What is a Death Doula/Death Midwife?

I’m currently crowdfunding tuition fees to train to become a life stages doula.  This includes training as a death doula, as well as a more widely understood birth doula.  I mean to provide birth to post death holistic life care for queer, trans, disabled, working class, immigrant and BBIPOC people.  This might be the first time you’ve heard of a death doula, and be wondering what that is.

I am on a journey to become a life stages doula, guiding people through the transitional phases of life, from preconception and adoption to relationship milestones, celebrations of ageing and growing, and finally through death and grief-work. I believe there is a particular need for this kind of work in LGBTQIA+, working class, disabled and BIPOC communities who are under-supported by many traditional medical and religious establishments. I want to fill that gap with compassionate pastoral care, advocacy, celebration and understanding of lives not catered to by institutions set up to cater to cisgender heterosexual and monosexual people. I intend to offer my services on a sliding scale so it is affordable to working class marginalised people with the more able to pay subsidising access for other clients. Everyone deserves to live and love and die with dignity and support – I plan to have the type of practice where no-one will be turned away for financial reasons and marginalised clients are prioritised in ways payment focused services just don’t support them.

Here’s a beautiful article about two death doulas/midwives, Vivette Jeffries-Logan and Omisade Burney-Scot and what their practice looks like. Their practices are informed from their cultural traditions in West African Ife and Occaneechi Band/Saponi Nation beliefs and practices. Mine will be informed by my Irish and Jewish beliefs and traditions around birth, death and everything that lies in between. That doesn’t mean I’ll only midwife to Jewish or Irish people – my clients backgrounds will be seamlessly tailored into how we make their journeys together.

Now, read how others do it so you can understand what I’m planning to do in the future.

“Over the course of about three months, the women stayed at Cynthia Brown’s side as the community activist and one-time Durham City Council member went about the process of dying. They rubbed her head, kept a watchful eye on her pain, and helped her decipher doctorspeak. And when her spirits appeared to lag, they’d tell her jokes and sing at her bedside.

This, Jeffries-Logan says, was a good death: “If I can help someone at the end of life heal and be clear, I will. There are some things we are required to do alone, but we are not isolated. We are community people. What happens to my nation happens to me. What happens to me happens to my nation.”

These days, end-of-life doulas, sometimes called death midwives, are an emerging profession in the growing death positivity movement, which urges a paradigm shift for thinking and talking about death as natural and not inherently traumatic.

They provide nonmedical support to help ease the final transition for the terminally ill. But it’s not merely about that culminating moment, “The End.” They help the dying and their loved ones navigate death with all its “before and afters”—including sickness, acceptance, finding resources for all the legal housekeeping, funeral planning, and bereavement.”

Please note the very valid critiques of professionalisation of what mainly stems from emotional labour done by femmes and/or people of colour. Many of the people providing death doula training are white and similar to yoga practice as the article says, they are capitalising on BBIPOC practices while BBIPOC are not benefiting from their practices. The death doula trainer I’ll be working with if I can afford the fees is an African American doula called Alua Arthur who runs her business and Youtube channel under the title “Go With Grace”. When I am qualified I will ALWAYS work on a sliding scale, and prioritise supporting working class POC and immigrants/refugees who have no access to public funds for free wherever possible (and if it’s not possible it will absolutely be no more than working at cost for materials, which I will support clients to crowdfund if they need to) by using the funds from financially stable clients.  I’m also intending to train doulas and midwives from marginalised communities (hopefully using grant money) once I’m qualified, so the skills I learn will be shared affordably in our communities to allow more queer, trans, Jewish, working class, disabled, immigrant and BBIPOC access to accessible holistic support from conception to post-death.

Anyone who donates £10/$10 or more to my crowdfunder is welcome to request a tarot or oracle reading appointment from me via video call. £30/$30 or more and you can request a personally tailored celebration ceremony for any birth/relationship/death anniversary.  And previously I’ve written and hosted a survivors tashlich service here in Manchester and I’m happy to send copies of the liturgy for it to all backers who request it regardless of donation amount. Rabbis in the Reform movement who have read it have made the following comments:

“Thank you for this helpful and rather special resource.”

“Really powerful stuff.”

“This is incredibly powerful and beautifully put together – thank you.”

I can do this work compassionately and well. I hope you’ll come on this journey with me.

Sitting shiva for the UK as radical activism

It’s been almost a week since the election results poured in and we woke to another five years of Conservative control in the UK and the occupied six counties. As a queer, disabled, Jewish and mad non-binary person reliant on both social security benefits and the NHS for survival, there is nothing good that this government will bring me, nor do I believe that finding a personal silver lining is ethical or appropriate when so many people will suffer, be deported, be pushed into poverty and/or die like they/we have been doing since May 2010 when the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition was formed.

I was 18 when that election happened – my entire adult life has been lived under an austerity government that has time and again aimed right at my communities and other vulnerable marginalised people to carry out their vicious ideology. A few times a month I think I have run out of hope, as stories pour in about the rising number of illegal deportations; the deaths of Windrush migrants denied NHS treatment for cancers; the lifelong disabled people dehumanised by Capita and ATOS asking us why we haven’t killed ourselves yet if we’re that depressed or summoning us for mandatory reviews as if our connective tissue or limbs has magically grown back in the past three years; the maternity hospitals reporting refugee and migrant pregnant people no longer seeking early intervention when their pregnancy becomes complicated for fear they will be deported too; the ESA claimants found fit to work and dropping dead in job centers a week later; the private companies running prisons being caught enacting vicious abuse with immunity from prosecution because all but the most compassionate question if maybe somebody in jail deserves a good kicking now and then; the Grenfell survivors still in temporary housing two and a half years on having to listen to Jacob Rees Mogg call them stupid for following fire fights instructions that would have been accurate if private developers hadn’t destabilised the tower block by wrapping it in flammable material; the disabled people having their care hours sliced again and again until they’re left with 15 minutes a day to access a day’s worth of nutrition, hydration, medical care and hygiene and put back to bed, if they’re able to access state provided care at home at all rather than being threatened with being institutionalised against their will or left with no help at all; the schools buying washing machines and starting pantries and food banks and creating mutual aid networks to keep their pupils and their parents fed and clean so they don’t end up as another addition to the 120,000 and climbing austerity deaths. I look at the tidal wave of austerity’s victims and at my sick, mad, poor, queer and disabled friends, my friends who are migrants and/or people of colour, sex workers, on benefits or ten medications a day that they couldn’t afford without the NHS, elders and parents and trans people sometimes all at once and I feel a growing fear that they will be consumed by that wave, or I will.

The election was supposed to be a turning point. I don’t believe that Jeremy Corbyn was the Messiah or indeed that any form of government is or can be free of sin or the sort of deep corruption that harms people. I don’t think it’s possible to work within a system reliant on capitalism, fossil fuel and racist militarisation of both borders and police forces and have a truly just society. But I do believe less people would have died under a Labour government, and given where we are right now, with at least a 120,000 preventable death toll for the last nine years, creating less deaths by moving away from an ideological system (that doesn’t work to meet its stated goals anyway) based in harm of the vulnerable and protection of the ultra rich would have been a goal that could have been achieved. Easily. 

We would have had more time to fight the inevitable wrongs a Labour government would have made because we would be less broke, less stuck in survival mode, able to leave our homes and access community, decent health and social care, and do the things that bring us joy. Keeping us stuck in a crisis holding pattern for nine years straight was a deliberate tactic to keep us from organising a concentrated fight back – our lives being saturated with a fight for survival, leaving us with less energy, time and material resources to fight lesser evils worked in the government’s favour and it isn’t going to let up any time soon.

So the election result comes in and I go numb. I make a space for communal grieving on Discord which is slowly mutating into a social action space, and I howl into the void with my friends and family. And when I am alone, awake at five am with my hips dislocating, unable to focus on anything but pain or politics and no friends awake to scream with me, I turn to my faith to find a way through.

In Jewish culture, the stages of grief following a bereavement are clearly marked – the initial stage from the death until the funeral is one filled with strong, unprocessed emotion – a state of total disorientation and shock. We tear our clothes, and we prepare to put the dead to rest. The funeral takes place as soon after death as possible, and then we spend seven days sitting shiva in our houses. People may come to sit with the mourner, but until the mourner begins speaking to them directly about their bereavement, it is custom not to bring it up as a topic. After seven days in our homes, mourning privately, we begin to re-enter the world, but are still considered in the same state of mourning as we were during shiva until 30 days after the funeral, and less intense but still recognised and valid mourning until a year after the death, after which we are more or less expected to be capable of functioning at our usual standard in society most of the time.

What can a highly detailed routine of grieving like this show us now, as we feel the weight of the inevitable conservative political cruelty closing in around us? 

It gives us a framework we can use. This is mourning, of a kind, and treating it as such, taking and making space for our feelings is activism. Remaining soft, tender and emotionally connected in a time where kindness is in short supply from society on a macro level (though interpersonal care webs and kindnesses are thriving), is a vital and radical political act. It is activism of a kind often under valued because it is traditionally femme coded. And it will enable us to do other, equally powerful and important activism further down the line.

So here is my prescription for you, if you want it: Do a condensed grieving process. Time scales vary from person to person in this as in all things, so I’ll keep that loose. Take what you need and leave the rest, there is no wrong way to do this.

Take an hour, an afternoon, a day and use it to express your unprocessed grief and fear and anger at what could have been, what you and all of us have been denied, and what we have to face instead. Journal it, do free word association, score and scribble on a piece of paper with a pencil or pen until it’s nothing but a squiggle of raw kinetic energy. Go to the woods, or stick your face in a cushion and once you’re there, scream. Cry. Pray. Hit or kick a punching bag or a cushion for as long as it takes. Bake something and focus deeply on the process of cracking the egg or watching the yeast activate. Meditate. Get high if it’s your thing and you can do it safely. Record an audio file or a vlog talking through your emotional palate at that moment in time. If you can, avoid doing activities that you associate with self harm. This is not about internalising your rage or turning your pain on yourself, so if it’s possible, try and avoid using methods on this list that you use to harm yourself.

When you feel like you have no more to express, like you’re all screamed, baked or toked out, move to the next stage. Sit shiva for what we’ve lost.

This stage is supposed to be less raw – this is the time for talking things through and processing them at your own pace. For sitting in community, in peace and thinking, talking, praying and eating together in a mindful, connected way. Reminding us that in the depths of the dark there are people who will show up for us when they can. 

And in our mad, sick, care-providing, broke and forever freelancing and zero hour contracting lives, take the time to recognise what showing up can look like – it might be a heartfelt Facebook comment from a friend in another country who doesn’t know your grief intimately from the inside like a local friend might, but can still empathise and offer to hold space for you; it might be a bed-living queer from a block or a bus ride away skyping you because you’re both too sick for physical hangouts, and this way you can still have dinner together. It might look like the person who can’t provide talking support but drops you takeaway money so you can focus your energy somewhere other than preparing food today; or the friend who drops off your meds and dashes off again because their caring responsibilities to others have priority right now; or the friend who brings their laptop and works in your living room so you have physical company even if they’re busy working overtime so they can afford rent this month. Let people know what you’re processing, and they will join you if and how they can. 

Linger in this stage for a few days, but a week maximum. It’s supposed to be temporary, and staying overly long can have negative mental health impacts if you are predisposed to world events becoming depression triggers. Limit other focuses as far as possible – pause on the novel you’re writing or your daily jog for a day or two if it feels more like work than healing (I say this mindful that in our lives as marginalised people we are expected to carry significant amounts of unpaid unrecognised labour that we may not feel able to put down even for a day or two – these suggestions are to be taken within your personal situation. This is not middle class “self care is a spa day at an inaccessible retreat that costs a weeks JSA money, but don’t worry, you can put on your credit card – treat yourself!!” nonsense), and be in your thoughts as much as is comfortable. 

Imagine what could have been – what a Manchester with fully funded social care would look like; or a Belfast with no houseless people sleeping rough; a rural Yorkshire with a nationalised rail service that actually works; queer and sex working communities with proper access to PrEP; bed-residing disabled and sick people able to access online communities of our peers using the free national internet service. Imagine as much of it as you can, as vividly and vibrantly and radically as you dare. Step beyond the manifesto promises, raise your standards and let them become a guideline as you start working your way towards the question of what comes next. 

When you are ready to ask yourself that question and start answering it, you are done with shiva, and ready to re-enter your communities, recharged to do the practical and radical work of surviving and resisting together, and where possible work towards building the beautiful spaces you dreamed up when imagining what could have been. You might not be able to nationalise the railways as a community organiser, but you can make plans to provide a door to door ride sharing (real ride sharing with other community members, not the faux compassionate capitalism Uber uses that word to mean) option for disabled, mad, broke, parenting and elder community members to get to your event. You can’t bring back the Sure Start centers single handed, but you can make sure there’s a crèche at the protest planning meeting and that it’s not just femmes running it because child care is femme coded work. You dream big and then make it happen in miniature – starting small scale gives you room to grow and expand.

Giving time to your emotions and processing events that have and will impact you and your communities helps us prevent burn out when we work to resist and repair, afterwards. It allows you time to dream and plan a future and deliberately clear a space for hope to get through, rather than trying to push it through the despair later as the tangles of it trip you up. 

Processing and understanding your feelings now, in a controlled way, is more healing than trying to hold your fear, anger and grief while also coordinating community responses against the anti Gypsy Roma and Traveller legislation ,or organising a solidarity fund for people in your disabled sick and mad world who have been kicked off PIP again because this time the assessor with no mental health training decided that they had no problems with hallucinations without asking that question during the assessment (this isn’t a hypothetical person – this was me in my most recent PIP reassessment. I challenged them, I beat them. I shouldn’t have had to fight but I won.).

Doing the work to understand and process your emotional palate now doesn’t mean you’ll never have a blip or a breakdown over the state of the political situation while doing other pieces of activist labour in the future, nor does it make you a failure when it does happen, any more than a mourner is considered wrong or a failure for having a day when they can’t stop crying six months or six years after shiva ended. 

Think of this not as a fix but as a pressure valve – processing and grieving now eases off the strain inside you, allows you to acknowledge and sit with the deep ache in your heart, and then keep going. The pressure may build back up, but you’ve figured out what the pressure looks like. You’ve put names to it, and found ways to build safeguards against some of the things that make you want to weep. The community space you’ve built on mastadon, or the accessible sex party that acts as a fundraiser for people to afford their prescription meds or pay their overdraft charges after they got sanctioned, the know your rights tenant workshops you corun on twitch from bed. You can hold those to the wound in your heart because you prepared for it to open again, and your activism has formed a balm and a medicine for it, as well as for your communities.

So sit shiva, prepare the dressings for patching up your wounded heart. Cry or scream for what we’ve lost and what is yet to come, and then go back to what you’re good at – the radical, awe inspiring activism of survival. We will carry each other through this with radical love, care and compassion. I believe in you, I believe in us.

Parshat Shmini

I’ve decided to start publishing my thoughts on the weekly Torah portions, mostly for my own record, but also I’m putting them on my blog because a few friends might be interested in my take on things.  I am not a Rabbi, nor do I claim to have the amount of knowledge and understanding of the Torah and Talmud that a Rabbi does.  These are my thoughts only.  Please note, I follow the logic of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg that God has no gender, therefore I use God throughout in place of gendered pronouns that many often use as shorthand for God.  Please don’t come at me about you thinking that is wrong.  Without further ado, here is my take on Parshat Shmini.

This picture of Tefillin Barbie reading Torah delighted me – this Barbie and her sisters in Torah are made by Hasoferet, and can be bought in her Etsy shop

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Parshat Shmini has a dual focus on the priestly requirements for making holy sacrifices, and dietary laws. Aaron and his sons are called upon to make their first public sacrifice to God after their seven day preparation for their assumption of public duties as priests. Moses tells them that God will appear when the sacrifice is done, that God will appear to the entire community there present, as part of the confirmation of Aaron and his sons’ roles as priests.

Things don’t go according to plan, however. As well as the animal sacrifices Moses told them to prepare, after God’s appearance, Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu choose to also offer pans of coals and incense for God’s holy fire to bless, which God “had not enjoined upon them” (Leviticus 10:1). In response, they are struck dead in front of God.

There is debate among the scholars if this death is a punishment for an inappropriate sacrifice, or a reward – fire consumes them as it does a holy sacrifice, Philo argues, taking them to God. Philo asserts that this is the meaning of Leviticus 10:3 – “Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.”  Philo believes that Nadab and Abihu transcended physical form at this point and were taken to God’s glory. This is in opposition to Rashi’s opinion that Nadab and Abihu were killed in punishment for drunkenness, evidenced, he argues, through the verses shortly after dictating that priests should not partake of strong liquor if they wish to carry out their duties appropriately (Leviticus 10:9).

I feel that there is a point between these two opinions, where the truth of the story may actually lie. Nadab and Abihu choose to offer incense and coals in their fire pans, in addition to the multiple animals that had just been sacrificed – animals that had been specified by God through Moses as something that was wanted and required. God did not ask for what Leviticus 10:1 describes as “alien fire” but Aaron’s sons gave it anyway.

At this point, they had just spent a week inside the tent preparing to be ordained as priests and preparing for the consecration of the Tabernacle, so it is fair to assume they were probably very excited about what they were about to do, what they were becoming a part of. God had also just appeared before them, and before everybody else. If we take a stance from the midpoint of Rashi and Philo’s opinions, they may have been intoxicated on the excitement of their closeness to God at that moment, rather than a more literal intoxication on wine, and they possibly got carried away with that intoxicating excitement. Their logic, in this state of excitement might have been, if God asked for some offerings from the priests and the community, surely more offerings would show their love for God even better?

This behaviour put me in mind of newly minted activists in social justice causes, who, so caught up in being a part of something new to them and which fills them with excitement and a newfound sense of community, decide to take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel by giving themselves jobs that nobody asked them to do, that aren’t actually useful.

For example, a new volunteer at the LGBT Center library who is asked to put a stack of returned books back on the shelf, and in addition, changes the entire categorisation system from alphabetical to Dewy decimal. This action makes them feel like they have been useful, and done something helpful out of their own initiative but actually the library was set up that way to make it accessible to the highest number of users, most of whom don’t actually know the Dewy system, and now can’t find anything. If they had asked, a more experienced volunteer could have explained this to them, but they didn’t ask for guidance, they decided they knew best, and now somebody has to undo their attempts at “helping”.

In this analogy, if the new volunteers, Nadab and Abihu had valued the expertise of the elder volunteer, Moses, and asked if it was appropriate to offer incense, Moses could have told them that it wasn’t, explained why, and they would have learned something useful.

Staying at this midpoint between Philo and Rashi’s opinions, it is possible that God recognised the intention of Nadab and Abihu’s overexcited attempts to offer the incense, and brought them to God’s presence, sweeping them up in that holy fire, and bringing them near to God after their death. It served to reward their attempts to praise God, but also to temper the rest of the community’s behaviour so that the entire community would not seek to emulate Nadab and Abihu’s over eagerness and ignore God’s word and requirements in favour of their own interpretation of what God really wanted.
In this way, it is also possible to see the parshat’s continuation from Nadab and Abihu’s deaths into the detailing of the kashrut laws as not necessarily a shutting down of passionate worship, but more akin to how a person rebuilds and clarifies their boundaries after those boundaries have been violated – either in terms of microaggressions, or interpersonal violence and abuse.

This list of ways that the priests are expected to behave, and details of things that Jewish people should or should not eat can be argued as an extension of the modern argument that intent is not magical – even if Nadab and Abihu did not mean to violate God’s boundaries by their offerings that God had not asked for, it was still inappropriate, and God now can be seen offering explicit guidance to ensure that such inappropriateness is not repeated in the future, by removing all doubt about what is and is not wanted and welcomed both in priestly behaviour, and the entire community’s standards for eating clean and unclean animals.

The level of clarity that these requirements go into is enough that no one overenthusiastic priest can argue that they are restricting their diet or their behaviour more than others are in order to prove that they love God better than everyone else, like Nadab and Abihu’s extra offerings might have done. Thus, God’s commands pre-empt and avoid a race to the bottom where everyone seeks to outdo each other in their piousness, avoiding their behaviour becoming about themselves and their status as ‘the most devout’ rather than being about God, as it is supposed to be.

It forces people to think – am I doing this because it is right, or because I wish to be seen to be doing it this way? If they follow what has been asked of them, it is because it is the right thing to do – going above and beyond unnecessarily is about themselves. This lesson is given to us and can, and must be taken into our everyday lives, our interactions with others.

The message of the entire parshat, from Aaron’s offerings to God that were asked for and accepted, to Nadab and Abihu’s transgression, however well meaning, to the boundaries God rebuilds in response to it, guides us to examine our behaviour, and our transgressions, and take a true accounting of whether we were really trying to do what is right, to serve our dear ones and our wider communities in the ways they have asked for aid, or if we have been seeking self-aggrandisement at the expense of those things we have claimed to be doing to help the world around us.

Moreover, it asks us to think, how can we make it right if we have been doing things for our own benefit, at the expense of what others need from us. And the parshat tells us – we can listen to what is needed from us, and do just that.

This Nagini Retcon: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Call JK Rowling On Her Bullshit

Content note: We’ll be discussing racism and racist cultural appropriation and there are a few images of anti-Asian war propaganda in this post.

With a £700 million net worth (roughly 923 million in US dollars) JK Rowling is the 197th richest person in the UK, according to the 2018 Times Rich List.  One would think that’d be enough money to buy a clue.  Sadly not, as yet another episode of bullshit has proved when it was revealed that in Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald (already a clusterfuck on its own what with the Johnny Depp apologists who make up the majority of the people in power on the film including Rowling, and what seems like a worrying suggestion from the director & cast about a lack of on-screen acknowledgement of Dumbledore’s sexuality) has cast Claudia Kim as Nagini, aka Voldemort’s pet snake/the vessel for one of his Horcruxes.

…yikes.

What is Starr Stuff made of?

Welcome to my new blog series.  I’ve called it Made of Starr Stuff, because I love that Carl Sagan quote.

““The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

I like the idea that everything is made up of the same particles and elements, and it suits how I’m going to treat this blog.  I’ve tried to start blogging before only to fall flat because I haven’t felt like I should, say, share a movie review on a history blog, or talk about history on a comics blog.  So this time I’m going to explode the fixed genre idea of what a blog is, and just talk about everything in the one blog.  I’ll make gratuitous use of tags so people looking for my history hot takes won’t have to sift through Star Trek studies, and movie monographs will be easy to find between book based broadcasts.  (Yes I used a thesaurus to make those all alliterative, no I’m not sorry).

So come join me while I chat about all the things I just mentioned and more.  While I do have an academic background, my intention is to write in an accessible, useful way.  I won’t be academically citing my works on history, but I will be adding little reading lists that will help you dealve into subjects I’ve talked about if you’re interested.  Likewise, I’ll add some jumping off points suggestions if I’m talking about huge sprawling series like X-Men or Star Trek, or discussing genres in fiction.

If you want to interact with me in real time, I live on the internet, so come hit me up on Twitter: @Femme_Jaime.  If you’re interested in requesting a post on a specific historical event or piece of media from me, I’m happy to do this for a donation on Paypal of £10 or more depending on the size of the request, how much time it would take, and if I’d need to buy/rent anything to facilitate writing it.  If you just want to express appreciation without requesting anything in return, you can put something in my Ko-fi tip jar.

Who never skips review day? LEGO Batman!

I’ve been to see LEGO Batman three times in the cinema now, and if that doesn’t tell you how this review is going to go, well, then you’re not the world’s greatest detective.

The whole film is great.  It’s really fun, and the story is more pitched at fans of Joel Schumacher and the animated series than the Batman vs Superman grimdark-verse.  It’s bright and poppy, the kind of thing that makes parents and studio executives relaxed and happy. Zach Galifianakis was probably my favourite Joker after Mark Hamill – you could tell how into it he was the whole way through the film.  Rosario Dawson was ten out of ten as Batgirl, and I know I wasn’t the only one in the screenings I went to who let out a little cheer when she asked “if you can call me Batgirl, can I call you Batboy?”  I especially loved that the studio saw reason and made her Lego figure *and* Jim Gordon’s both brown, given Rosario isn’t a white woman, and I’m hoping it carries through into Lego’s ongoing branding for Batgirl toys too, even after the film’s popularity fades (if it ever does).

The plot is really beautiful, exploring the concepts of fear of attachment after trauma, and how to build a chosen/non-blood-related family in a way that super hero narratives like Batman just seem designed for, given how many of them have Tragic Orphan Syndrome as a pre-requisite for a backstory.  The soundtrack is also mind-blowingly cool – the end credit song is playing as I write this review, and I don’t think I’m ever going to hear (I Just) Died In Your Arms without laughing ever again.

[MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW]
On a more serious note, I noticed how the film absolutely didn’t give Batman a pass for being mean to Babs, Alfred or Dick because he has PTSD – he had to work on his reactions that were (reasonably) upsetting them by taking away their autonomy, and he had to both explain why what he’d done wasn’t okay, and do better for them to forgive him.  It wasn’t just magically forgotten because the plot demanded it, nor was Batman expected to stop having PTSD because Barbara got mad at him for reacting badly to her, Robin and Alfred being in danger.  The quote from the beginning was really meaningful for anyone who’s ever had to change their behaviour to come back from the place you go when you experience trauma.  Hoo.

I’d rate this film 4/5, because while it was fairly excellent it still wasn’t as good as Batman Forever.  Fight me.

The Space Between Us

We went to see The Space Between Us yesterday, and I’m so glad we made the effort to go out despite the terrible weather here, as it was one of the sweetest space stories I’ve ever seen.

Asa Butterfield plays Gardener Elliot, the first (and only) human born on Mars, who decides to travel to earth as a sixteen year old to visit his Skype friend Tulsa.  They go on a road trip and start falling for each other.  That’s the summary you get from the trailer, and it looks fairly bubblegum happy.  Friend, it is so much deeper than that.  You experience isolation, loss, love, witness someone choosing to make life altering decisions as a (film version of a) disabled person.  Gardner chooses to go to earth despite the fact that he might die from the differences in atmospheric pressure and how they’ll affect his body which has only ever known life on Mars.

I really loved the portrayal of both Gardener, and another character as disabled people chosing to do things even if it was risky – it’s a life lesson a lot/most disabled people have to make at some point or another: is it worth it, to live, to have this experience, even if it makes me worse in the long-term?  Even if I might die?  Now most people don’t have experiences of that last question, but I’m pretty sure everyone has thought about what they would do if they had to choose in a life or death situation like that.  I know I have, and I’ve also had to make the other choices – should I have this risky treatment, even if it might make things worse, should it go wrong?  Though Gardener makes the choices with all the spontaneity of a sixteen year old boy, it’s made very clear to us through the film that he understood what he was doing, and it’s worth it.  The same is true for the other character I can’t mention without spoiling the film.

There are some beautiful scenes between Gardener, who is essentially orphaned, and Tulsa, his Skype friend who takes him roadtripping across the US, and it felt really important to see the kinds of emotional honesty that both characters were given in their respective genders – Gardener, a wide-eyed innocent boy who has no guile whatsoever, and Tulsa, a foster care hardened, justifiably angry girl who tries to explain the world to him.  “You can’t just say how you’re feeling, because if we were all honest, then maybe we’d be happy or something,” she tells him at one point when he declares how beautiful he finds her.  And having a boy being the intensely soft, emotionally driven center of the film felt really refreshing, especially after having watched Moonlight a few days earlier, where we watch a soft boy being toughened to an armour plated man.  That moment never comes for Gardener in the film, and I was really grateful, as too often it’s portrayed as natural for boys to have their emotional softness taken away at a tender age, while girls are expected to retain it.

The acting and cinematography are wonderful in this film – Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson deserve so much kudos for their roles, and naturally Gary Oldman knocks it out of the park as the Richard Branson-esque Nathaniel Shepherd.

The one criticism I have of the film, is in its treatment of both Gardener’s mum, Sarah Elliot, and the astronaut who takes care of him on Mars Kendra Wyndham.  Sarah is an astronaut who discovers she’s pregnant while flying to Mars, who is constantly defined as “irresponsible” for not knowing she was pregnant when the mission began – as if a) she didn’t become pregnant through actions undertaken with another person, and b) Nasa wouldn’t routinely screen their astronauts for potential pregnancy before they launched.  It’s all very much hand waved as a “woman’s problem” that she’s irresponsible for not handling before they left on the four-year long trip to Mars.  And then when later in the film, Kendra is vilified for telling Gardener she never wanted children, she’s not seen as having done something good and kind for having raised this random kid she found on the space base on Mars, she’s seen as a monster for not being thrilled that she’s been left to take care of him because nobody else is doing it.  It’s a very big let down in a film that gets men’s emotions so right, and I wish I could pretend that flaw wasn’t there, because otherwise it’s a wonderful, cute and happy emotional rollercoaster of a film.  So it gets 4/5 from me.

The Backstagers

I’ve just picked up issue #7 of The Backstagers after bugging my local comic store for over two weeks after I’d finished reading issues #1-6 back to back when I found them in their £1 comic box.  It’s so good, folks.  It’s whimsical, has a beautiful purple heavy colour pallet and so many different kinds of boys and men, beyond the usual high school archetypes of ‘the jock’ and ‘the nerd’.

Set in an all boys’ school, the book follows Jory as he tries to join the Drama Club, and ultimately ends up joining the backstage crew of Aziz, Beckett, Hunter and Sasha.  Now I used to backstage for my mum’s drama school (yes, I was a trans teen doing light and sound for school aged drama productions – I wonder why I like Beckett so much…), and I love the attention to detail that’s been put into this piece – the sound decks and light rigs, there’s a sequence entirely depicted in hastily finished cardboard props in a later issue, and there’s paint just sodding everywhere in the backstage area.  Realism aside, the whimsical magic that’s introduced in the mysterious tunnels hidden in the backstage area, under the school is amazing – I found the comic in an all ages box, and sure enough I felt catapulted to childhood by the colours and the absolute unpredictability of what the characters will find around each corner.  It’s fairly telling that Rian Sygh also has Munchkin as a credit, the backstage world with it’s kookiness is very reminiscent of Munchkin.

Something else I love is that this series has queer and trans characters (including a queer boy of colour as a lead character, if that’s something you’re missing in your regular pulls) who aren’t there to be a teaching experience for the other characters!  They just…get to be nuanced people like everyone else!  Beckett’s trans status is brought up once, by a character he used to know, and it’s not explained, it’s not made a fuss of.  It’s a character I could see myself adoring way back when I was a trans teenager, because he’s allowed to be complicated, and love and hate things without just being a trangst monster.

Issue #7 just came out, and it’s the penultimate one – so there’s plenty of time to pick up the run and then wait in frustrated joy with me for #8.

Rating 5/5

Alters

I read issues one through three of Paul Jenkins’ Alters in a single sitting.  Mostly because not enough happens in each issue to be satisfying, so I pushed on to see if anything would come of the plot lines being started in issues 1 and 2.  If I’m being kind, I think the set up took longer than I was expecting, as issue #3 was fairly decently paced compared to the other two, and had some good character development.  While the line art and colouring is fairly classically beautiful, reminding me a lot of early 80s Bronze Age X-Men art, the writing of the series feels a lot less nuanced than I’d hoped for with such self congratulatory hype about Chalice being the first mainstream trans superhero.  All of the main characters are charactures – from Chalice’s working class Republican father who is introduced complaining that he can’t take a crap in peace, to her brother with cerebral palsy who is nonverbal and is ‘interpretted’ by other characters as agreeing with them or listening without judgement at various points, to Chalice herself, who gets plenty of the tropey scenes from generic ‘mainstream’ portrayals of trans women characters where we see them changing their clothes or removing makeup and wigs.

The language is also embarrassing in places – her brother is “stricken” with cerebral palsy, and later, a permenantly injured character’s life is described as being “over” because of his injury, when spoken about by a non-disabled character.  Instead of the “nothing about us without us” style of disability inclusion, disability is largely portrayed through the effects it has on other characters – we don’t hear Chalice’s brother express any thoughts until the end of the third issue.

It’s also deeply uncomfortable that the comic is described as the “first-ever superhero series with a central transgender protagonist created by a mainstream writer” when Aftershock is a smaller publisher, and ‘mainstream writer’ seems to be being used as shorthand for cisgendered writer, as trans people have been making art with trans super heroes in ezines for as long as I’ve been around the trans community.

The plot is very classic superhero narrative – new superhero emerges, must choose to go to the dark or light side, and struggles with having a secret identity, but honestly it doesn’t develop fast enough to hold interest, perhaps especially because its not a particularly unique story arc.

Ultimately, I don’t feel like this series is worth the time it takes to read.  If you want a decent mutant series where superheroes have secrets they keep from their families, go and read X-Men; and if you want a decent trans woman to read about, in Gail Simone’s Batgirl, Alysia Yeoh is far less tropey than Chalice, or if you want a broader spectrum of gender representation, you could go for Kieron Gillen’s Inanna, from The Wicked And The Divine series, or James Tynion and Rian Sygh’s Beckett in The Backstagers.

Rating 2/5