossible to tell whether the insidious, abstracted violence of the film is of national or thematic origin. One often feels menaced by French films, so unlike American films in their pernicious silences, the odd cuteness of their suburbs, the foreignness of their women’s beauty.) I want to write about the film here, however, because it is queer, but also because it says something a little different about children’s sexuality than most coming-of-age films.

In American Pie, that epitome of teenaged sexual trauma, a desperate Jim Levenstein humps a warm apple pie and is caught by his parents (his father, presumably, understands Jim’s impulses and gives him a kind talking to, for all intents and purposes as if this is perfectly normal male, heterosexual behavior). In Water Lilies, Marie steals Floriane’s trash after their first night together. Back in the (apparently total) privacy of her room, Marie rips open the garbage bag, searching for some physical reminder of Floriane. She finds a browned, wizened apple core which, after only passing hesitation, she bites into and chews with a mixture of wonder and regret. 1

The abject as talisman and marker of (queer) obsession has many articulations, from the ABBA poo stolen and placed in a vial in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, to the urine stolen and put in a vial in Scott Heim’s In Awe, amongst others (see also, John Waters). (Also, see homophone, “vile,” and the poetically related “violate,” “inviolate,” and “violence.”) To preserve and/or ingest the abject is often the only way of being close with one’s desired object precisely because these talismans are leavings, excrements not to be missed or even discussed. They can be stolen and harbored with impunity.

In Water Lilies, there are no parents 2, and, therefore, no hysterical interventions (as in American Pie and other representations of teenage sexuality). But, more importantly, without parents there are no secrets and no hidden knowledge. Instead, there is the vaguely menacing prospect of boys’ sexuality (the closing shot of the movie makes this clear: the boys’ (nonsynchronized) swim team, their faces covered in what appear to be their own underpants, gyrate in half-speed under dancehall lights, performing acts of mock aggression against each other’s mostly naked bodies, while Floriane, eyes closed and face turned upwards, dances alone). But it is still a world of girls – girls who fight, who comment on each other’s bodies, girls who thwart each other’s advances, girls who fuck each other. Writer/director Céline Sciamma seems to suggest that it is not parents who regulate children, but themselves. The inmates are running the prison.

Which begs the question, as that phrase always has: Why? The easy answer is that that’s how norms work – we learn to regulate ourselves, become docile. But doesn’t queerness disrupt this idea? If norms worked, queerness wouldn’t. Water Lilies reminds us that there is always something left – shame, abjection, the wizened apple – after punishment, after regulation.



1 The apple remains a potent metonym for innocence lost. It means knowledge and deviance, a magnetic, mesmerizing dialectic. That its consumption also initiates expulsion from Utopia may explain its use in films about “growing up,” in which kids, through physical sex or a newly charged sexual landscape, move from the Eden of childhood to the dystopia of adulthood. Yet its use in Water Lilies and other films about queer desire suggests that it is also what is left, a remnant of sin – childhood, too, is dystopic. Marie’s secreted apple does not initiate her into a sanctioned maturity. Instead, it marks a fringe of childhood where policing fails. The classic symbol of knowledge and deviance is also a symbol of abjection, not because it initiates expulsion but because it marks it.

2 Literally, in the sense that no parents ever appear on screen. But they do exist in the characters’ lives. Floriane claims that she needs Marie to legitimately get her out of the house to meet a boyfriend, but as the film progresses this seems less a reality and more Floriane’s manipulation. The cinematically absent parents are of little concern to the teenagers, though they never comment on why this is the case. In other words, the film seems to deliberately avoid implicating parents or even to admit their influence. Unlike Jim’s parents in American Pie, who catch him doing something that can only be funny if he is caught (lest it turn into tragedy, like Floriane’s discarded apple), the parents of the girls in Water Lilies do not exist to catch their children in (decidedly more dangerous and compromising) acts of sexual deviance. What their children have learned to hide is not humiliation or confusion, but desire.