You already know this story. Despite backlash, those in power seem determined to frame AI as a net social good. Moving beyond the language of productivity and optimization, the technology is instead often lauded as a catalyst for equality, justice, and a truly democratized internet. Last year, half-baked attempts to call genAI use a “new glass ceiling” circulated online after research indicated that women use it less frequently than men in the workplace. Discourse routinely breaks out about whether it’s ableist to critique LLM use. In Canada, “nation-building projects” and AI expansion have been promoted under the banner of “Canadian sovereignty,” given recent U.S. aggression. At the 2026 Liberal National Convention, Mark Carney stated that “Our goal is AI for All, AI governed by Canadian values, accountable to Canadians, and serving Canadians.” “Done right,” he continued, “AI in health care means shorter wait times. AI in education means every child is met where they are.”

Workplace equality, accessible technology, shorter medical wait times, and personalized education are good things. How nice of someone to say so! Thank goodness this divine technology dropped into our laps, offering a miracle cure for hitherto unsolvable problems!1 Of course, it is never the right time for climate policy – far better to build more, to care for our women/disabled people/children/other marginalized communities through the power of AI, to protect ourselves against the threat of invasion or obsolescence on the world stage. Or something.

Within such discussions around AI, bodies are rhetorical ragdolls flung from topic to topic, abstracted figures in need of protection by a benevolent state. (Not in need of expanded social services or more radical socioeconomic change, though – never that!) I am tired of my own sick body’s invocation in discussions that couldn’t care less about it. This body does not want to be used to justify technonationalism, or climate denialism, or the supposed successes of the free market. Personally, this body wants socialism and the spontaneous combustion of all data centres.

Nearly two decades ago, Mark Fisher characterized capital as “an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombiemaker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” More than anything, I think, AI lets us cover our rotting flesh with band-aids.

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These layers upon layers of capitalist realism have left me in a persistent state of agitation. Reckoning with the environmental, labour, or disability politics of AI is a frustrating project: depending on your vantage point, it might seem unbearably futile or simple. Still, AI has come up repeatedly in my own work over the past few years, which I have spent in K-12 writing centres and college classrooms. After speaking to other educators, talking to students about the importance of literacy, seeing anti-AI protests go unnoticed, watching my bitcoin-loving mayor proclaim that he has “eleven AI agents running right now, doing… a lot of [his] work in the background” (a statement he later walked back), noticing other communities’ steamrolled attempts to stall or prevent data centre construction, being bashed over the head with the idea that AI is a “new frontier” in Canada, witnessing the decimation of entire communities each summer, hearing that data centre construction will nonetheless revolutionize accessibility and labour, and learning to teach in this environment, I find myself a little less concerned about stating the obvious, a little more adjacent to my breaking point.

In the simplest terms, Canada is stubbornly attached to neoliberalism, to implicit assurance that we will never stoop to America’s level – framing that deliberately obscures the shared struggle against our ruling classes, against climate change, against fascism, against technonationalism, against the commodification of land, healthcare, water, and housing. When Trump’s re-election made the crises within liberalism impossible to ignore, Canada’s counterreaction (predictably) produced Carney, who claimed to offer a liberal solution to liberalism’s fundamental brokenness. When it becomes impossible to insist that the economy is good, actually, or that the job market is strong – when liberal crises are no longer obscured, it becomes easier to entertain alternatives. Unafraid to address the fictitious nature of the rules-based international order, Carney named what past centre-left leaders failed to, avoiding Biden-esque assertions that things would simply return to normal. Our crises were real, he assured the public, and we can change them through… doing very little. And so, as previously-disenchanted voters rallied around Zohran Mamdani and finally rejected framing of socialist boogeymen, I watched Carney govern as a cuddly conservative.2 It’s difficult to change things without changing things. It’s also difficult to change things without spending money. Emerging at the perfect time, AI appeared on the horizon as an “investment” in Canada’s future, an alternative to spending money on boring things like ensuring people have enough money to live. (Of course, Carney is spending money – massive amounts of it! – particularly on the military.)

Within and outside Canada, AI is often positioned as a miracle cure for inequality. Sam Altman conveniently claims the technology will help “[fix] the climate,” revolutionize education and medicine, and bring “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today.” The Trump administration, for its part, is less on board with such visions of change: its AI Action Plan calls on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change,” even as it promises to “increase the standard of living for all Americans” with the technology. For governments like Trump’s and Carney’s, AI offers a band-aid solution for problems that have long gone unaddressed.

This contrasting, malleable rhetoric around AI is particularly important to note. Like a tech bro Barbie doll, AI tells us we can be anything, make anything, do anything. It will revolutionize the world, we are told, but not in a woke way. Or… sometimes in a woke way? It was built through worker exploitation in the Global South but will somehow end exploitation and bring prosperity. It runs on massive quantities of energy but will somehow solve the climate crisis. This technology depends on contradiction, but it targets fundamental political gaps.

Again, workplace equality, plans to end climate change, accessible technology, higher wages, shorter medical wait times, and personalized education plans are undeniably good things. When AI is framed as the only path forward, it obscures alternatives as well as the root problems demanding solutions in the first place. When our discourse focuses primarily on the ethics of individual AI use (ex. “Is it valid for [insert person] to use AI?”), we risk missing the bigger picture.3

AI creates individualized one-stop solutions for problems that can and should be addressed systemically. Some teachers, being woefully underpaid and overworked, use AI to outsource their class prep, lesson plans, report cards, or stock feedback when marking. While this problem could be addressed through collective bargaining, many employers refuse to discuss bargaining proposals, reject them outright, or drag their feet through years of negotiations. Problems like these need urgent solutions but often involve much longer timelines. (When I joined my first union, I was utterly shocked to learn that employers can just… express unwillingness to discuss proposals. Unless union pressure convinces them otherwise, the conversation ends there.) I can see, then, how AI might lessen the burden in the meantime, even as workers actively put pressure on their employers.

Several problems arise from in-the-meantime AI use, of course. I have spoken to student teachers who are actively encouraged to use AI – either by superiors or instructors – for their class prep in order to speed up the process.4 At what point does this become a problem of individual failure (i.e. taking too long to mark when one could increase efficiency with AI) instead of collective demand (i.e. class sizes must decrease)? Will workers even want to put pressure on their employers if a band-aid solution is available? I have watched in frustration as colleagues and superiors have given up very quickly – people who, two to three years ago, had harsh critiques of the neoliberal workplace and seemed eager to change it.

This is how it often goes:

• Not enough teachers in the classroom? Use AI.

• Can’t afford a graphic designer/editor/songwriter/copy editor/marketer/model to help promote your work? Use AI.

• Need a side hustle but can’t produce content fast enough for the attention economy? Use AI.

• Too frustrated or perfectionistic to hone your writing/art/music/other artistic skills and bring your creative vision to life? Use AI.5

• Can’t afford a therapist? Use AI.

• Don’t have the mental energy to make grocery lists for your growing family after work? Use AI.

• Not enough time to complete your tasks at work? Use AI.

• Too busy to write papers between classes and work? Use AI.

• Long healthcare wait times? Use AI.

What should be understood as a labour issue – a doctor or teacher shortage, a volatile job market, etc. – is reduced to a mere lack of technology. These problems aren’t unsolvable, of course. Canada’s doctor shortage, for one, is largely due to its limited medical residency spots, which are government-funded positions. Increasing medical school admission means nothing if students don’t get matched with a training program, and such positions have not kept up with population growth.

It seems nonsensical to separate each of these crises, to treat them as discrete problems in need of digital solutions. The teacher shortage should be intertwined with other forms of education reform. Free education is itself an accessibility goal. When AI is framed as the magical cure for inaccessibility, we pave over the major problems and needs within our education system at a time when we should be dedicated to mass literacy. Disabled students do need support, but AI often promises to help them succeed in spite of understaffed schools instead of making sure schools are staffed in the first place.

Still, the fantasy of freeing disabled people with AI appears in our political imagination, a tantalizing mirage. I mean, how can you critique something produced to help disabled people? Isn’t that ableist? Such questions have fostered the intertwinement of accessible technology with the defense industry, which have a long history together. In Canada, AI is already most frequently invoked in discussions around defense: Carney’s LNC speech announced that his “new Defence Industrial Strategy will catalyse half a trillion dollars of investment6 to build Canadian industry from Aerospace to AI, while creating over 125,000 new jobs.” This is not new. For Liz Jackson and Rua Williams, the “wheelchair-to-warfare pipeline” describes the creation of technology which “might seem like it’s for disability, but then it becomes extrapolated almost immediately into some kind of carceral or warmaking technology.” Often, this is because machine learning, robotics, and data science research funding is wrapped up either in the military or in disability-adjacent technology. As Williams suggests,

“you see many projects that are robotics for disability, where the researchers themselves don’t really have any kind of relationship or even interest in the disability or disabled people themselves… And so disability becomes this context in which anything that you make is unassailable and is like above any critique, because it’s for the benefit of disabled people. But the actual practical end state of that research has nothing to do with something that could actually be integrated into somebody’s life. And some of that is just because of the medical industrial complex, but most of it is just because it’s completely impractical and divorced from any kind of disabled leadership or interest.”

None of this is to say that this assistive technology is useless. On the contrary, its usefulness is of central importance – it must be constantly invoked as proof that capitalism breeds innovation.7 Again, though, focusing on these band-aid fixes – assistive tech that helps solve problems for few now, rather than for many later, or assistive tech steeped in surveillance, such as Meta glasses – denies the fundamental truth that we all deserve better solutions, that this political economy depends on disablement and debilitation at home and abroad, that ending healthcare inequality means ending capitalism.

Also, do disabled people even want this? Has anybody stopped to ask? Yes, as it turns out: in a recent Simon Fraser University survey, 85% percent of physically disabled respondents conveyed that they were “more concerned than excited about AI,” and 45% expressed “major concern” towards the use of AI in education. What about women? In “Women Worry, Men Adopt: How Gendered Perceptions Shape the Use of Generative AI” (2026), an Oxford article exploring the so-called “AI glass ceiling,” Fabian Stephany and Jedrzej Duszynski find that “Concerns about mental health, data privacy, environmental sustainability, and labour-market impacts all dampen women’s personal adoption of GenAI tools more strongly than men’s.” They conclude, then, that “interventions that address AI risk perceptions—for example, by reducing pessimism about AI’s societal impact—might produce substantial increases in women’s usage, and do so without a comparable male-skewed boost, potentially narrowing the inequitable gender divide in GenAI adoption.” Such logic is frequently replicated in corporate settings. Instead of concluding, perhaps, that such concerns are rational, this thinking frames women as anxious and at-risk of falling behind. As writes, “The solution here is not to encourage women to ‘lean in’ (yet again) and use just as much AI in their day-to-day lives and work as men do. The solution is for the rest of the world to take women’s caution and the concerns of other marginalised groups seriously.” After all, the technology, as puts it, “has easily been coopted as yet another weapon in the arsenal of a violently patriarchal society.”

The SFU study focused on respondents from British Columbia, while the Oxford study focused on women in the UK, so I’ll resist making too many generalizations. Still, it’s interesting that paternalistic claims about gender and disability are used time and time again, leading to time-consuming and counterproductive debates about empowerment for groups that might not even want this.

Am I totally against AI? Probably not. I understand that there are useful applications.8 Some socialists are fighting for collective ownership of the technology or public accountability, which would certainly be better than no safeguards. I certainly don’t think genAI can be ethical in a capitalist economy, and I also don’t think it can sustain itself without exploitation. (North American data centres, after all, make visible labour that has always existed; OpenAI’s data annotation and content moderation would not be possible without exploited labour from the Global South.) Regardless of my actual feelings towards the technology, I think the pseudo-liberatory rhetoric around AI is insidious, frustrating, and like absolute acid against the kind of solidarity needed to ever change things.

I won’t attach a comprehensive step-by-step proposal for the complete upheaval of Canada’s political system here, but I’m frustrated that incessant, ostensibly-inclusive pro-AI rhetoric is being used to justify extractive policies. I wish I had a quick rebuttal, so this is mine:

It can be agonizing to keep hoping for change. I understand why people are doing what they need to do in the meantime, especially in cases where forgoing AI might literally come with a cost.

Even so, a crip Marxist-feminist perspective should hold that these technologies are presently against workers, are capitalizing on inclusive language in their mad scramble for profitability, are intertwined with violent systems of exploitation, and are framed as solutions for systemic injustice experienced by the most marginalized among us. Our task as disabled consumers/community members/women/workers/ leftists interested in justice is to reject this messaging, focus on shared needs, and look for collective solutions instead of succumbing to enchantment by technology that promises to raise us up in a broken world. The goal is to destroy the problems and gaps that these companies capitalize on and claim to solve. The goal is a world that doesn’t produce these problems in the first place. Band-aids are no match for rotting flesh.

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“The motor cars have all gone wrong. They are queer. They are not doing what they were designed to do when they were turned out of the factories.”

– Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (ca. 1914-1918)

Late this summer, I got concussed, which meant I had to drastically reduce my screen time. Perhaps it’s just that the physical pain of my screen-induced headaches has formed a negative association with the online world, but my accidental soft digital detox has instilled in me a sense of deep despair and alienation whenever I engage with social media for more than a few minutes at a time. Opening TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or Substack often triggers a kind of out of body feeling – the same one I felt during a 10th-grade health scare, during which I thought I had a brain tumour and so spent several days deeply disturbed at the smallness of everything I cared about – alongside this sense of mounting alarm at the sheer volume of slop and discourse and affiliate links, at how quickly we got here, at my inability to pinpoint the moment we started sliding into this, at how it’s all accelerating, hurtling towards an unclear end.

I generally try to refrain from techno-pessimism; I want to believe that things can get better, and “phones bad” conversations often feel too individualistic, too resigned, too easy in their directionless hopelessness. Despite how I want to respond, though, I still can’t think my way out of this sense of mounting despair and alarm, so I am attempting to exorcize it through ridiculousness here. Anyway, my brief time away from the online world crystalized the frog-in-a-boiling-pot-ness of it all. Then Taylor Swift released her latest album.

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The Life of a Showgirl has not been well received (for good reason – the best words to describe the album, I think, are “bizarre” and “bad”). I have only seen negative reviews and jokes about how awful it is, but I do feel that its strange, banal horror is interesting in its own right. (Maybe that’s just the brain damage talking.)

I haven’t identified as a “Swiftie” since I was a child, but her earliest albums do still hold a special place in my heart. The Taylor Swift songs of my youth made me curious about love. I was eager to understand the melodrama and ecstasy she sang about – so eager that I would try forcing myself to feel the gravity and nuance of situations I could barely grasp, lying on my bed or staring at the car window and casting myself as the romantic lead of each messy love story she described. I imagined screaming at future partners in the rain before making up, or holding someone’s hand for the first time, or yearning endlessly. These early songs made the missteps and mess of young adulthood seem beautiful, a strange future to look forward to instead of dread.

When I listened to “Eldest Daughter,” the fifth track on The Life of a Showgirl, I felt none of that – it contains no future, no big emotion. But the song is also deeply mesmerizing in its awfulness, and shallow digs fail to capture the utter weirdness of it all. The effect of the song is far more interesting than what Swift was actually trying to say, and I feel like I’ll go crazy if no one else understands this fever dream.

The title itself marks a shift for Swift. Much like “former gifted kid,” the “eldest daughter” has become an online folk category with its own mythologized identity. Somewhere between now and its 2017 coinage,1 the term shifted from meme to earnest label to something in between, with users invoking it to describe the gendered expectations placed on firstborn girls. With their focus on burnout, trying too hard, feeling uncool, and overthinking, several folklore songs have been adopted into the eldest daughter canon organically. Such is the typical pattern of Swift’s reception: fans claim her songs as anthems for particular groups (“this one is for the thought daughters!” or “this one is for the overlooked middle children!” or “this one is for the girls with religious trauma,” they might say). “Eldest Daughter,” conversely, was designed for the canon, offering an explicit take on the discourse.

Normally, pop stars sit blissfully above the dizzying churn of online micro-identities; artists who invoke such terms are typically new, young, and chasing virality as proof of potential in a hostile industry. “I just wrote a song for the eldest daughters!” is the language of TikTok, where creating your own conversation often feels riskier than tethering yourself to an existing one. When you have as much cultural power as Swift, why do the same thing? Why enter the world of memes and discourse most of us want to escape? Such questions frame the rest of the song.

The first time I heard “Eldest Daughter,” I had just finished crying over my recovery, which has been frustrating and unpredictable. Since the concussion, I have struggled more with concentration, word-finding, gathering my thoughts, and speaking on the spot, which has been a massive blow as someone whose work currently revolves around reading, writing, and teaching. I listened to the first several songs as I got ready for bed, seeking distraction in the ecstatic feeling I got from listening to Fearless as a child. The familiar, nostalgic chords of “Eldest Daughter” hit me as I removed mascara from my puffy eyes, providing a welcome break from the first four disappointing, upbeat songs. Then Swift started singing. I listened to the whole song in frozen astonishment, stunned by the jaw-droppingly bad lyrics. No song has ever made me gasp out loud in (delighted?) horror like this. The whole process broke something in my brain, I think, elevating my despair to new heights. I think it might also be the defining song of our era.

“Eldest Daughter” captures the mindlessness, cringe, emptiness, and quiet alarm permeating culture right now. The opening cords are simple and pensive, invoking a sound akin to “New Year’s Day” or “White Horse.” The lyrics, however, feel wildly removed from the worlds that produced Reputation or Fearless: “Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered ‘til they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot / Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments / Every single hot take is cold as ice,” Swift sings in a defeated tone. Hearing a popstar mention “trolling,” “memes,” and “hot takes” worsened the pit in my stomach – the same pit that forms whenever I stumble across heated discourse on mundane disagreements or meet people who speak in Twitter quotes. It is a pit of contamination, a claustrophobic reminder of the internet’s creeping grasp on all aspects of life. It is a sudden awareness of something weird, to borrow from Mark Fisher, of something so strange, odd, and wrong that should not exist here. I want it out of me, I want to stop craving it, and I want it to stop feeling familiar. I want someone to rip off my skin and get it out.

Here, though, Swift paints a portrait of a thoroughly detached digital landscape – one in which nothing is new, funny, or sincere. This is a landscape full of slop, and everyone is complicit in creating it. This, of course, is itself a cold take; think pieces about unoriginality, apathy, and nonchalance abound. Though Swift is still attached to the “uniquely uncool girl with no chill” label, artists like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX have been responding to a genuine desire for mess and vulnerability in our culture, stepping into the gap. What does Swift do with this perceived descent into slop, though? She gives in: “I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage,” she laments in the chorus shortly after, creating what feels like a 2017 parody of a Taylor Swift song. The self-parody seems intentional: as @midnightstrack2 jokingly noted on Twitter, these lines form a cursed parallel with the chorus of “White Horse,” the fifth track on Fearless (“I’m not a princess / And this ain’t a fairytale”). Put them in the same key and the ironic “savage/bad bitch” line sits a third above “princess/fairytale,” harmonizing with the more earnest, heartbroken drama beneath it. The juxtaposition underscores just how much time has passed, just how distant Fearless feels. Rather than trying to shift the musical landscape, Swift succumbs to the staleness, meaninglessness, and brainrot she critiques, desecrating her old sound through a kind of meta-slop in the process.

Despite my general aversion to nostalgia, I do find myself yearning for the old internet, for a time when online culture was novel and stupid and uncool to discuss in public. Romanticizing childhood is frequently unproductive, but it’s what Swift next reaches for too. In a relatively jarring shift in tone, she recalls a scene from her youth: “You know, the last time I laughed this hard was / On the trampoline in somebody’s backyard / I must’ve been about eight or nine / That was the night I fell off and broke my arm.” The song’s opening cultural diagnosis fades completely into the background, making room for a more personal note. The memory is recounted hazily, however, as the “someone” Swift played with is lost to time. Despite the fuller chords beneath this verse, the image of life and play feels less real than the opening bitterness. The idea of remembering a hate tweet or meme more clearly than the experience of breaking your arm as a child is deeply unsettling, and I am struck by the usernames that stick in my mind instead of the names of my old favourite teachers – people I swore I’d never forget. Just as we adjust to the subtle horror of this verse, though, we are jolted back to the intense cringe of hearing Taylor Swift say “I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage.”

With a series of memories flashing before us, the bridge is full of yearning: “We lie back / A beautiful, beautiful time-lapse / Ferris wheels, kisses, and lilacs / And things I said were dumb / ‘Cause I thought that I’d never find that / Beautiful, beautiful life that / Shimmers that innocent light back / Like when we were young.” For the first time in the song, the chords are building towards something, seeking resolution – but it barely comes before we return to the cringe of the chorus again. Her refrain of “I’m never gonna leave you out” gradually morphs into “I’m never gonna leave you now,” which feels less like the tender reassurance Swift intended and more like a threat. We are stuck with her, the long outro seems to affirm, caught in stasis much like “Eldest Daughter.”

Ultimately, the song serves as an accidental cautionary tale. When I listen to it, I feel a desperate urge to change things, to resist succumbing to meta-slop or locating hope solely in the past. It isn’t every day that you find a song so bad that you’re pushed to rethink your whole existence, so that’s something!

It has been said that we live in deeply embarrassing times. These days, my embarrassment is tinged with horror. This form of horror-embarrassment is in small things, as their smallness makes them more alarming.2 These include: seeing a woman on the train ask ChatGPT if she’s having a medical emergency, even as it insists it can’t give out clear-cut medical advice; my mayor posting genocide-denial tweets and bitcoin ads back to back; being told that my job should be taken over by AI; billionaire pop stars acting like underdogs in the music industry; politicians posting memes; dead podcaster memorial merch; getting concussed and missing Twitter. When did this happen? When did things all go wrong?

Honestly, “Eldest Daughter” makes me hesitant to answer those questions or indulge my horror further. Despite its chilling emptiness, the song also finds comfort in collectivity, which does feel like the only antidote to the nihilistic horror-embarassment of the internet. Whenever I get voice messages from my friend in Paris, or march alongside strangers, or see everyday acts of care, it’s hard to believe that we’ve gone all wrong just yet.

Recent reads that didn’t leave me with horror-embarassment:

• “Use Your Words,” by

• Look Ma, No Hands: a Chronic Pain Memoir, by Gabrielle Drolet

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Last week, I missed a meeting and didn’t have to lie about why.

When dealing with any kind of mental or physical health issue, you quickly learn that some truths are considered too unprofessional to tell. Nobody wants to receive an email, I’m told, that says, “Dear so and so, I can’t come in because I’m lying in the dark on the verge of tears with the lowest energy I have had all week, and if I get up, leave my apartment, and deal with the temperature dysregulation, noise, lightheadedness, and stress that will come from standing up and going outside (where I will probably need to stand on the bus for an hour because it’s impossible to find a seat at this time of day), I worry that I will either pass out or experience a full brain shutdown. I’m not sure if it’s a full flare-up or if I’ll be better tomorrow. All the best, DJ!”

For someone with a different body, this might not seem like a coherent narrative; it produces a disappointingly unsophisticated mental image, its spaces and sensations all muddled. “Dear so and so, I am sick today,” is more cohesive. It’s simple, effective, legible.

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Last week, though, I told the truth. The person with whom I was meeting was also disabled; upon receiving my email, they wished me well, expressed solidarity, and met me with kindness and understanding. There is no need to steal time or access, it seems, if both are freely given in the first place. There is no need to force myself into a flattened, well-worn script of legibility if my words resonate, if they find a reader who already knows them well.

Disability — including learning disabilities, chronic illness, and mental illness — is often made legible through narrative. On one side of the spectrum, disabled people become abstracted, forced to live on in “heartwarming” tales of miracle cures, “motivational” accounts of depressed geniuses with supercomputer brains, or “inspirational” Facebook videos of people doing “normal” activities with mobility aids. On the other side, disabled people appear as attention-seeking fakers, holy fools, or signs of diminishing standards.

These archetypes and narratives show up in fiction, overheard conversations, and, perhaps most inescapably, the news. Over the last few months, several U.K. media outlets have blamed “sickfluencers” for contributing to the rising number of chronically ill youth in Britain. A piece for the Telegraph suggested that online chronic illness communities are perpetuating benefits fraud, with users encouraging “those with long-term illnesses to apply for disability benefits, or even ‘hack’ the system to obtain welfare payments.” Miriam Cates, a former Conservative MP in Britain, suggested that social media was encouraging “worklessness” in young people:

“It is very concerning that some social media influencers are seeking to normalise worklessness and even advise people on how to be successful in claiming more sickness benefits. Of course if people are genuinely too sick to work, they must be supported. But creating a culture that makes it easy to opt out is bad for young people and bad for our economy.”

Just last week, Trump claimed that the FAA’s “diversity push” has led to hiring people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions,” so the recent DC plane crash should be thought of as an event which “tragically underscores the need to elevate safety and competence as the priority of the FAA.” (There is still no evidence that anyone involved in the crash was disabled.)

These are all narratives, stories1 crafted to explain recent events by throwing disabled people under the bus. On my worst days, they leave me feeling exposed, exhausted, hopeless, and eager to perform wellness, to listen to the medicalized voice commanding me to need nothing and to push heroically through. As with most products of the medical-industrial complex, of course, these internalized thoughts come at a cost — afternoons of performative wellness often mean evenings spent in horizontal silence.

Opposition to K-12 and university accommodations typically invokes the “real world” as a site of natural inaccessibility, a place where accommodations are never given. The first time I saw a professor speak candidly about their disability and access needs, however, a counternarrative began taking shape. Though one nice interaction over a cancelled meeting or a conversation about access needs obviously will not change the cold, uncaring systems around us, both became welcome reminders of the “real world’s” mutability.

As rumours of CDC censorship predict cuts to “gender ideology” research, “accessibility programs,” and other initiatives under the DEI umbrella, it feels more necessary than ever to preserve queer and crip2 knowledge production.

When I began my search for conversations around disability narratives, I noticed that a wide range of popular media criticism tended to focus on whether or not a given representation was problematic. While such conversations can be productive, their social media-ified counterparts often leave me feeling hollow, exhausted, and alienated from any sense of community. In addition to deconstructing counterproductive and ableist narratives, I also think this is a crucial moment to showcase how we are theorizing our own experiences through art, theory, and other forms of cultural production. What counternarratives can we articulate? How can we alleviate shame in a world continually producing it? Which perspectives and vocabulary might help us imagine otherwise?

As part of this goal, I have compiled a rapid-fire list spanning novels, blog posts, academic monographs, essay collections, podcasts, and short stories below. Most should be suitable for a non-academic audience, though some of the monographs can be dense at times. Finally, if you have any other media recommendations (especially fiction!), please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Theory & Essays

“Access Intimacy: the Missing Link” by Mia Mingus

“Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level… Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations.”

We are often told that accommodations are unrealistic and impossible, that we must push through and adapt to this seemingly-unchangeable world. Such assertions hinder change, but they also foster loneliness, alienation, and shame. Mingus’ blog post highlights the importance of what she terms “access intimacy,” a concept hindered by the individualistic talking points we inherit about pushing through.

Crip Negativity by J. Logan Smilges

“Many of us have been accused of lying, of laziness, of selfishness, or of moral ineptitude because of our access needs. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told by relatives, friends, colleagues, and boyfriends that they cannot trust me—not because I’ve fibbed about needing to miss meetings but because they perceive my emotions as insincere or fake. Unless I exert tremendous energy to mask my autism by performing neurotypicality, I am routinely perceived as a fraudulent human, as a shifty, suspicious figure whose tears come too easily, whose laughter bursts too suddenly, whose eyes fade to a hollow stare.”

Short (and open-access!) academic text on imagining anti-ableist liberation. “Access Thievery,” in particular, stood out to me – this chapter explores “stealing” the time and access we need in order to flourish. Smilges’ writing is a beautiful blend of the academic and the personal.

Disability Visibility and Disability Intimacy by Alice Wong

“I already knew how to extend disabled love, I just didn't have the right framing for it. My mother and brother were diagnosed alongside me that December. Our household was already held together by disabled love. Every time we dimmed the lights or spoke in low voices, my family showed love for those with migraines. When my brother tiptoed down the stairs in the afternoon to grab a snack, avoiding all the squeaky spots, he left trails of love behind him. He would gently shut cabinet doors and creep back upstairs as I dozed on the living room couch, a napping spot that seemed to have a special kind of magic for aching joints. When my mom honed herself into a weapon at every new medical appointment. All sharp edges and hardened eyes, she was teaching me a new form of love. I had plenty of instances of disabled love in my life, I just hadn't honed my self-love or awareness yet, so I didn't see them for what they were.” (“Unspooling,” Nicole Lee Schroeder)

Two classic anthologies of essays and poetry on disability. Contributors range from disabled activists, academics, and creatives. I am currently making my way through Disability Intimacy, but Wong continually succeeds at putting disabled community-building at the centre of her work.

“Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” by Ellen Samuels

“Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.”

Samuels’ essay describes how illness and disability restructure our relationships with time. Though Samuels suggests that there can be something liberating about crip time, this piece focuses more on how the concept also captures unshakeable grief and loss. I think of “crip time” on a near-daily basis.

Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer

“What Feminist, Queer, Crip offers is a politics of crip futurity, an insistence on thinking these imagined futures—and hence, these lived presents—differently. Throughout the course of the book, hold on to an idea of politics as a framework for thinking through how to get “elsewhere,” to other ways of being that might be more just and sustainable. n imagining more accessible futures, am yearning for an elsewhere—and, perhaps, an “elsewhen”—in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral.”

An invaluable introduction to ongoing conversations between queer & trans studies, crip theory, reproductive justice, and ecofeminism.

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

“The insistence upon breast prostheses as 'decent' rather than functional is an additional example of that wipe-out of self in which women are constantly encouraged to take part. I am personally affronted by the message that I am only acceptable if I look right or ‘normal,' where those norms have nothing to do with my own perceptions of who I am. [. . .] Every woman has a right to define her own desires, make her own choices. But prostheses are often chosen, not from desire, but in default. Some women complain it is too much effort to fight the concerted pressure exerted by the fashion industry. Being one-breasted does not mean being unfashionable; it means giving some time and energy to choosing or constructing the proper clothes. In some cases, it means making or remaking clothing or jewelry. The fact that the fashion needs of one-breasted women are not currently being met doesn't mean that the concerted pressure of our demands cannot change that.”

Composed of reflections on Lorde’s breast cancer and eventual mastectomy, The Cancer Journals tackles difficulties around the inexpressibility of pain head on, questioning and reimagining what a sick body looks like and just how it should express, advocate for, and love itself. Her text explores how whiteness, ablebodiedness, and cisheteronormativity work together to uphold prevailing standards of ideal, functioning femininity. Throughout The Cancer Journals, Lorde carves out a necessary space for women who are not the same as they once were, who are no longer viewed as ablebodied and are unashamed of that.

“Disability and the Cisgender State” by Jules Gill-Peterson

Gender affirming health care is not only moralized through a fantasy of experimental mutilation, but is also styled as prohibitively expensive, an inappropriate expenditure of taxpayer dollars in an era of permanent austerity. Rather than assuming transphobia as some transhistorical, free-floating animus that waits in the wings of history, there is every reason to see anti-trans political violence and the establishment of the cisgender state as integral to neoliberal American statecraft. In making this shift towards a materialist trans critique of the cisgender state, Marta Russell’s materialist analysis of disability is immensely helpful.

This introductory essay describes the link between U.S. anti-trans legislation and allegations of mental illness. Gill-Peterson has produced an incredible body of work in transfeminist history and theory, and this piece might be a helpful place to start. As the spectre of disability is frequently invoked in the current war against trans people,3 we must be resolute in our solidarity.

Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

A classic written during Sontag’s breast cancer treatment. Paying particular attention to cancer and tuberculosis, Sontag’s text explores victim-blaming in current and historical illness and disease narratives.

Fiction

All’s Well by Mona Awad

“A display of wellness. That’s what’s called for in this moment. A performance of health so that the audience understands. The audience will only know how deeply you have been in pain when they see how hard you dance afterward.” But she says nothing. Just glares at me as she rises from her throne with a wince. We watch her begin the burdensome walk to the door. Limping as I used to limp. Same limp. Can’t be the same limp. Can’t be. She’s performing. Mocking me, my old pain. Has to be.

I am currently in the process of writing a full essay on All’s Well, but I couldn’t wait until it was finished to discuss it here. This very weird book offers a clever subversion of the “magical cure” trope and works through the intense rage produced by chronic pain and the medical-industrial complex. The protagonist’s hurt, anger, and thirst for revenge ensure that this is decidedly not a feel-good story, but I found it both cathartic and incredibly generative.

Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel

“The deaf children would be joining the preschool, too; the doctors believed they’d still pick up the language, and everyone, including all the parents, would be learning Plains Sign Language. A project that had been hyperfocused on one language was now ensuring two languages would blossom.”

A work of Métis futurism, Vowel’s short story collection includes eight short stories followed by individual analyses of each text. Several different disabilities appear throughout the collection, but “I, Bison” and “Âniskôhocikan” both explore how the notion of “overcoming” is weaponized against disabled Indigenous peoples. Whereas “I, Bison” presents a more dystopian, medicalized future, “Âniskôhocikan” describes a future in which accessibility is a collective aim – an aim that rejects capitalist and colonial pathologization and the interventionism of the curative imaginary.

Podcasts & Media

Diagnosis Grad School by Olivia Dreisinger

Podcast on Substack (with transcripts available if you’d prefer to read) about navigating academic institutions with a chronic condition. I discovered it at a time when existing in my body and doing research felt impossible, and it made me cry because I had never heard anyone describe my own experience so well.

Books on my TBR

I can’t vouch for these yet, but I have heard good things:

• How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, Johanna Hedva

• Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction, Sami Schalk

• Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence, J. Logan Smilges

• Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure, Eli Clare

• The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability, Jasbir Puar

• Exile and Pride, Eli Clare

Thank you so much for reading. I was planning to post the fashion essay I have spent the last ~5 months working on, but I sat down to finish it last weekend and ended up writing this instead.

If you want to read more of my work on gender and illness, you might also enjoy…

This confession would strike shock and disgust into the heart of my 17-year-old self, but it must be said: I should probably spend less time online. In fact, I wish I knew how to log off completely, because it feels like everyone on the internet is suddenly being very weird about three things I have many opinions about: sex, femininity, and fashion. Despite the outpouring of post-election takes about how America’s conservative turn was obviously foreshadowed by recents trends (it was, but where were the smug commenters when writers were predicting this years ago?), I am seeing a steady resurgence of aspirational “trophy wife,” “beauty as power,” and “skinny girl routine” content. Such videos frequently frame marrying a rich man, staying home, and embracing “natural” femininity – centuries-old expectations placed upon women – as cutting-edge hacks, revelatory lifelines etched into our palms by god, previously unknowable but rendered divinely legible through one Chosen Influencer’s quest to decode them.

We have been here before. It seems like we have moved through this discourse every few months for years, with new actors unearthing buried disputes with stakes and torches in hand. Merely pointing out this repetition, however, feels increasingly futile when actively working against a conservative movement fraught with gleeful contradiction. “This is nothing new” can be a useful antidote to nostalgia-induced, conservative complaint-fantasies framed as bold, subversive, or innovative challenges to the status quo (a position that the left should continue to fight), but I worry that dismissal alone may be insufficient: we can strip some of the rhetorical power in these movements by revealing how they have persisted throughout time, but exposure alone only takes us so far when there is a void to fill.

Gen Z’s “I’m-just-a-girl-so-I-should-stay-home-and-look-pretty” content clearly – and often explicitly – speaks to disillusionment with liberal feminism, with its creators frequently citing frustrations with “girlboss” messaging and its focus on corporate success within a cutthroat, draining, and exploitative capitalist system. In response to these realizations, these women rethink what they have been sold, turning instead to the home as a place of refuge from the dismal job market and economy. Conservative creators jump in, affirm their disillusionment and choice to stay home, and proceed to sell them milkmaid dresses, egg aprons, and all other cosplay needs for the newly-initiated. The crowd claps, the lights fade, and the curtains close. The end.

With its current focus on individual empowerment within the crumbling neoliberal order, liberal, bourgeois feminism has clearly been failing people for some time. While traditionally left theoretical traditions such as Marxist feminism, transfeminism, and Black socialist feminism offer overlapping approaches to some of these failures, conservative voices are frustratingly some of the loudest. As I explored earlier this year in “Shopping for Sheep’s Clothing,” anti-capitalist and feminist rhetoric is increasingly being appropriated by the right in response to issues abandoned by the liberal establishment. In addition to the many reactionaries rationalizing their social conservatism through disingenuous adoption of feminist language, however, another group is advancing. In the months directly preceding and following the U.S. election, I have been troubled by the heightened visibility of a distinctly conservative “feminism,”1 one that grounds its political and social arguments for conservative policy in an attempt to wrest the feminist mantle away from a faltering liberalism. As disillusionment with liberal feminism grows on both the left and right, the left needs to reckon with this growing conservative feminist movement – whether we consider it truly feminist or not.

While it might be tempting to dismiss conservative feminism as an oxymoron, MAGA does not seem to care about contradiction – in fact, their affinity for contradiction seems to make them more alluring. I am also convinced by theorists like Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur2 who argue that a successful anti-fascist feminist movement must honestly acknowledge and reckon with versions of feminism, historical and contemporary, which we must oppose. Many historical first wave feminists were also eugenicists, and some became open fascists. Imperial feminism, trans-exclusionary feminism, white feminism, and various other forms of feminism mixed with conservative positions have and do lay claim to the feminist label. The complicated origins of feminism and its continued political heterogeneity make it impossible to articulate some true, “pure” feminism uncontaminated by reactionary thought. None of this is to disavow feminism or to suggest the term is no longer useful: quite the opposite, as intersectional feminist opposition to gender essentialism, wealth inequality, pro-life natalism, white supremacy, and police apologism seem more important than ever. But rather than endlessly and pointlessly arguing about the semantics of what “counts” as feminism, I want to draw attention to and unpack a movement that appears to take itself seriously, clearly has mounting support, and yet has enough plausible deniability to avoid courting widespread controversy.

In the ongoing political struggle for a better future, the left must win on more than policy. It seems pressing to explore how conservatives are bringing new weapons to the culture war, wielding soft power on the countercultural terrain of the second battlefield: art, media, fashion.

This idea of “soft power” perfectly captures the political and aesthetic zeitgeist of our current fashion moment – and, indeed, the conservative feminist movement. In a recent piece for Vogue, Laird Borrelli-Persson dubbed the upcoming fashion season “strangely apolitical,” yet “especially feminine” – a curious combination, given the intensely politicized nature of women’s fashion over the last half decade. Still, Borrelli-Persson suggested that:

The 12 top trends of the spring/summer 2025 collections speak not to politics, but to the idea of soft power – of using fashion to influence, beguile, charm, seduce and bewitch. The season as a whole felt uplifting, positive and women-friendly; the overall message being, as Nicole Phelps put it: “You don’t have to renounce your strength to be feminine.”

Though Vogue contrasts soft power with politics, “soft power” carries significant political history. Political theorist Joseph Nye popularized the term in 1990, defining it as “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment.” In “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power” (2008), Nye writes that “the resources that produce soft power arise in large part from the values an organization or country expresses in its culture.” On a more basic level, soft power is “one source of influence,” but it is “also the ability to entice,” “seduce,” and “attract.”

It is interesting, then, that Borrelli-Persson’s description of SS25 fashion – as a tool to “influence, charm, seduce, and bewitch” – aligns almost perfectly with Nye’s politicized vision of soft power. Conservative soft power manifests both as a strategy to contest liberal cultural hegemony – to exert a social and political influence through culture, art, and design, promulgating conservative values and ideas – and also as a specific ethos tied to a fashion aesthetic, one playing on traditional signifiers of femininity, a weaponized womanhood.

I do not think Vogue is deliberately advancing a conservative argument with its trend report, nor that femininity is inherently conservative. It is telling, however, that sentiments of this kind are so apparent in the fashion space in our present moment. Soft power is contrasted with the more overt power of “politics,” tied to a naturalized and essential femininity and with it implicit gender norms. The idea that women are naturally suited to exercising power subtly, through feminine charm, rather than overtly, in the public sphere, conforms closely to conservative ideals of the gender binary and the proper place of men and women in society. Arguments precisely like this one were often levied directly against the suffragettes and others arguing for increased political representation for women. Vogue’s trend report correctly identifies a growing sentiment; though they likely did not intend a conservative message, they have their finger on the pulse of a powerful force.

Within the conservative imagination, this political-aesthetic joining plays out through the stereotypical image of leftist women as unhinged, blue-haired, unfeminine figures, in contrast with the natural, stable, classically feminine (white) woman. The former is framed as coercive, pushing her “woke” agenda on poor, tired men; the latter seduces, sharing her desire to return to a chivalrous time, a time in which women were unburdened by the masculine public sphere. Crucially, conservative femininity positions itself as countercultural, creating a confused fashion landscape.

This is familiar and deliberate framing. In 2017, American right-wing commentator Paul Joseph Watson infamously declared that “conservatism is the new counterculture” – a sentiment that many on the right still seem to share, despite the GOP’s recent House, Senate, and presidential wins. It is not just overt political control the right craves, but cultural relevance and social approval. What chafes is the sense that their values are slipping out of acceptability, and particularly that young people might abandon them altogether. In an attempt to harness the alienation so many young people experience after forty years of neoliberalism, conservatives are striving to frame their values as hostile to the status quo. Conservative femininity is currently at the centre of this struggle.

Enter Evie Magazine. If you are still keeping up with tradwife news, Evie has likely been on your radar for some time; Hannah Neeleman just graced the cover of their third print issue, “The New American Dream,” and she was originally attached to Evie’s recent “Raw Milkmaid Dress” drop. wrote a great piece about Evie’s background and dismal journalistic standards, but for the uninitiated, the publication brands itself as the “conservative Cosmo” and routinely features beauty and lifestyle tips for your average pro-natalist, anti-woke, and traditional-yet-modern girl.3

Femininity appears to be the central concern for Evie, whose mission is supposedly to “empower, educate and entertain young women with content that celebrates femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more honest perspective than they get elsewhere.” Evie’s About page (which boasts that the publication is “the future of femininity”) states that “no matter how hard the forces that shape society advocate otherwise, women and men are inherently different,” so “the only way forward is to acknowledge and celebrate those differences by embracing our nature despite the world telling us we should hate the realities of our biology and what we are.” Evie’s primary contribution to the culture war is “protecting” and reinforcing the notion of cis womanhood, which they continually frame as being under threat. Evie positions itself against elements within the traditional right and also what it frames as the coercive gender anarchy of the left.

In “TERFs, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms,” Bassi and LaFleur warn against “a distinctively right-wing anticapitalism which casts heteronormative cis women as the ultimate losers of modernization and, therefore, the potential vanguard in the resistance against it.” As Bassi and LaFleur point out, this strand of conservative feminism is “fully stripped of the classed connotations of other kinds of mass feminist mobilization—chiefly, socialist feminism.” Indeed, they note that “feminist working-class solidarity” is continually “replaced by the idea that what should instead bring women together is a shared self-definition as biologically overdetermined and authentically gendered subjects — in other words, ‘normal women.’” This is precisely Evie’s strategy. The magazine must depict femininity itself as under attack from the left in an attempt to preserve the “natural,” conservative role they prescribe to women. Gender, for Evie, must be naturalized and essential; attempts to reveal otherwise must conversely be opposed at all costs.

When speaking directly about trans people, Evie writers tend to recycle a blend of common TERF and conservative talking points. They consistently praise and stand with J.K. Rowling, who they frame as a woman who has “come under attack” for merely “defending her views on womanhood and sex.” In another article titled “J.K. Rowling Says Male Crossdressers are ‘One of the Most Pandered-To Demographics in Existence,’” Meredith Evans writes for Evie that “womanhood is not a costume, and J.K. Rowling agrees.” As with most transphobia, such refusals almost always claim to protect “real” women and their children, drawing attention to the nuclear family.

What is more interesting about Evie, I think, is its frequent pose of apoliticism when constructing girlhood or womanhood. They are not shy about their transphobia, but they generally keep overt commentary in the News section. In their Beauty and Health sections, however, they frame their advice as innocent and universal, providing content for the girl who just wants to RETVRN to a world of 90s beauty standards, jealous strivers be damned! They criticize the body positive movement, but they draw more attention to pieces glorifying thinness. They attack trans people, but they spend more time defining the constitution of a “natural” woman. In addition to teaching the reader to seduce through a cultivated feminine charm, their goal is first to seduce you, to frame the lifestyle and body they sell as the ultimate aspiration. It’s a soft power pyramid.

In an Evie article on the divine feminine, for example, Baylee Hunt writes that “Encouraging women to embrace their nature and cultivate a softer approach to life provides the opportunity to revolutionize society and reharmonize the masculine and the feminine, repairing the damage done between them in recent years.” The words “revolutionize” and “reharmonize” sit in tension, embodying the contradictions inherent in an ostensibly feminist movement that looks both forwards and backwards.

Evie founder Brittany Martinez is adamant that Evie is not fighting the culture war, however: she writes that “Conservatives will never win if they imagine themselves as combatants atop defensive battlements, hurling abuse on the mass media.” Instead, she calls conservatives to shift the media landscape by creating pop culture themselves. Crucially, she does not frame this process as an overtly political one, instead encouraging the cultivation of conservative soft power:

That project starts by creating good content, whether in the form of books, films, TV, music or magazines. If politics is downstream from culture, and culture is largely shaped by entertainment, why are most influential conservatives ignoring the latter? We delude ourselves if we think everything we say or do has to go straight to politics.

Evie’s social media channels carry this mission out most effectively, focusing primarily on red carpet moments, “girl” culture, and celebrity drama – much of which is not framed along explicitly political lines. They even have a TikTok playlist dedicated to calling out misogyny, with their primary target being conservative manosphere commentator Hannah Pearl Davis. This move is a smart one. By disavowing right-wing misogyny, they frame themselves as running counter to mainstream conservatism, giving their followers a cause to fight for: women’s empowerment in the right-wing movement. In a piece for Quillette, Martinez writes:

Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities.

Martinez correctly identifies the unpopularity of liberal feminism, offering an alternative interpretation of its failures to disillusioned readers. Such comments – while more precise – echo other classic conservative flirtations with feminism.

In 2013, Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver, two Tea Party activists behind Chicks on the Right, argued that conservatives were the real feminists: “the word ‘feminist’ has been hijacked by liberals, and we’re taking it back.” They accuse the Democratic Party of having “centered its messaging on a manufactured ‘War on Women,’” which they frame as “a flimsy facade for the entitlement machine that feeds women a false sense of security.” In a blog post from 2014, Clark and Weaver wrote that “Women like us aren't throwing other women under the bus” but are “fighting for things that Actually Matter – economic growth, national security interests, our standing on the world stage, proper healthcare, personal accountability.” Their 2014 book, Right for a Reason: Life, Liberty, and a Crapload of Common Sense, calls for a “makeover” of the conservative party, in an appeal to women and “minority voters.”

At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Kellyanne Conway likewise discussed her relationship with feminism, stating that she saw herself as a product of her choice, not a victim of her circumstances. “That’s really, to me, what conservative ‘feminism,’ if you will, is all about,” she told Mercedes Schlapp. In The Sunday Times’ Ballerina Farm profile from last summer, Megan Agnew famously asked Hannah Neeleman about her own stance on feminism:

“I feel like I’m a femin-,” she said, before stopping herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means any more,” she continued. “We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life.”

Responses to the likes of Conway and Neeleman frequently focus on a dichotomous distinction between progressive feminism and conservative anti-feminism. “Are these right-wing darlings doing anything we might consider ‘feminist’?” some commenters ask. “Are their actions and comments emblematic of choice feminism, white feminism, or right-wing anti-feminism?” others question, reaching for more specific labels. Such categorizations are undeniably useful when discussing how ostensibly feminist language is used as a Trojan horse for conservative policy, such as pro-natalist positions smuggled in under the guise of helping mothers and families. If we, on the left, want to counter these ideologies, however, it seems necessary to do more than simply point out conservative talking points or try to keep the “feminist” label pure. We can close our eyes and refuse to call them feminists, but they still wield power, they are still expanding their influence, and they are still attractive to a large and growing number of young women. Evie and other conservative feminists understand this intimately.

I see Conway’s conservative feminism as an attempt to incorporate much of the language of liberal feminism to make the Republican party more attractive to women, aligning with Chicks on the Right. Conversely, I see current conservative feminism as a wider response to liberal feminism. Evie and publications like it prey on growing disillusionment and the ongoing collapse of liberal hegemony. Of course, they want to be the only game in town. Rather than engaging seriously in a debate with left responses to liberal feminism, conservative feminism seeks to position itself as the embodiment of the true counterculture pitted against a monolithic foe.

How might we think of Evie’s feminism, given Brittany Martinez’ evasion of her own question? During my research, I noticed that Evie has a reader survey on their website, which progresses from typical questions about your age range, location, and relationship status to topics like your stances on abortion, casual sex, the ideal economic policy for the United States, feminism (and feminist self-identification), birth control, sex in media, and whether or not Evie should launch a lingerie brand. I am still not sure which of those should be considered most surprising. Out of the 60(!) questions, the 45th was most intriguing. “If Evie were to launch a publishing arm (books),” it asks, “which subject would you be the most interested in?” The three multiple choice options provided are: a) men vs. women: how to fix the relationship between men & women today; 2) the art of femininity: a bible on all things feminine; 3) a new kind of feminism: what went wrong, why modern feminism has failed women, and the sane steps we need to take to move forward for both women and men to flourish. I see these three responses as the main facets of Evie’s brand.

Ultimately, Evie is trying to reach readers with varying levels of disillusionment and skepticism towards liberal pop feminism. As this publication and others like it gauge interest in this “new kind of feminism,” we need to be precise in our terms. In most contemporary academic feminist discourse, it is a given that feminism is not a monolith. In online circles, however, I routinely see women discussing their critiques of liberal feminism with shame, worrying that their disillusionment is a sign that they are giving in to the siren call of conservatism. Conservatives (and TERFs) win when we let them frame themselves as the only alternative to liberalism, just as liberals win when they frame themselves as the only alternative to conservatism. We must fight this distinction without expecting each ally to become experts on theory. Conservative American policy-makers do not sincerely care about lowering the price of groceries, but they are filling a void left by the Democrats. They do not care about protecting women or children unless violence against them can be weaponized as parables about the dangers of queer people or immigrant men. They do not care about the cost of healthcare or the expansion of the social safety net, though they are more than willing to channel working class alienation against their chosen scapegoats.

It has become a truism that the left needs to market a vision of the future. I admit to struggle with articulating an alluring, attainable ideal when the future feels foreclosed, but if the left wants to avoid ceding further cultural and political territory to the resurgent right and the conservative feminists now fighting on an important new front, it is precisely this ideal we must attempt to imagine. What would domestic labour look like with increased paid parental leave, more generous child benefits, or universal basic income? How might working families flourish if parents no longer had to worry about the cost of college thanks to free public education?

Liberal feminism is not speaking to these questions, yet it works in tandem with conservative feminism to drown out those who do.

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This year was both impossibly difficult and incredibly rewarding, so I needed one last chance to let my inner hater out as I revel in the beautiful mess that was 2024. This started out as an outgrowth of another, more fashion-focused draft, but it ended up expanding over the last several months and became an accidental follow-up to “Shopping for Sheep’s Clothing” – the original piece will be coming to you at some point in the future!

Whether this is your first time reading one of my pieces or your tenth, thank you so much for being here. If you liked this essay, consider leaving a comment or sharing it with someone else who might appreciate it. I hope you have a restful end of the year!

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As a recovering perfectionist who is currently trying and failing to learn to paint, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “aliveness” in art. I first encountered the term through comic artist Lynda Barry, who uses it throughout her work to capture what we might refer to as relational art – art that makes us aware of our entanglement (or relationship with) the world around us. Near the opening of Making Comics, just as lightly captioned images give way to paragraph-covered sticky notes, she writes: 

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Young creatives are constantly encouraged to showcase their work online, but actually doing so can be labyrinthine and double-edged. The algorithms governing social media platforms constantly try to redefine and reshape us, finding new ways to sell us to new audiences. I spent nearly three years creating sewing, personal style, and fashion analysis videos after accidentally building an audience through a handful of viral TikToks (an earth-shattering confession, I know). Filming and editing footage of my creative processes made for a fun hobby outside of my work and research, but I eventually burned out and gravitated back towards my most comfortable medium: writing. In my current state of intense internet-oriented disillusionment, I’ve been reflecting on my own creative past and future lately, and pondering questions of authenticity, artistry, and what it presently looks like to be a creative person online. In my attempt to answer some of these questions, I decided to create an interview series with people approaching fashion and creation from many different angles, featuring academic researchers, content creators, freelance writers, designers, and more. 

My first conversation is with Jess Bosnjak, an illustrator, designer, and fashion content creator based in Oakville, Ontario. Like many older members of Gen Z, Jess grew up playing on GirlsGoGames, a platform hosting thousands of flash games targeted towards tween girls. (I, for one, was obsessed with their dress-up games and would wake up early to play them on the family computer before school.) Looking for a way to combine illustration, social media, and fashion, Jess decided to revive this childhood activity by designing, coding, and developing her very own nostalgic dress-up game as part of her bachelor’s thesis. Featuring over 90 hand-drawn replicas of Jess’ own clothing, “Dress Jess” now has 316,000 plays on TikTok and has quadrupled her audience over just a few months. The twist? Most new fans of Jess are pre-teen children. 

I wanted to chat to Jess about her experience in the online fashion world. Our conversation covers accidental content creation, unanticipatedly young audiences, the performativity of fashion content, being put into a style box, the intersection between music and fashion, and tips for finding discounted vintage. Some highlights from our 40-minute conversation are included in my reflection below.

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Be honest: have you ever felt, even just for a fleeting moment, like nobody wants to work anymore? That young people just need to unplug, get out of their heads, and be more resilient? That Tiktok teens have been shopping for identities instead of finding themselves? 

There is no shortage of think pieces and essays engaging with such questions. Three months ago, I came across Freya India’s “You Can’t Buy an Authentic Self,” an essay arguing that we can’t find our “true selves” through consumerism, despite what companies might have us believe. The piece explores the link between girlhood and predatory marketing, paying particular attention to how the beauty and wellness industries target trans women by “manipulating vulnerable people.” So why are her comments flooded with people agreeing with her and making transphobic remarks in the same breath? 

India’s work can be read in relation to a more recent, growing tradition of writing that follows a typical pattern: it addresses a popular, recognizable concern (one common one right now is the “damaging effects of social media on young girls”) and ties it to a larger web of socially conservative points without making the connection explicit. Because many of these pieces start with a seemingly innocuous concern (social media can be incredibly damaging!), critique neoliberalism, appropriate anti-capitalist or feminist rhetoric, are framed as general cultural criticism, and don’t end with “and that’s why you should turn to the right,” many readers end up missing the implications simmering beneath the surface. It feels necessary to strip this rhetoric down. 

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These pieces seem subtle in their politics; authors and publications know that the headline “Gen Z Wants to Stay Home, Be Mentally Ill, and Cry Like a Little Baby” will be less appealing to average readers than something like “The Average Gen Z Child Spends $X on Video Games Instead of Saving for the Future,” regardless of whether both essays say the same thing. The key here, of course, is that these talking points are not vague to right-wing audiences, hence why we refer to them as dogwhistles. I find this whole thing quite sinister: I would much rather have social conservatives be honest about their conservatism rather than adopting a pose of progressive concern and moral authority.  

of has already written two great essays on the rightward swing within mental health and disability discourse and girlblogging, and I would like to have a broader discussion about how these ideas take root and grow within fashion criticism and consumption discourse. Trans and disabled people have been increasingly visible targets within these conversations, and if you want to stand in solidarity with the people you care about, it is so important to learn how to recognize this rhetoric when you see it. 

This is an essay on recognizing wolves in sheep’s clothing and resisting the seductive allure of camouflaged moral panics. I will contextualize and analyze three recent examples of such moral panics, which have infiltrated discussions around fashion and consumption habits. I recognize that this is not my typical style of post, and I don’t want it to be read as a bid for cancellation or harassment; I just want people to know what they’re reading because I’m frustrated by the increasing number of well-meaning people falling into an intellectual trap set specifically for them.  

A month after I started writing this essay, I saw this series of tweets, which feature a much more obvious example of conservative ideals being wrapped up in fashion discourse.

LeFevre’s original thread includes a list of men’s fashion crimes, like wearing: 

• 7. A pro sports jersey with another man’s name on the back of it.

• 9. Jewelry (other than watches and wedding rings), because “the only thing more disappointing for a woman than seeing a desirable man with a wedding band on, is seeing a ring on any other finger.”

• 33. Your heart on your sleeve

• 40. Women’s clothing.

The subtext here is wild. We escalate from a banal stance on flip flops to policing masculinity using subtle, incel-adjacent references to sexual insecurity – it would be too overt to use the term “beta male” here, but that’s clearly the fear that the “jersey with another man’s name on the back of it” taps into. This language has been memed to death, and while that does little to prevent people from seriously latching onto it, I think it makes it more recognizable – unironic use of terms like “alpha,” “sigma,” or “beta male” is typically a clear sign of online inceldom and the manosphere. Conservative-leaning cultural criticism targeted towards young women seems to have taken a subtler approach, however. (As many conservatives love to remind us, some recent studies have concluded that Gen Z women are more liberal than Gen Z men, so I can’t help but wonder if this subtlety is connected.)

GIRLS, India’s newsletter, explores topics related to “girlhood in the modern world,” with a particular emphasis on technology, social media, gender, and, more subtly, the decline of traditional social virtues. “You Can’t Buy an Authentic Self” is typical of her oeuvre, tying together anxieties around consumption, femininity, and selfhood. (Note: The piece was paywalled as I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, but an audio version is available here.) On the surface, its thesis seems sound enough – it aligns with frustration I have felt towards online fashion communities, and many people have been expressing similar feelings in the wake of the post-COVID micro trend boom. The rhetoric employed in the essay carries us far from that original point, however; it proceeds to frame trans women as chief examples of such frivolous, distracting overconsumption (a subtle point made explicit by many of the citations employed by the author). Employing tactics reminiscent of Jordan Peterson, a noted source of inspiration for India, the essay hooks readers with a widely accepted opening point, only to lure them into more extreme territory under the guise of “genuine concern.”

There is a huge difference between being annoyed at the way online shopping culture has shaped our identities (it is annoying! People are obnoxious about it!) and being annoyed at the way online shopping culture has shaped our identities but especially the identities of trans people, who can’t buy their way into the gender they want because gender is essential and trans people are just confused etc. Don’t let your knee-jerk frustrations around consumption distract from this sleight of hand. So many people are interacting with India’s essay without seriously grappling with its harmful implications, and so many others are using it as an excuse to be explicitly transphobic out of “genuine concern” for young women and their consumption habits. Both of these outcomes are concerning, but they shouldn’t be surprising. 

On other platforms and publications, India is an open social conservative and critic of progressive politics, feminism, and “woke culture.” When writing for GIRLS, however, she frequently couches her conservatism in progressive rhetoric, taking basic concerns and observations and quietly weaving them into culture war discourse. In a recent post expressing disappointment towards the author for her increasingly conservative takes, I saw a comment expressing confusion towards some readers’ reactions and suggesting that GIRLS had always been openly socially conservative. While I agree that social conservatism is and always has been central to the GIRLS project, I think its politics have intentionally been made more ambiguous in order to appeal to moderate and even left-leaning audiences –  a trend I am seeing more and more online. 

This process is most evident when looking at two different versions of the piece side by side, so let’s take a moment to examine the framing and unpack the rhetoric being used.  

While the GIRLS version of the essay begins with Tiktok screenshots of a woman discussing the cost of medically transitioning, the Quillette version opens with a collage of Dylan Mulvaney alongside the subtitle, “We should be wary of teaching the next generation that identity is something that can be bought.” 

Even before the article starts, we are primed to hear two slightly different messages. The Quillette version makes it clear that this piece is centrally about buying an “identity,” and it relies on Dylan Mulvaney – a common right-wing scapegoat – to make it clear that gender identity is really what we’ll be discussing. The Substack version, in comparison, focuses on buying a “self” and emphasizes the financial aspect of medically transitioning, allowing more left-leaning readers to focus on the “anti-capitalist” points as they read. If you squint, generous readers might even come away concluding that we should consider moving towards wider acceptance of social transitions, reflecting on the unique financial pressures different groups of women face to meet standards of femininity, or exploring the harm stemming from current standards around “passing” (though none of this is stated in the piece). 

The thing is, trans people have been having conversations around these issues in and outside of the academy for decades upon decades; there is a vast body of work from which to cite if the author was interested in engaging with these ideas in good faith. India claims to take issue with any plastic surgery marketed to “vulnerable people” as a way to “find your true self,” and one of her central questions seems to be whether gender-affirming procedures like facial feminization surgery (FFS) should be considered vastly different from other cosmetic procedures like nose jobs, breast augmentation, or BBLs. Again, conversations like this have been happening in queer leftist spaces, so it’s frustrating to see this expressed as if it were a thought that the left doesn’t want you to hear. ContraPoints’ “Beauty,” for example, offers a very accessible introduction to some of these points, but she is just one person; her ideas obviously shouldn’t be taken as being representative of the entire transfemme experience. 

The citations that are present in India’s essay, however, are incredibly telling. Because the author doesn’t name the posts included in hyperlinks or conclude with a Works Cited list (though the latter isn’t common practice on Substack), readers don’t see references like “Why Capitalism Loves Transgenderism,” “Demi Lovato Admits They Get Confused Over Pronouns After Coming Out as Non-binary,” or gender critical (read: TERF) piece called “if that was my true self, then why did it take so much work?”

Without actually clicking on any references, the true agenda of the piece is somewhat obscured, but it’s so important to think critically about how all of this “evidence” hangs together. Making an explicit connection between transness and consumption, India writes: “You are more than products you buy. Than the stuff you consume. Than your identity label that conveniently comes with a shopping list (A Shopping Guide for Trans Kids!).” In the shopping list she links, option #4 is putting out a call for hand-me-downs, #5 is thrifting, and #6 is getting existing clothes tailored. The hyper-consumerist horror of it all! I think that most people would agree that we are more than the products we buy, but buying clothes that fit you – whether due to social transition, a pre-teen growth spurt, or both – seems far from seeking out a “consumption-based identity.” (Also, you can find a shopping guide for anything. The Bump has a list of 64 shopping essentials for newborns. How dare they commodify an identity that’s definitely just a phase?! This just in: babies should be the real targets of overconsumption. See how ridiculous this sounds?)

Near the end of her essay, India writes:

I think if a true self exists it is the version of you outside the market. Stripped of all your products and procedures. [. . .] Now we’ve convinced a generation that their authentic self is the personality they built out of products or the self-esteem they borrowed from surgeries. But being comfortable in your body isn’t expensive. That’s a convenient and lucrative lie. It’s not expensive; it’s difficult. It’s extremely difficult to accept yourself. Impossible, even. The only way to get anywhere close to self-acceptance is to earn it, to become someone deserving of it. To put ego aside and focus on feeling aligned internally rather than externally. 

A perfect fusion of both the GIRLS and Quillette pieces, this paragraph seamlessly conflates gender identity with highly abstracted “authentic selfhood” in yet another sleight of hand. Out of context, it reads like your average, slightly edgy critique of consumerism; it is general enough to apply to virtually anyone. Within the broader context of the piece, however, phrases like a “personality [. . .] built out of products” or “self esteem [. . .] borrowed from surgeries” become incredibly loaded by framing transness – particularly trans femininity– as manufactured, inauthentic, a frivolous costume to put on. This is classic transmisogyny dressed up as anti-capitalism. 

Of course, this “anti-capitalism” is a pretense – the real assertion here is that identity is something immutable and self-evident from birth, so anyone trying to help you “create” an identity is profit-seeking and lying to you. This trending anti-capitalist façade is most easily observed on the far-right: in her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly warns audience members about the predatory “billion dollar industry” encouraging young, confused “victims” to transition;1 Scott Howard’s The Transgender-Industrial Complex (2020) suggests that the trans agenda involves working with the “depraved” ruling class to create a “transhumanist globalist dystopia,” as one positive review puts it; columnist Pedro Gonzales blames “the medical establishment, Big Pharma, the culture industry and government agencies” for convincing confused youth to transition, turning them into “ideal customers for the health-care industry.” Each of these critiques frame trans people as either passive victims or scheming masterminds of consumerism and capital (all the while ignoring the fact that many trans people exist without medically transitioning). These points also run parallel to the infamous “transgender social contagion theory,” which Julia Serano outlines and debunks here.2 

I am not saying that India is swept up in or convinced by these more extreme theories – I have no idea what she personally believes. Whether India is echoing these points out of malice or ignorance, however, their implications are cruel and heavy, and I find it far more concerning to see people circulating these essays or repeating her tone and talking points in “The Commodification of X” essays without considering the weight behind their words. 

Capitalism has failed so many people. Overconsumption is exploiting and ruining lives. Regardless of how unplugged anyone tries to be, it is difficult to avoid being inundated with advertisements. It makes sense that many young writers and readers are seeking out conversations around predatory marketing, especially as it relates to the construction of deleterious beauty standards and gender norms. However, it is frustrating to see bad actors take advantage of wide-ranging dissatisfaction and divert attention both away from any kind of structural change and towards conspiracy. This tactic is not just limited to discussions of fashion, queerness, and gender identity, of course. We can observe a very similar phenomenon in right-wing discussions around mental health, another hot-button conversation online to which India also frequently contributes.

“Stop Rewarding Victimhood and Bring Back Defiance,” a piece written by Freya India for Konstantin Kisin, discusses the supposed rise of a victimhood mentality among Gen Z youth. India critiques the glamorization of and identification with mental illness, which she views as the central cause of this shift. Again, she suggests that these identities are essentially being sold to us by Big Pharma and Tiktok influencers, framing this as an issue about online consumption. 

India discusses how the “billion-dollar mental health industry pushes us to pathologise normal negative emotions” with terms like executive dysfunction and rejection sensitive dysphoria, likening clinical labels to spiritual or metaphysical forms of consumption. There are many reasons to critique the medical-industrial complex, but when such critiques target those who “reward suffering,” “label [their] laziness as ‘ADHD executive dysfunction,” or “hoard and hang onto every painful experience,” we abandon all sensitivity and move from the structural to the individual. As ​​points out, 

Resorting to the dopamine rush of endless scrolling, or to the sticking-plaster medical intervention of SSRIs, is not a cop out or a lack of resilience on the part of the individual - it is evidence of an abdication of duty from those who have the political and institutional responsibility to do something. It is not needless decadence or moral failing. It is a cry for help. Framing phones, or medication, or the rejection of tradition writ large as the root of the problem instead of the symptoms of it is a coward’s way out of confronting an ugly reality.

I am also troubled with the ways diagnoses can be presented and discussed online, but videos from struggling teens should not be taken as representations of a larger culture of victimhood. One of the worst things the internet has encouraged us to do is rationalize personal annoyances by casting them as indications of morality. Some people make rage bait videos. Some people make repetitive “signs you have [insert illness]” videos because they frequently go viral and likely help make money through the creator fund. Some people are genuinely struggling or are dealing with their condition imperfectly, as many young people do. It seems ridiculous to take the latter as a sign of generational moral failing. I think it’s very harmful to teach people to assume that everyone around them is just lazy, selfish, coddled, and failing to adequately measure up to an arbitrary set of standards – it creates people who are primed to argue online, sure, but not actually prepared for real-world interactions. We can’t encourage this culture of disdain and superiority (which is ironically what the right accuses the left of doing) if we genuinely want anyone to improve the loneliness epidemic, mental health crisis, and build community. 

I also understand that the desire to participate in “kids these days” discourse is strong, particularly for young adults who finally feel old enough to participate in it, but it is irresponsible to turn throwaway grievances into pieces shared with large audiences without doing substantive research. Complaints about “kids these days” are often very similar across time periods, and panic around increased mental illness is also nothing new. Care for a brief historical overview? 

With the rapid growth of asylums in the mid nineteenth century, concerns over the “national epidemic of insanity” grew. Andrew Wynter’s “Lunacy On the Increase?” (1857) voices some of these concerns, citing isolation, lethargy, and mental inactivity as causes of “mental ruin.” Conversely, it is the “toil-worn artisans” and craftsmen, for Wynter, who “live in the great eye of the world and keep step with the great march of civilization.” He suggests that “English fields can afford cretins as plentifully as the upland valleys of the mountain range seldom visited by the foot of the traveller; whilst, on the other hand, in the workshop and the public assembly, ‘As iron weareth iron, so man sharpeneth the face of his friend.’” Here, the urban proletariat is framed as noble, tough, stoic, and full of purpose, an optimized figure of biblical productivity. This rhetoric emphasizes progress, of moving forward and keeping step with the “great march of civilization,” tying the Protestant work ethic to a need to serve capital. This sentiment is clearly still alive and well. 

A 1919 Delineator article worries that “mental deficiency might also be prevalent to an alarming extent in the general population.” A 1953 article written for the Evening Star notes that while “people all over America [. . .] fear that insanity and mental breakdowns are more common today than ever,” the National Association of Mental Health concluded that there had “been no evidence of an increase or decrease in incidence.” In the 80s and 90s, concerns around the prevalence of mental illness and learning challenges in millennial children resulted in similar conservative backlash, with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (an anti-psychiatry organization run by the Church of Scientology) campaigning against the use of Prozac and Ritalin for minors with depression and ADHD. 

India and her fellow champions of social contagion theory are simply trumpeting an old moral panic. It is nothing new – in fact, it is undermined by its very longevity. It is unsettling to see this relatively recent resurgence develop a kind of self-awareness, however. As Naomi Klein notes of her research into conservative media for Doppelganger (2023):3

People asked me whether I was worried that, in listening to Steve Bannon so much, I might begin to agree with him—that I might red-pill myself or something. But that is not what worried me. What worried me is [. . .] hearing Steve Bannon take up these issues that I knew to be very powerful, these traditionally left-wing issues that had been kind of left unattended. When I would hear Bannon cosplaying Chomsky, or my own politics, it wasn’t that I thought he believed it. It’s that he was using this political move to great effect, looking at the people and the issues that the Democratic Party has abandoned.4

Even deep inside the blogosphere, even in lifestyle or fashion writing (which far too many people dismiss as being apolitical), I think this observation is crucial. The medical-industrial complex and wellness and beauty industries absolutely deserve critiques, but we can’t let ourselves be seduced by those feigning progressivism while ultimately only reinforcing existing social hierarchies and radicalizing people to the right. Just as self-described environmentalists can be ecofascists, self-described anti-consumers and anti-capitalists are not necessarily progressives (or genuine anti-consumers/anti-capitalists, for that matter!). 

So. I am not saying that we should stop critiquing consumerism, corporations, and marketing – I just think we need to discuss how these critiques are being parroted and weaponized. Since many of these conservative-leaning pieces rely on readers to connect the ideological dots instead of making their real concerns explicit, it is more important than ever to read critically. What are the implications of a given piece? Who is the target audience? What ideal world or system is being proposed, and what needs to change in order to achieve it? Questions like these are helpful to consider if you are learning to spot conservative dogwhistles in action. 

Many industries are trying to sell us versions of ourselves, but what if we resisted the appeal of moral panics and focused instead on the root issues to which they respond? Gender-affirming surgeries could not be framed as frivolous, bourgeois expenses if healthcare were free. Ethical consumption would look entirely different if resources were pooled and traded secondhand. Mental health outcomes might be different if teens could inherit a world with universal basic income and free education instead of housing and climate crises. Scolding people for their supposed lack of resilience will not improve conditions for the rest of us. It is cruelty disguised as critique.

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If you have noticed a recent increase in right-wing anti psychiatry discourse, you are not alone – it seems like everyone online has something to say about the mental/physical health of Gen Z, especially as it relates to an essentialized, traditional view of womanhood. I will be releasing a more critical essay on this soon, but I first want to reflect on my own experience, especially as an ill, femme person existing in the online fashion world. (For those seeking lighter fare, I will also have an interview coming out soon with the wonderful Jess Bosnjak, an illustrator and fashion creator from Ontario.)

When people ask what sparked my interest in fashion, I struggle to answer authentically – it is a deceptively complicated question. They might expect me to list my style inspirations or express long-standing desire for a creative outlet, or perhaps they are looking for something more personal, an experience I had as a child or teen. Despite its mundanity, getting dressed is a highly personal, weighted activity that shows up everywhere: in mid-aughts makeover scenes and opening montages, creating (and satirizing) portraits of the supposed routines of womanhood; in condensed, laid back, six-second clips by influencers on Tiktok and Instagram reels (I’ve made them, too); and in the DSM as one of the basic activities of daily living (BADLs), forming expectations around “normal” functioning and independence. During the worst of my health issues, it was difficult to get dressed without obsessing over whether I was signaling my ability to function – did I look clean or presentable enough to appear well? Did I look well enough to appear feminine? I feel connected to many different parts of myself while experimenting with my personal style, but above all else, my love for (and frustration with) fashion has been shaped by my chronic illness. 

When I was first diagnosed in high school, I had very few places to go. I quit nearly all extracurricular activities and spent much of my time in bed, so I started passing time by putting outfits together on my bedroom floor. It was a hobby to engage with from my room, and it gave my body something to do besides feeling sad and ill – rather than thinking of my body as an adversary, a thing that was hurting me, I came to view it as something I could co-opt into working with me. In Illness as Metaphor (1977), Susan Sontag writes that some illnesses tend to render the body both literally and figuratively transparent through medical processes and discourse (12). In response to the overwhelming sense of exposure and transparency I felt by making my condition visible to friends, teachers, and medical professionals, I hoped to control my own opacity by mastering one BADL that could obscure my internal condition: getting dressed. This process of “obscuring” often simply meant outwardly conforming to normative standards of health and femininity. Performing a kind of “functioning” femininity helped me feel normal, at least in one sense, particularly when my pre-existing executive dysfunction was exacerbated by persistent brain fog. Dressing down, of course, is viewed as both unfeminine and unwell, a way of “giving up” on both gender and health. Even when I felt terrible, I knew that looking composed would make me seem better than I was. Looking clean and put together is a moralized ideal, especially for femme-presenting people – there is particular attention to the ways women get dressed and show up in their personal lives, so failing to do so feels like a gender transgression. 

At the same time, illness has also been rhetorically co-opted to reinforce patriarchal gender norms. Tuberculosis offers the most obvious example of this process. Sontag writes that by the mid-eighteenth century, TB was highly romanticized and used as one way to signal “being genteel, delicate,” and “sensitive” within English high society (28). She notes that with the shifting class system, worth and station were asserted through both “new notions about clothes (‘fashion’)” and “new attitudes toward illness,” with “clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior decor of the body)” becoming “tropes for new attitudes toward the self” (Sontag 28). Though some of these ideas have shifted since their inception, I find myself conflicted, disoriented within time – does my illness make me seem weaker, softer, closer to a conservative, traditional ideal of a woman?

As Laura Hirshbein points out in her monograph on the rhetorical history of depression, American Melancholy (2014), explicitly gendered rhetoric around illness was integral to late-nineteenth century healthcare. She writes that physicians such as H.A. Tomlinson warned that American women were “in grave danger from insanity because they were ‘warring against their natural position’ of bearing children and attempting to avoid responsibility through their grasping for ‘material advancement or social opportunity’” (77). For Tomlinson, illness was a consequence of straying from one’s biological destiny. By 1906, however, research emerged constructing hysteria as an essentialized, female disease – an idea which transformed into the assumption that depression primarily affected women (Hirshbein 79).  Though gender roles remain far from static, the medical industrial complex still seems to hold both of these contradictory assumptions: that deviating from essentialized womanhood is what makes you sick, but also that sickness is a biologically-destined quality of womanhood. 

To cultivate a relationship with economically and environmentally sustainable fashion is to cultivate a relationship with the past through secondhand garments and, by extension, the older representations of gender reflected in each vintage seam or pleat. I gravitated towards the flowy blouses and looser skirts of the 50s-70s, choosing comfort that would still be deemed intentional. While fashion and comfort are major discussion points in chronically ill circles, their relationship with gender norms typically remains implicit. In the sixth chapter of The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is (2020), Sarah Ann Singer and Jordynn Jack examine characterizations of chronic illness on Pinterest. They outline four main repeating motifs in the memes, art, and photographs: “1950s housewives, spoons, cats, and bodies that make invisible ailments visible” (132). Their description of one particular image stood out to me:

In it, a 1950s-era woman wearing a full face of makeup, complete with red lipstick and matching manicured nails, applies mascara as she smiles at the viewer. The text reads: “I don’t look like I’m in pain? Thank you!! It only took 5 layers of makeup and really strong painkillers.” (134)

The fashion of the 1950s housewife is considered quintessentially feminine – so much so that her image is often taken up for reactionary ends – yet her appearance here draws attention to the process of getting ready, of walking through the BADLs necessary to construct the classic image of mid-century femininity. Singer and Jack suggest that the housewife’s invocation might represent “the masterful ability to conceal pain beneath a smile and polished appearance — even if it takes powerful drugs to do so” in addition to the “struggle with the expectations that women, in particular, should always look good, maintain a neat and tidy home, and put a hot meal on the table for dinner, all with a cheerful smile” (134). My illness has made this struggle a familiar one. Like my own experience, however, I think the housewife meme also captures another layer of complication: crucially, performed femininity is what allows her to mask her unidentified physical or emotional discomfort. The “5 layers of makeup” and “strong painkillers” work together, illness and gender performance each reinforcing the other. 

Clothes and makeup did more than mask illness and pain; they also provided metaphors for more drastic medical interventions, attempts to discipline wayward female minds and bodies. In American Lobotomy (2015), Jennell Johnson references the rhetorical construction of clothing as a domesticating force within pro-lobotomy articles, stating that “lobotomy had the power to clothe naked women” (56). Though press accounts were divided, Johnson also references a prominent article that “claimed lobotomy helped women to fulfill proper adult gender roles” (58).  Similarly, Jonathan Metzl’s Prozac On the Couch (2003) analyzes advertisements for late-twentieth-century psychotropic medication. Metzl notes that even between 1997-2002, Effexor advertisements featured “ringed women” smiling next to text proclaiming “I Got My Mommy Back,” “I Got My Marriage Back,” and “I Got My Playfulness Back” (155). 

Like their earliest counterparts, these advertisements frame possible patients as wives and mothers, centering their social and domestic responsibilities and relationships. I see this rhetoric echoed in my own life – well-meaning people have expressed more concern over my illness than my queerness or neurodivergence in discussions around me finding a partner or having children. 

I am frustrated by the way illness and gender transgressions have been intertwined by pharmaceutical marketing, but I am even more frustrated by the way right-wing writers flip these talking points for their own moral panics around mental health more broadly. The example ads I have discussed show how pharmaceutical companies marketed medication as a way for women to achieve traditional, conservative gender norms and step back into essentialized familial roles. Now, conservatives are moving in the opposite direction, creating a portrait of womanhood that requires being “natural” and unmedicated. Instead of being open with their anti psychiatry stances, however, they often cite rising numbers of mentally ill girls (on the left), discuss the glamorization of illness (on the left), and conclude that we are witnessing a culture of victimhood as a result of over-pathologization (on the left), all the while insisting that they believe many people do have the illnesses they claim to. I want to push back on this, because when you’re already in pain, it’s highly aggravating to hear people “debate” over whether that pain is rational, reasonable, or just a passing fashion we’ll all overcome, even if such points end with a vague concession that some people are probably telling the truth. It’s even more aggravating when people see my fashionable self-presentation and assume that I will validate their contempt for those who are unable to perform the same outward semblance of functioning. 

The question I always want to ask is why, if they really are so against pathologizing and medicating disorders, these individuals wouldn’t then advocate for a more accepting, accommodating world that met people’s needs instead of demanding one rigid standard of functioning. When we put pressure on people to make it through the school or work day without accommodation, and medication (or even just therapy, which many people on the right also seem to take issue with) lessens the burden of doing so, it feels illogical to direct our anger towards those seeking treatment. 

(Also, sorry for being slightly pedantic here, but many radical theorists in queer, mad, and disability studies also take issue with the way we pathologize disorders, so I’m tired of people insinuating that this is a thought the left doesn’t want you to hear. Nick Walker, for example, has proposed a distinction between the pathology paradigm and the neurodiversity paradigm; the former relies on “the assumption that there is one ‘right’ style of human neurocognitive functioning” rather than understanding our view of normalcy as socially and culturally constructed, while the latter views neurodiversity as its own form of diversity, moving away from the medical model’s framing of autism, for example, as a deficiency or disorder to cure. The difference between the right-wing thinkers and figures like Walker, of course, is that one group focuses on individual successes and failures in the context of existing standards of functioning, while the other refuses to view those standards as sacrosanct, instead asking us to imagine and work towards creating a more accessible world.)

I understand that we might not understand the reasons holding someone back, or we might view their reasons as irrational. At the same time, pain is irrational, and the “wrong” reasons shouldn’t make someone undeserving of structural support. If we accept that people around us really are ill, then we must also accept that concepts like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, returning to “normalcy,” and beating the odds are all relative. I remember a time when just going to class was cause for celebration; my tenth grade teacher called me “wonder girl” for simply meeting my accommodated workload. I can do far more today than I could then, but my body is still unpredictable. Not everyone has the energy to mask their pain, and when it really comes down to it, these anti medication panic pieces seem deeply uncomfortable with witnessing pain at all – whether it comes from a medicated or unmedicated person. I truly hope I won’t be in pain forever. But while I am, where should I go? Regardless of how stoic I am, how much I force myself to do, how put together I look, I am still ill. 

Illness, fashion, and essentialized portraits of femininity have long been intertwined, and I find that I sit uneasily in this long history of sick women. I feel at once deficient and in a state of biologically destined patriarchal conformity, infantilized or invisible unless I grasp for a gender I primarily relate to aesthetically. At the same time, I understand how I have come to feel this way – the gendered rhetoric around health and illness seems unstable, in a cacophonic state of constant flux and contradiction. If we want to build solidarity and care, we need to expand our own visions of what it looks like to function, moving beyond the conventional assumption of neurotypicality, able-bodiedness, whiteness, quiet femininity, or confident masculinity. 

For now, I am exhausted by each new morning and nightly beauty routine framed on Tiktok as necessary cycles of girlhood. I am exhausted by the comments under these videos, which frequently say “I’m doing womanhood wrong.” I am exhausted by my own routine, which cuts into my sleep. I will always love fashion, but I am exhausted by getting dressed. I don’t want to co-opt my own body, to use it as a shield; I want to rest. 

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Works Cited

Hirshbein, Laura. American Melancholy, Rutgers UP, 2014. 

Jack, Jordynn and Sarah Ann Singer. “Theorizing Chronicity: Rhetoric, Representation, and Identification, on Pinterest.” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is, edited by Jennell Johnson, Ohio State UP, 2020, pp. 125-142.

Johnson, Jennell. American Lobotomy, U of Michigan P, 2015.

Metzl, Jonathan. Prozac on the Couch, Duke UP, 2003. 

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor, McGraw-Hill, 1977.

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In the painfully sincere bridge of Chappell Roan’s “Casual,” the speaker confesses, “I try to be the chill girl / That holds her tongue and gives you space, / I try to be the chill girl / But honestly, I'm not.” An elegiac reflection on a dying situationship, the song breaks down the unique pressure, frustration, and guilt that arise from affected nonchalance. When it becomes more exhausting to feign detachment than it does to feel openly and earnestly, the speaker reminds us, the potential security of casualness undoes itself. 

As an artist, Chappell Roan (aka Kayleigh Rose Amstutz) is anything but casual. Her music frequently embraces big, messy emotions, and her fashion is unapologetically referential and bold. Her sound and presentation are campy, ecstatic, and fun in a way that actually makes me excited about the future of pop. Over the last few months, I have watched countless people fall in love with her – she has massively blown up online since releasing The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, opening for Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS World Tour, filming a Tiny Desk Concert, and absolutely killing it in her Coachella sets. When discussing Chappell’s sudden surge in popularity, many people fall back on the old adage about how it takes ten years to become an overnight success. I’m sure that her recent performance run is largely responsible for her swift rise to fame, but I also think her presence has exposed what many of us have been missing during our shift from millennial pink to millennial grey: earnestness, theatricality, colour, and style existing outside of clear aesthetic boundaries. 

Now, I am generally bored of fashion-related “vibe shift” discourse – it frequently feels hollow, with much of it blatantly attempting to speak trends, vibes, or eras into existence. At the same time, fashion is undeniably cyclical, and it feels like something has changed; online fashion is still highly fragmented by niche micro aesthetics, but people seem more and more fatigued by this nonstop categorization. This fatigue seems to be occurring alongside a greater shift away from the nonchalant, influencer-driven It girl looks of the last decade in favour of more earnest modes of self expression. With her wildly eclectic range of looks centred around personal feeling and outward affect,1 Chappell Roan perfectly captures this shift, both reflecting and shaping a change in the zeitgeist – a change also manifested in the fabled return of the party girl.

Since seemingly everyone is attempting to coin an era right now, so much of current trend reporting involves preemptively naming things to see what sticks. SSENSE recently dubbed 2024 “the year of the party girl,” which is likely one such attempt to speak a vibe into existence. I know I just wrote a piece on pseudo trends and rage bait, but I do find that proposed trends (when they aren’t obvious bait) provide helpful insights into our present moment, as they typically try to tap into some kind of cultural current. Like Chappell Roan, more and more people seem to be reaching for bold, unrestrained aesthetics centred around play and experimentation – exactly what the party girl archetype seems to represent. 

If you spend time in online fashion communities, you have likely noticed that new aesthetics rarely stand alone – in the current state of Girl Marketing, figures like “that girl” and the “clean girl” are tweaked and appropriated for the wellness, beauty, and fashion industries, creating a series of patchwork archetypes. In ’s “The Year of the Party Girl”, discusses the complicated relationship between self-optimizing lifestyle movements and the aesthetics to which they are linked. She writes:

a part of me believes that the trend of naming a lifestyle as “slow living” is a nice way to reject the broadly accepted cultural assumption that everyone in their 20s should be going to bars/clubs every single weekend while consuming copious amounts of drinks and yelling “WHAT??” to a friend over a blaring chainsmokers track. it should be universally acknowledged that it is equally acceptable to party (responsibly) as it is to choose alternative modes of socialization. somehow this concept is hard to grasp on either side of the argument. 

another (more sinister) part of me worries this glamorizing of a slow life is a hidden language for hyper-productivity in the form of early morning workout classes, non-fiction self-help books, and anything else one does to feel appropriately optimized and “worthy” as deemed by the clean girls. i fear slow living is being utilized as a crutch that leads one to wisp away the experience of navigating uncomfortable situations that ultimately give us the tools to process the inevitable difficulty of life. getting out of your comfort zone is vitally important!!! be embarrassed!!! spill something on yourself!!!! ask a dumb question!!!! get rejected!!!!!!

Like Emily, I also feel divided about these two modes of expression. The slow living yet hyper-productive woman is, of course, a highly moralized figure (which has already covered far more eloquently than I presently can). The clean girl – like “that” girl and her many other related archetypes – is an aestheticized portrait of ultimate functioning, the platonic ideal of 2020s girlbossery.2 Her fashion is minimalistic yet chic, often displaying quiet wealth through designer jewellery or pastel Lululemon workout sets. She looks effortlessly beautiful and composed. She is independent and unbothered. She is nonchalant. 

It’s a very cute look, and I’m not here to knock anyone’s style. But for the mythologized, online version of the clean girl archetype, outfits never seem to stand alone – clothes are accessories to her imagined success, just like the green smoothies and self-help books. 

The party girl departs from the effortless, casual, and comparatively utilitarian relationship with fashion we see from the clean girl, model off duty, or “that” girl. SSENSE imagines her wearing metallics to catch the light, mixing patterns, and carrying bright, jewel tone eyeshadow, which I haven’t seen in an aesthetic since the post-2016 shift to minimalistic makeup. I have seen many recent comments from people who want to dress or do their makeup more eccentrically, but the most common barrier is fear of embarrassment, which I definitely sympathize with. I love how the party girl (as Emily North describes her) is decidedly not nonchalant or detached from the social world – we might read her as embracing big, uncomfortable emotions like embarrassment and rejection, which we need to live with if we ever want to take creative risks or spin goofily on the dancefloor. Whether the party girl’s revival is real or imagined, she offers a counter-archetype – one signaling a desire for a more playful, messy era of fashion. 

In general, I think we could do with a higher tolerance for mess, especially when it comes to self-expression. I don’t want to demonize Tiktok aesthetics, but sometimes I wonder if their neat categorizations offer a sense of safety, a way to bypass the inherently cringe nature of creative experimentation. For much of Gen Z, who grew up painfully aware of digital surveillance, perhaps the idea of being documented in an embarrassing or cringey outfit is particularly terrifying. At the same time, one woman’s treasure is another’s cringeworthy trash! There is no way to win, to protect against cringe – I promise. We might as well embrace it, and after years and years of beige, I want to embrace bright colours, big feelings, and mess. I want to see sequins, sparkles, and colourful eye makeup for no reason. I do not want to look nonchalant!

Chappell Roan seems unafraid of cringe. Her music is bold, campy, and unashamedly queer, and her fashion is bright, theatrical, and so much fun. It is true maximalism. Though one review of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess describes her lyrics as “walk[ing] a fine line between camp and cringe,” it ultimately suggests that her music “soars when it’s at its most ambitiously indulgent.” Indeed, (self-)indulgence seems key to Chappell’s work. Every song and onstage look feels personal, designed for her. Amstutz has referred to Chappell Roan as her drag project, which allows her to play with campy aesthetics and be highly experimental and referential with her styling. In a recent Instagram post, she wrote:

My outfit choices, song choices, writing style, hair/makeup, etc. are all nods to the queens I look up to. I try to honor my queer elders; those who came before me. I am always referencing someone or something it’s all very intentional. Camp is camp. Pop is pop. I’m not taking myself or aesthetic seriously, because that’s no fun. I want to have fun. 

“Fun” is the first word that came to mind when I heard my first Chappell Roan song, and it certainly extends to each aspect of her creative presentation. At a time when there is so much anxiety in the fashion space about being sufficiently original, it is (perhaps ironically) refreshing to see someone dedicated to showcasing their generic roots and community, playing with a wide array of inspiration, and centering personal joy and fun in fashion instead of trying to tap into an existing aesthetic. 

For her recent interview with Nylon, for example, Chappell sported makeup inspired by the glitter Vine girl, whose reaction image is frequently used to poke fun at messy or amateur makeup looks. This is one of my favourite Chappell Roan looks to date – with her bright pink, bedazzled hennin, Chappell’s entire outfit captures the spirit of a childhood dress up game. It’s also a beautiful tribute to mess, to a childlike portrait of beauty as colour, sparkle, and hurried self-expression, to a time before makeup taught us to know our faces well enough to distrust them. 

(I also feel personally vindicated by this creative direction, as someone who frequently encountered the Vine girl image in the comment sections of creative eyeshadow or graphic liner looks I wanted to try. While looking through my Pinterest board the other day, I saw it under this pin I saved five years ago:

How soon we forget. Five years ago, people like our dear friend Fronk were comparing this adorable 60s mod-inspired look to the Vine girl; today, I can’t open social media without seeing some form of 60s makeup. A vibe shift indeed.)

Some of Chappell’s other looks are making huge waves online. I have seen so many recreations of her iconic 80s prom-inspired Tiny Desk look, and have read so many comments from teenagers pleading to “normalize” fun makeup again. Chappell Roan has made one thing clear: the people want to have fun and feel things through fashion again! 

Beyond her incredible style, it also means a lot to hear happy, messy, upbeat, pop music that also happens to be queer. If I had someone like her in my life as a closeted tween, I would have felt so much more comfortable existing in the world as I wanted to. (I also would not have begged for so many plaid shirts. My only style icons were Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls Like Girls” music video and the women in Buzzfeed’s LGBT Youtube playlist.) 

I don’t know if the pressure to be chill is ever stronger than it is in high school, so it makes me so happy to see teenagers resonating with these bold, wacky looks. When I wanted to wear makeup as a child, my thought process was, “pink and purple are my favourite colours, I love glitter, and if there’s a way for me to put all of those things on my face, I want to do it.” I have been trying to cultivate that mindset again, but it’s challenging to relearn once you’ve been conditioned to prioritize what’s flattering.3  

Right before I became a teenager, I developed an interest in fashion by reading different style blogs (aclotheshorse will always have a special place in my heart). I remember being so excited to grow up and experiment with the weird little twee-adjacent styles I loved, only for athleisure and Kardashian-driven neutrals to grip the fashion landscape. Beige, pantsuits, and more mature silhouettes seemed to react against the more earnest millennial styles of the early 2010s. I felt foolish, like I had misunderstood what fashion was. To my young brain, the new ideal image of femininity seemed to champion showing no emotions while succeeding at everything – she was a girlboss, always heading somewhere, too nonchalant to indulge in feminine frivolity. Seeming casual and effortless was the standard, and it was a suffocating one to stumble into when trying to navigate the world of creative expression for the first time. The clean girl, model off duty, and “that” girl all seem like softened iterations of these earlier trends, with each digital archetype presenting an image of optimization without feeling. IRL fashion aside, it’s interesting (and slightly concerning!) that those images have been considered some of the most aspirational. 

For me, Chappell Roan’s technicolour explosion ultimately brought the sad, beige nonchalance of our current cultural landscape into greater focus. Fashion exists in so many different registers, and while Chappell’s looks are obviously meant for the stage, her approach to styling is one that I hope will catch on. I certainly want to further explore how to incorporate the joy of expression into my own personal style! I won’t be able to wear the eclectic, vintage outfits of my dreams to work, but I would love to find a way to bring more whimsy to my practical outfits, move away from aesthetic categorization, and embrace play through fashion. 

I still think the concept of “out” is out entirely (as evidenced by my newsletter name), so have no fear, sad, beige friends: I don’t think neutral, minimalist styles are going anywhere. Instead, I’m hoping this shift will make space for more styles to coexist. 

However… whether wearing beige or overwhelming colour brings you joy, I like to think that nonchalance is out. 

Thank you so much for reading! As always, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts.

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3

I am obsessed with those girls who wear glittery eyeshadow and/or colourful graphic eyeliner with no mascara for this reason. It always looks so cool and creative! These looks are more formal, but I also love them:

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The last several months have been tough. I got very sick twice, dealt with a personal loss, fell wildly behind on my work, and experienced some of my worst chronic illness flare-ups to date, among other things. I also started this newsletter, presented my research twice, and did many exciting things that I’m sure I’ll be proud of once my body has a chance to rest. Currently, though, it feels like my brain is operating at half capacity, so my day-to-day relationship with fashion has been relatively strained. 

Sometimes dressing up makes me feel so creative, joyful, and free, and other times it makes me even more exhausted. I try to balance both of these moods as they come up, but they’re hard to predict. In order to make space for both options, my happy medium has involved a go-to outfit formula. When I feel like dressing up and having fun with my outfits but don’t have the mental energy to be creative, I fall back on three items:

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1. White boots (or white sneakers). If I know what shoes I’m wearing, the rest of the outfit typically follows. I got my boots on sale from L’intervalle in 2021 and they’re still going strong (they’re the Amiens Boots in white leather and they’re currently on sale again for $105 CAD, incidentally). They’re very comfortable and instantly make my outfits more fun, but sometimes sneakers are the wiser choice. 

2. White headband or scarf. If I don’t have to worry about frizz or whether my hair is sitting the way I want it to, I’m happy. 

3. Any loose dress. Self-explanatory: the most comfortable creations in the world. 

Some examples:

This leaves me with an almost-uniform to play with, which I really love. When I’m anxious, this process also helps reduce the amount of time and energy I put into getting dressed – I have been known to fall into long spirals while trying to find pieces that look or feel inexplicably “right,” so it has been immensely helpful to remove that routine from my mornings. An added bonus: I feel like a cartoon character with a signature outfit. 

How are you feeling about outfit formulas? Do you have a favourite?

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Outfit formulas are obviously not my original idea, but far too much fashion content out there makes it seem strange to rewear clothes frequently – clearly not a reasonable expectation unless your wardrobe is constantly changing. Clothes are meant to be worn!

Anyway, I don’t normally like getting so personal online, but I’d also love to see more conversations around the process of getting dressed. It affects each of our bodyminds differently, and if you also share in this stress (whether permanent or due to seasonal burnout), I see you. I hope you’re hanging in there.

Last month, Vogue dropped this tweet, announcing the arrival of a new trend: “chocolate syrup hair.”

The internet reacted quickly. Twitter and Reddit were filled with snide comments about how people will turn anything into a microtrend, “chocolate syrup” is just a clumsy repackaging of brown, and that marketing teams are just trying too hard. As with many ridiculous pseudo-trends before this one, the smart, enlightened consumers joined hands in a grounding moment of peaceful solidarity to laugh at those silly interns, at the overeager influencers rushing to adopt each aesthetic, at the brands quickest to drop a curated collection based on new key words. But oh, fellow consumers, how do you know they weren’t laughing back at us? 

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Of course, I sympathize. I too shared this knee jerk reaction – as soon as I read the tweet, I rolled my eyes, annoyed by this pervasive style of marketing. The endless categorization of personalities, aesthetics, and even daily routines online has been exhausting to watch. (For my more offline readers, some of these personality/aesthetics have been named “tomato girl,” “vanilla girl,” “office siren,” “grandpa core,” “coastal grandmother,” or “clean girl,” and these archetypes might engage in activities like “bed rotting,” eating “girl dinner,” doing “girl math,” or creating “girl mess.” If this sounds strange and overwhelming to you, you are not alone.)

My initial response to the “chocolate syrup hair” tweet, however, felt too easy, especially after earlier (and eerily similar) controversies involving Vogue and Elle. For context, in 2022 and 2023, these publications helped push beauty terms like “glazed donut nails” and “brownie glazed lips” after Hailey Bieber was spotted sporting them. These trends sparked a whirlwind of think pieces and critical videos — many of which pointed out that each “new” style was merely a renamed version of something classic (opalescent top coats and brown lip liner with gloss have been around for ages, of course, with the latter being a staple in Black and Latina communities long before white celebrities attempted to co-opt and rebrand the style). 

A similar cycle occurred with Sophia Richie’s “blueberry milk nails” (read: light blue nail polish). There is undoubtedly a strange desire to coin a term for everything online, and fashion journalists are certainly not immune to this compulsion. But if Vogue could make the same mistake a fourth time, how much of a mistake could it really have been?

Perhaps I’m just putting on my 60s Space Race-inspired tinfoil hat, but I don’t think it was a mistake at all. After all, people love to hate things, and this style of tweet seems like the perfect way to generate discourse – intentionally or otherwise. I’m beginning to realize that these simple, sensationalized trends win either way: either they make people mad, generating endless think pieces and dunk tweets about the ridiculousness of each idea, or they catch on, creating new trends. In either case, traffic is driven to the publication. It’s the perfect storm of discourse bait. And wow, the bait worked:

’s recent essay, “The Discourse Age,” provides a great overview of the current hellscape of online discourse. She aptly notes that:

even given the fact that the most controversial figures will appear outsizedly popular in the internet sphere, most “discourse bait” happens in a one-off Tweet. It’s not always purposeful — usually when it is, most can spot the troll behavior and react accordingly — but for anyone who’s even the least bit digitally literate, you know where the hot buttons are and how to press them.

Eliza also points out that discourse bait posts — as opposed to overt troll posts and unambiguous rage bait — usually gain more traction, as people are “much more willing to have a conversation regarding an ambiguously prodding post than a straight-up hateful or vile one.” I think this is right, and it also describes how many fashion trends (or pseudo trends, perhaps) operate in the current state of social media: they are intentionally ambiguous, double-edged attempts to walk the line between outrage marketing and sincerity. In other words, they cater to both potential lovers and haters of each proposed trend. This is the trend bait trap.

The Vogue tweet is a great example of one such “ambiguously prodding post”: it pokes at current conversations around overcategorization and the rapidly increasing trend cycle while simultaneously launching a shiny, new tidbit of hair inspiration for consumers genuinely looking for change. The fact that the former category is now just as valuable as the latter within marketing is what interests me most. 

The recently-coined “mob wife aesthetic”  – which features fur coats, leopard print, and Italian leather bags – shows us something similar about the role of the hater in contemporary fashion discourse. Spearheaded primarily by kayla trivieri, this aesthetic first went viral on Tiktok with the declaration that the “clean girl” look – a fashion and beauty trend involving minimal makeup, clear skin, and sleek hair – was now out, while “mob wife” was in. Now that we have finished taxonomizing each archetype of girlhood, we can finally begin to categorize womanhood! #Win!

The original video received mixed responses. Some people were taken with this new aesthetic, while others found Trivieri’s assertion forced, given that it was not actually a trending style – just an attempt to generate one. Like Hailey Bieber’s chocolate syrup hair, the mob wife was thrown out for audiences to dissect and, eventually, inflate to trend-adjacent status as a result of passionate discourse. 

This has occurred many times before, of course, largely due to the influx of professional and self-proclaimed trend forecasters online. Rachel Tashjian correctly suggests that:

On TikTok, trend forecasting has become the new influencer hustle, almost a trend itself; creators who can string together photographic evidence with a pithy and compelling monologue are performing a kind of competitive prophecy. And the platform’s algorithm seems to favor this sort of information sharing: the more ridiculous the prediction, the more traction it gains, and the more predictions we are fed. 

As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell genuine trends from simulated or baselessly predicted ones. 

of recently echoed theories about the mob wife aesthetic even being planted as a way to market the Sopranos 25th anniversary. Was this a clumsy attempt to force a trend, to try making “fetch” happen, or was the controversy anticipated from the start? Was this just a casual idea thrown out into the internet, only to be met with unanticipatedly strong opinions? In any of these cases, the marketing was successful: like many others, I might not have discovered the aesthetic or the Sopranos reboot without the controversy surrounding them. I think there is something more complicated going on than the simple adage that “all publicity is good publicity,” however – it’s as if haters have become a hot niche of their own, forming a joint target audience with the sincere consumer. 

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Nothing captures this phenomenon better than current teen movies, which mastered this over the last ten years. A few years ago, I fell down a rabbit hole of Netflix Original teen rom-coms. I, alongside many others, hate-watched The Kissing Booth, Sierra Burgess is a Loser, Tall Girl, He’s All That, and any Noah Centineo movie I could get my hands on. Clips from these movies often went viral for their cheesy tropes, general absurdity, and cringey writing. The assumed target audiences of these films were adolescent girls interested in teen comedies, who generally seemed to rate them highly out of either sincere appreciation or a so-bad-it’s-good approach. “Enlightened” viewers like me, however, reveled in the perceived cringiness of these movies. I thought I was so smart, so cool for laughing at the writers’ incomprehensible missteps. No tragic hero has ever had such hubris as this. 

Reviews for Tall Girl – one such widely mocked and memefied movie – typically fall into two camps: 1) sincere odes which take the movie at face value, applaud the execution of its basic message (love yourself as you are), and emphasize the benefits of showing it to insecure tweens and teens who might otherwise feel alone, and 2) passionate, multi-paragraph breakdowns of each hateable character, scene, and trope. Two common refrains, “what were the writers smoking?” and “how could they write something this stupid?” were echoed across Youtube, Tiktok, and Reddit. These critiques drew tens of millions of views, which in turn, of course, led to more streams of the movie. It generated enough buzz to justify making a sequel, and Tall Girl 2 was the single most popular movie on Netflix in the week of its release. 

(Note: spoilers ahead for the end of Tall Girl, for those eager to find the light after hearing my tragic tale.) 

Now, watching Tall Girl is what finally shattered my illusion of superiority. In one of the final scenes, Jodi Kreyman, the titular Girl, finally gets together with her guy best friend, Jack Dunkleman. Jack, a short nerd who carries everything around in a milk crate (instead of wearing a backpack or tote bag like the rest of us), makes his move: he stands on the aforementioned crate and kisses her, finally fulfilling her dream of being with a guy taller than her. 

Chekhov’s milk crate sent me over the edge. It was undeniable: I had fallen for the bait. 

I was a puppet, and the writers were pulling the strings; the sincere, appreciative adolescents and my band of haters were both targets from the start. It was a deeply humbling realization, and now when I see people boldly hating on media without hesitation, I feel that same nauseating foolishness gnawing at me. It’s easy to feel like hating is a subversive act, I think, especially when such hatred feels grounded in moral objections (as it often does). In Tall Girl, such objections frequently centred around her obvious privilege as a well-off, conventionally attractive white girl, which make her complaints about heightism particularly eye roll-inducing; with chocolate syrup hair, they typically focus on the sickening churn of overconsumption and microlabels under late capitalism. This is not to say that those critiques are wrong or unnecessary, but rather that these trends and pieces of media are designed to elicit them. It’s all part of the trap.

So: is “chocolate syrup hair” a marketing intern’s clumsy attempt at coining a term, or is it a disingenuous attempt to generate rage clicks and engagement at any cost? It’s both, baby!

Even so, what comes next? If we know that the trap is here, should we disengage? Critique its presence despite the engagement we’re giving them? Something else entirely? My own experience in marketing leaves me uncertain.

One thing I do know is this: even in the fashion world, it feels increasingly necessary to take each hot take or prediction with a grain of salt if you’re interested in developing your style (or preserving your peace of mind). 

Those are my parting words. For now, I leave you with this, dear readers:

Works Cited

Mclamb, Eliza. “The Discourse Age.” words from eliza, 8 Jan. 2024, www.wordsfromeliza.com/p/the-discourse-age.

Odell, Amy. “The ‘Mob Wife’ Trend Is Fake.” Back Row, 28 Feb. 2024, amyodell.substack.com/p/the-mob-wife-trend-is-fake.

Tashjian, Rachel. “Real Fashion for the Era of Fake Trends.” Harper’s BAZAAR, 5 Apr. 2022, www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/fashion-week/a39631139/fear-of-god-eternal-jerry-lorenzo-interview.

Thank you so much for reading! I had originally planned for this post to be just 1000 words and far less goofy, but I really couldn’t restrain myself. Please let me know what you think of this format, and feel free to share other trend bait traps you may have fallen into…

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The sun is coming out, petals are finally peeking out from their buds, and the air is filled with the chirps of new fashion enthusiasts gravitating towards 1960s styles. As the mod movement has been the single most influential period for my own personal style, I thought I would share some of the secondhand and handmade pieces I’ve been eyeing recently. 

Note: I have added sizing details after each item of clothing, but please be sure to double check each description for more thorough breakdowns of measurements and signs of wear. 

This post has also been labeled too long for email, so feel free to press “read in app” to access the full list!

Hats

As noted in her latest edition of Retail Diary, many vintage styles of hat have been forecasted for this upcoming season. As a certified pillbox hat enjoyer, I feel obligated to include two of my favourites in this newsletter. 

Black and white pillbox hat 

Baby blue pillbox hat with embroidered flowers 

Outerwear

Who doesn’t love a good cape? 

Chiffon capelet

Size: S/M

Plaid wool cape 

Size: 12

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In March of 2022, when I first began planning this newsletter, I drafted an outline for an essay titled “‘Out’ is Out: Tiktok and the Destruction of Trend Cycles.” Perhaps ironically, the original subtitle has now gone through many changes — the conversation around the rapid churn of consumption, microtrends, and the flattening of individual personal style on Tiktok has itself become a passing trend, with these observations now feeling commonplace and banal in online fashion discourse. 

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Though so much has changed in the last two years, this conversation has recently been revived, with Tiktok users like Elliot Duprey even referring to the current state of things as a “personal style epidemic.” As Duprey and many others have now pointed out, the recently-coined (and now-infamous) Eclectic Grandpa aesthetic, which mimics a lifetime of curation and experimentation, seems to perfectly embody our current confused, generally nostalgic cultural moment. 

Yes, so much has changed about engaging with fashion online, but one thing has not: it is deceptively difficult to identify what is actually trending or on the rise. If you look at the comments alongside “style evolution” videos on Tiktok (including anything labeled “before vs. after finding my personal style” or “dressing for the male vs. female gaze”), you will likely see comments insisting that the outfits from both before and after are merely following the trends of their respective times. In addition to expressing intriguing resistance to anyone claiming true individuality online, these commenters also offer valuable insight to a compelling truth about the current state of fashion as influenced by the internet: with the ever-increasing number of online subcultures (or, perhaps, algorithm-driven corners which merely feel like subcultures), nothing is truly “out” anymore.

Some things are still in, of course, as they always will be; this was unmistakably the autumn of red accents, ballet flats, and bows, for example. What is out, however, is increasingly nebulous. The biggest trends of the last few years have been influenced by the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and numerous forecasted trends for 2024 — including sailor-inspired fashion, which I will be releasing an essay on soon — simultaneously draw on the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 2010s. If the twentieth century has been turned into one big fashion bingo card, an Edwardian renaissance is the only thing blocking our total blackout. 

In Fashion Trends (2021), Eundeok Kim, Ann Marie Fiore, Alice Payne, and Hyejeong Kim describe the traditional fashion life cycle, with which you might be familiar: 

All products, including fashion products, have a finite life cycle. New styles are introduced in the market, last for a certain period of time, decline, and finally disappear. Although the rate and duration of use vary, the diffusion of a specific fashion tends to follow a predictable cycle, called a fashion cycle or fashion life-cycle curve.

On the internet, however, this cycle has been radically altered. In addition to gaining or losing relevance much faster, I find that trending styles also no longer feel finite; rather than disappearing and fading into the typical end-stage of obsolescence, they seem to linger in the background. It’s as if we are always slightly haunted.

This phenomenon is not solely confined to fashion, of course. Though shaped by the conflict over ownership of her master recordings, Taylor Swift’s re-released music and subsequent Eras Tour are great examples of how — as she puts it in “marjorie” — “what died didn’t stay dead.” With each (un)dead era, Swift’s model releases the past from behind us, reviving it for endless reconstruction and making it available for a new generation of consumers to experience for the first time. 

This year’s Met Gala theme — “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” (of which Tiktok is a lead sponsor, incidentally) — looks incredibly exciting, and it, too, encourages us to look back and revive styles from over 400 years of fashion history. Writing for Vogue, Luke Leitch shares that the gala will feature pieces ranging from “a 17th century English Elizabethan-era bodice to 21st century acquisitions by designers including Phillip Lim, Stella McCartney, and Connor Ives.” As the Met Costume Institute has been a curatorial department since 1959, historical references have always been staple features of Met Gala looks. 2021’s two-part theme, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion”/“In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” was an explicit tribute to America’s fashion history, while other themes have paid tribute to specific periods, such as 2004’s “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century” or 1989’s “The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire.” 

This year’s theme feels different than the gala’s typical approach to historical references, however. Like the hauntedness of current trends and Swiftian undead eras, the characterization of older fashion as something to “reawaken” implies a similar kind of slumber, a rejection of the in/out or alive/dead binary in favour of liminality or spectrality. 

When asked about each theme’s decision process, Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s chief curator, told Vogue France: “What I try to do is work on a topic that seems timely, and that defines a cultural shift that’s happening or is about to happen” (qtd. in Berlinger). Isn’t “Reawakening Fashion” the perfect theme for a world in which “out” is out — one in which past, present, and future eras appear indistinct? 

As points out in this Cafe Hysteria piece, our cultural understanding of taste is also increasingly complicated by widespread ironic appreciation for the tasteless, making some nostalgia-fuelled fashion trends even harder to identify. Cultural critics such as Franco Berardi, Mark Fisher, and Fredric Jameson have also written extensively on the role of nostalgia in other facets of current pop culture. For Fisher, there is something necessarily spectral or haunted about contemporary electronic music, for example, which fails to deliver “futuristic” sounds despite previously being synonymous with an aestheticized sense of the future. There is something similar, I think, about the current state of fashion, and I can’t wait to explore it with you. 

Thank you for being here! This is a taste of what I have planned, including a deeper dive into the idea of “out” is out. This newsletter will combine my love of fashion, literature, history, and cultural analysis to explore topics such as the culture of categorization on Tiktok, our obsession with eras, the concepts of online girlhood and “personal” style, what our consumption habits mean, the role of friction in shopping, general fashion inspiration, and how to “read” an outfit. Readers can expect one long(er)-form piece per month with smaller pieces interspersed between. 

Above all else, I hope this will be a safe space for community and discussion — it’s so strange to have conversations across different mediums, and I hope Substack will help bridge the gap created by platforms like Tiktok and Instagram.

I am incredibly excited for Out is Out, and I can’t wait for you to join me.

Works Cited

Berlinger, Max. “How The Met Gala Theme is Decided Each Year,” Vogue France, March 5th, 2020. Accessed 1 January, 2024.

Buxbaum, Gerda. Icons of Fashion: The 20th Century, 1999

Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. Accessed 27 Dec. 2023.

Huizinga, Madison. “Is Having Good Taste Overrated?” Cafe Hysteria, 1 Oct. 2023, madisonhuizinga.substack.com/p/is-having-good-taste-overrated.

Kim, Eundeok, Ann Marie Fiore, Alice Payne, and Hyejeong Kim. Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. Bloomsbury Collections. 

Leitch, Luke. “‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’ Is The Costume Institute’s Spring 2024 Exhibition,” Vogue, November 8, 2023. Accessed 31 December, 2023. 

Siddiqui, Yusra. “Eclectic Grandpa Is the Controversial Trend That’s Already Defining 2024.” WhoWhatWearUK, 19 Jan. 2024, www.whowhatwear.com/uk/eclectic-grandpa-trend.