Waves: the Fall 2022 issue
From the Editors
Welcome to the Fall 2022 issue of Waves! We believe this is our most thought-provoking issue yet—not only because the ideas are original, but because the authors model such innovative methodologies. In the pieces below, you’ll find ethnographic, poetic, autobiographical, and psychoanalytic approaches to critical inquiry. We hope the work featured here inspires our undergraduate readers to question and push the boundaries of traditional scholarship.
Evelyn Meckley’s “Time’s Twisted Arrow: An Examination of Queer Desynchronization,” for example, offers a first-person, autoethnographic analysis of queer time. Her presence as the author is insistently and unapologetically embodied, intimate, and emotive. Drawings and journal snippets interweave with the insights of phenomenological psychiatrists and queer theorists. Subjectivity is often thought of as an unwelcome guest in academic writing, yet by making her positionality explicit, Meckley produces a complex and moving argument about the way “queer people experience desynchronization” from normative time, “beginning with the initial divergence from chrononormativity, continuing through the often twisted and circuitous temporal experiences that characterize queer self-exploration and ending with a look toward non-normative futures.”
Plucky first-person pronouns appear again in Rebekah Browne’s “praxis” project, “Rootlessness and Placemaking: A Personal Recount and Reflection of Home from a Military Kid Perspective.” Browne applies Yi-Fu Tuan’s ideas about the geography of social space to her own childhood memories in order to reflect on the importance of home and community. Incorporating maps she illustrated of her childhood neighborhood in Kaiserslautern, Germany, Browne paints a vivid picture of the spaces and places that have shaped her understanding of what “home” means to a “military kid.”
Adriana Beltrano’s psychoanalytic reading of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Fleabag results in a surprising theory of love as “desire of the absence of the other.” “Subconsciously,” Beltrane argues, “we seek a safe, distanced castration from the other, or a desire that can never be fulfilled”—a dynamic epitomized by Fleabag’s tragicomic desire for a Catholic priest.
The final piece in this issue, Michelle Muli’s poem “The Black Wedding Dress,” is an ekphrastic celebration of Qondiswa James’s silent protest near Cape Town’s City Hall on February 10, 2022. Ekphrasis derives from the Greek, ek, “out,” and phrasis, “to speak”—to speak out. Muli’s ekphrastic poem—a poem written about a scene or work of art—is thus a powerful way “of giving a voice to those rendered voiceless by the patriarchy whilst also criticizing powers that thrive under the influence of gender-based violence.” With her poem, Muli joins James’s fight against gender-based violence and systems of oppression in South Africa. And like James, Muli “uses silence, ironically so, to encourage people to speak up against such systems.”
One of the reasons we launched Waves was to create a journal that welcomes the diverse range of ideas, methodologies, and modes of communication we see from undergraduate students. We had noticed that many undergraduate journals have submission requirements that shut out the kinds of experimentation that lead to discovery and change. We’re grateful for the variety of projects authors contributed to this issue and will continue to celebrate undergraduates who are experimenting, pushing boundaries, and making waves.
Enjoy!
—The Waves team
Queer Time
Time’s Twisted Arrow: An Examination of Queer Desynchronization, by Evelyn Meckley
Theory of Love in Fleabag
“Desire of the Absence of the Other in Fleabag,” by Adriana Beltrano
Placemaking
“Rootlessness and Placemaking: A Personal Recount and Reflection of Home from a Military Kid Perspective,” by Rebekah Browne
The Fight against Gender-based Violence
“The Black Wedding Dress,” by Michelle Muli
Evelyn Meckley
“This autoethnography was written as the culmination of a semester’s worth of examining positionality and temporal perception in my Quest 1 course. When it came time to choose which aspect of my identity I wanted to explore for my final paper, my queerness was the obvious choice. Queer temporality fascinates me, and through the genre of autoethnography, I was able to reflect on both my own temporality and that of other queer people. As an autoethnography is meant to examine society through the lens of the self, I hoped to address and explore some broadly-felt aspects of the queer temporal experience—to help cishet people understand and to help queer people feel seen.”
Adriana Beltrano
“Here, I wanted to explore the theory that when we desire, especially when it comes to romantic desires, we are actually desiring the absence of the other. It is the age-old adage of, ‘I want what I can’t have.’. . . My goal is to have readers (perhaps mostly young adults who are relatively new to love/desire) question their desires and whether they actually hope for fulfillment. When we grow tired of our partners, is it because they are not for us, or is it because media has made us used to unfulfilled or impossible to fulfill relationships as the end goal? On a similar note, are we purposefully desiring things that will never lead to our desires being fulfilled?”
Rebekah Browne
““Rootlessness and Placemaking: A Personal Recount and Reflection of Home from a Military Kid Perspective” is a rendition of a “Student Praxis Project” I was assigned in my class, Spatial and Temporal Thinking. . . . Our course textbook, Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, heavily shaped this module and provided context and language for the reflection portion. We were asked to contextualize Tuan’s perspectives on the impact of physical space on social space, as well as the significance of the concept of homeland using our own life experience. . . . The project also required complementary maps. I understand the maps may not be of a publishing quality, especially regarding readability and accessibility. But I chose not to redraw them because I resonate with their informal quality and hope it may reinforce the intimacy of this piece. ”
Michelle Muli
“On the 10th of February 2022 – the day of South Africa’s State of the Nation Address – a lone figure stood mutely in front of the parliamentary building in Cape Town, donned in a black dress and veil. Through videos on the internet, I watched this woman stand in a silent protest against gender-based violence. . . . I wrote this poem in response to the silent protest held by local artist Qondiswa James, inspired by how she took a stand against gender-based violence only to have her efforts plundered by police forces that repaid her civility with brutality. . . . Above all, it pushes the concept of standing against systems of oppression and uses silence, ironically so, to encourage people to speak up against such systems.”