How Magical Realism Reflects the Queer Experience

Illustration by Malaika Astorga

As we continue to get sucked into sanitized versions of LGBTQ+ identities, one thing is becoming clear: I’m tired of mainstream queer media. The same sentiment could be expressed more succinctly with the words “I’m tired of mainstream media”, but it’s the queer ones that are a particular thorn in my side. The increasing sanitization of queer stories may make them more digestible for cishet audiences, but it inevitably comes at the cost of reducing the queer experience to what can be easily turned into Funko Pops and brand deals.

In the search for a more authentic experience, I—surprisingly enough—turned to a genre that isn’t necessarily known for its queer representation: magical realism. For someone with surface-level knowledge of magical realism, it might be more fitting to discuss the literary genre in its initial context: originating from Latin America in a period of significant political turmoil and using unimaginative language when describing imaginative events to convey messages of social and political critique. However, a closer look at traits unifying the works of the genre reveals parallels between the magical realist experience and the queer experience.

Magical realism employs a technique called authorial reticence, or the intentional withholding of information about the world from the audience. Authorial reticence, and the effect it has on the reader, wonderfully reflect the lack of preparedness to navigate a cishet world as a queer person. After all, don’t you—the queer person reading this—ever feel like your peers were given some kind of survival guide that got mysteriously lost in the mail in your case? Like you missed a life-altering memo?

Another point of comparison is that the underlying political aspect of magical realist works serves as a mirror for the inherently political lives of queer people. In a world where queer bodies and relationships are constantly exploited as discussion points in TV debates or potential vote-sways to garner a few votes in elections, the removal of political undertones from media can feel like a flattening of queer storylines. Even though magical realist works rarely discuss queer issues, the fundamental connection between a narrative and its underlying sociopolitical contexts offers comfort for those who feel that their lives, too, have an underlying context.

Perhaps most importantly, magical realism turns its eye on the reader; it is the relationship between the text and the audience that adds an extra layer of depth to magical realist works. Everyday life often marginalizes queer experiences and people, whether they’re characters in the story of life or an audience for cishet realities. Conversely, crafting a magical realist narrative requires thinking not only about the in-text world but also the world of those reading it: how much should the reader know about the character? How is the reader supposed to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake – and within this world, is there even a meaningful difference?

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Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” is a story with a relatively simple premise – it’s about a man who turns into an axolotl. The story is a classic example of a magical realist text: the real-world setting of Paris is contrasted with the fantastical events, and the reader never really finds out how the transformation happens (in the original context, the story was meant as an extended metaphor for the political situation in Argentina).

“Axolotl” brings special attention to the process of transformation in a way that may be comforting for transgender audiences, even though there is no mention of gender in the story itself. The narrator’s recount of his transformation is parallel to the process of exploring one’s gender identity: the initial fascination (“I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else”); the intrinsic feeling of connection with the unknown (“They and I knew.”); the feeling of removal from one’s old self (at the end of the story, now in the aquarium alongside the axolotls, the narrator starts to refer to his human version, which still visits, in third person) and that the transition was meant to happen all along. The narrator fully embraces being an axolotl, with all of its weirdness and with full awareness that it means at least partially breaking away from what it means to be a “regular” person. Ain’t that the representation you sometimes need in place of pretty protagonists on both big and small screens, desperately attempting to convince cishet audiences that “queer people are just like you, really”?

In contrast to “Axolotl”, Chavissa Woods’ short story collection Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country focuses more on the queer than the magical realist. Although some stories in the collection are just plain and simple literary fiction, the story which leans into magical realism the most is “A New Mohawk”, a story of a young trans man who (how very topically) one day wakes up with the Gaza Strip attached to his head. “Take the Way Home that Leads Back to Sullivan Street” is a story of a lesbian and her partner who share hallucinations (or are they hallucinations?) after doing drugs at their in-laws’ Mensa party. Almost every story in the collection features queer characters, and none of them stray away from portraying the characters as disgustingly human, with all the ugliness it requires.

Woods seems to get something that many contemporary creators of queer storylines don’t get: that delving into the peculiarities of the queer experience isn’t a bad thing, and that creating art that fits cishet ideals of “normality” shouldn’t be the goal. I think the most vivid element of TTDWYGITC is its inability to be sterilized and turned into Shein merchandise: it’s queerness you cannot get out with bleach and capital.

If you’re a queer reader, fatigued with the increasingly boring and sterilized portrayals of queer realities in media, go to a library and grab a book from the “magical realism” shelf. After all, the original rainbow flag included a stripe symbolizing magic.

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Magdalena Styś is a jack of all trades and a master of putting them all into their schedule. You can check out their work here or follow them on Instagram.

Malaika Astorga is the Co-Founder & Creative Director of Also Cool. She is a Mexican-Canadian visual artist, writer, and social media strategist currently based in Montreal.

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For Pleasure: An Essay

Illustration by Malaika Astorga

« Pâtes ou poulet? »

« Pâtes, s'il vous plaît. »

The stewardess rapidly picked a combination of little containers and handed over the grey tray. While I waited for the moment when I could take off my mask, I analyzed the food and its disposable packagings: pasta in the aluminum cuboid, a transparent plastic pot with indistinguishable veggies, plastic cutlery, tiny paper packs of salt and pepper, plastically -contained vinegar, a chewy piece of bread, a butter stick, hand wipes, napkins, cookies. I opened the pasta container to find overcooked red sauce. There is something about the aesthetics of airplane food that makes it more believable that we're travelling amongst clouds at hundreds of kilometres per hour.

I was feeling heavy. I had just finished the book O Peso do Pássaro Morto by Aline Bei. The romance asks the question, "How much loss fits in a woman's life?" Chapter by chapter, new layers of pain were revealed for the character. Each chapter recounts a year of life, of abuse, of an obligation of performance, of loneliness. It was the mix of the plane's constant buzz and my rage against how women are expected to endure struggles that made me look at the butter stick and desire its melting decadence to moisten the stale pasta. When this thought first crossed my mind, I smiled. What if my partner sees that? Health, other than the events of disease, is a performance. Sitting in the middle chair of the corridor line, I imagine my neighbours watching me dissolve the cholesterol stick into my meal.

Tired of other people's expectations of her, Cléo from Agnes Varda's Cléo de 5 a 7 takes control of her own narrative, proclaiming: "Damn Tuesday! I'll do as I like." She dresses in a stupid winter hat and goes for a summer walk. Bei's protagonist never told off the legislators who postulated how she should live her life. She embodied silence, and silently she died, choked on her own puke.

Thinking of both women, I decided I'd prefer wearing more stupid winter hats.

I first took one-quarter of the mini butter stick. The saltiness and fat of the butter smoothened the texture of the tomato sauce. I checked my surroundings and melted the rest of the butter into my aluminum container. By the end of the meal, I was overcome by the adrenaline of rebelling against public eating norms. I was victorious over shame. I giggled to myself. It was probably confirmation bias, but instantaneously my face felt greasier. There was a silly intensity of joy. A joy that is based on not giving in to the Panopticon. I proposed to myself an experiment. I wanted to try the opposite of Bei's character. I decided to go on a one-month journey searching for the answer to “How much pleasure fits in a woman's life?”

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We arrived from the airport, dropped my luggage off at my house, did groceries, and started cooking vegan burgers. My partner's roommates arrived all together. One of them had said they would welcome us with cake and beer. Instead, they came in time for my partner to cook them dinner. I listened to their discussion of domestic issues in French. I questioned if I was already failing in the search for pleasure. Exhausted from the jet lag, we went to bed. Before the light was turned off, I looked at my partner and said I wouldn't go on the canoeing trip with his friends anymore. He opened his eyes wide and asked why.

I had explained the idea of a hedonistic month earlier when the airplane landed. So I replied, “I don't think I will have fun.”

In the dim room, I contained my smile. For once, I didn't re-explain that my French is not agile enough to participate in conversations, and his friends—although bilingual Montrealers—weren't quite welcoming to anglophones. Anglophone… as if Portuguese wasn't my first language, as if English always came to me smoothly. For all I didn't say, I allowed the smile to cover my face in its grease.

My partner was clearly disappointed with me for backing off less than a week before the trip. I hardly ever cancel plans with anyone. I felt guilty, but then he asked if this pleasure thing was serious. Yes, it is! I felt empowered by my research. I was ready to focus on making my own plans.

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I imagine some activities as reserved for my elderly self. Having chickens, trail running, naked live modelling. In search of stuffing my life with as much pleasure as possible, I took inspiration from the bucket list I have prepared for when I'm very wrinkled. A big part of the list involved me being fitter, wiser or the owner of a backward, but being bare is ageless. I proceeded to make the arrangements for naked live modelling. I messaged a friend of a friend who organized the event. I rehearsed poses and balancing. I wanted the pleasure of feeling that the body is no other than a still-life composition.

On a Wednesday, looking at the evening lights of Place des Arts, I felt like Dorothée. In Varda's movie, Cléo asks if Dorothée didn't feel too exposed when live modelling. Dorothée replied: “Nonsense! My body makes me happy, not proud. They're looking at more than just me. A shape, an idea. It's as if I wasn't there."

Standing. Sitting. Laying. My body received attention but without being a target. For once, it was only marked by its stillness.

I maximized pleasure whenever possible while maintaining my functional adult duties. I said more NOs in that week-and-a-half than I had done in the past couple of months. I was overjoyed by committing to finishing my poetry manuscript. And when I wasn't writing, I spent time with my beloved community. I was unaware at the time, but I practiced part of Epicurus’ ethics: the priority of friendships. I searched for ataraxia, the lack of suffering and the feeling of calm and enjoyment. I asked myself constantly: “Will this bring me joy?”

I only saw my partner twice or thrice in the first two weeks, and he wasn't ever quite spiritually present. Once I stopped going to his friends' events just because I wanted to see him, we hardly ever saw each other. And he had always been too busy to spend time with my friends.

After a weekend with friends, foraging mushrooms, dancing and meeting new people, I missed him. On Monday morning, I proposed dinner at 7:30 PM at my place. He agreed, until at 4 PM when he texted me: "Actually, I think I am gonna go climb. But see you around 9."

I read the message, defeated. There was the same amount of disconnection with him as all the connection I felt with my friends. Earlier on that day, in therapy, I asked: “How do I know when it is a hard phase, and when it is over?” It had never quite been an easy relationship, but the struggles had solidified in the past two months. Instead of replying, my therapist exchanged questions. "Did you find the answer?" I am always afraid that I know too well what my therapist wants to say when she doesn't reply directly.

Still holding my phone after reading the text, I started crying on the sofa. My roommate came to check what was happening. “It needs to be over today,” I told her, and she knew exactly what I was referring to.

I cleaned the tears from my face. “I'm tired of being sad about this. I'm gonna go on a run.” Angry, I left the apartment. I mentally screamed at myself that I had let this go on for too long, that I had tried, but that love doesn't work by itself.

It was a ridiculous idea to run while my breathing system was busy with hiccups. I sat down. Angry. Crying. No endorphins were created.

I should be focusing on my pleasure, goddamn it!

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He arrived at my place at 8:40 PM. I was slightly high from a friend's joint. He asked about my weekend, and I described the events, clearly overwhelmed by joy.

"How about me? Where am I in your amazing life?"

“Yeah, you are never really around in these moments.” The words left my mouth easily. The anxiety that this topic had always brought me was brushed away by the weed.

"What should we do about it?"

I knew he expected me to ask him to be there. But I felt so neglected asking, it would be naïve to ask for presence. I was tired, and my head was clear. “I think we should break up.”

He stopped for a couple of seconds, realizing I was serious. In the next hour, I calmly explained my reasons: I didn't want to feel like I was the only one trying, I felt invisible, like his desires were always bigger than mine. I wanted someone that wanted to be in my life. Actively. 

He said he loved me. He said it made sense. He said he felt like shit while climbing. He said it was true that he took me for granted. He approached me for a hug.

In my head, I narrated the event: This is our last hug. Now, we'll never have sex, we'll never wake up together, and we'll never be partners again. The hug ended.

"So, how do we fix this?"

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I started falling behind on pleasure. Academically, I felt drowned. After spending September doing the bare minimum and spending most of my time finishing the manuscript, I was burned out. Months before, I had decided to engage in the Honours program. I had enrolled in classes that I would have never taken if I had seriously considered the enjoyment factor. I thought of it as a pain necessary for the pleasure of a future self. 

Every week I was assigned to read English texts from the Renaissance and the 18th century. I had always avoided European period literature courses because their title describes all the readings well: stories of white men for white men. That is required if you want to be "honoured." Complaining about the required courses was a useless complaint summarized by a good friend: "Well, Laura, it was you who decided to do gringo studies. Hold the bomb."

Trying, or in a Brazilian Portuguese direct translation: "holding the bomb," felt contrary to my pleasure search. I found myself incapable of prioritizing my own present pleasure. The difficulty wasn't gendered. Joy was withheld by my distaste for what I had decided to take in university and the complexities of trying to discover how to make love work. I tried choosing pleasure, failed, and found myself miserable by not guaranteeing a minimal level of hedonism.

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My pleasure notes became a food diary. While I felt emotionally exhausted, I indulged in every possibility of savouring delight. Natural wine, double chocolate ice cream, Brazilian coffee. On September 30th, I wrote: A night of decadence with new friends. Asking for a shameless amount of dessert to take home. The capability to not worry about how my request is perceived by others.

Good meals create space for other pleasures. It was the first time my partner and I explored social occasions that were new for both of us simultaneously. Until then, "new" was always one-sided. COVID couples and their assigned bubbles! In our new friendship with C., we found mid-ways. She was French; knowledgeable about wine like him, full of emotions and with a musical taste like mine. 

We took the bus back home, giggling at the lovely night. Holding my container with five huge slices of vegan tiramisu, I discovered a new capability of our relationship: to build together in the world.

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The next day, my partner and I shared the experience of a horrible hangover.

"We shouldn't have drank five bottles of wine."

He had forgotten the existence of the last bottle, a type of sweet apple wine.

I went home. Sick, I realized that the pleasure experiment was supposed to end on that day. I felt defeated. The pleasure was unattainable amidst the anxiety I felt for half of the experiment. I refused the conclusion that my complete pleasure was short-lived, a two-week enjoyment followed by the struggle with reality for the rest of the month. I extended the experiment for a month.

At this point, I pressured myself into finding ways to feel pleasure. My university time was filled with imposter syndrome and anxiety, and to balance, I would go hard on the weekends. A party wasn't a party anymore. It was a way not to fail at pleasure.

My search started as a refusal to believe that there is always more space for pain in a woman's life. I wanted to explore how women tend to compromise more than men. And in part, the instinct of thinking about the lack of pleasure as gendered was fruitful. By refusing to push aside my priorities, my relationship improved and found new ways of being. Yet, as for the rest of my life, the difficulties were based on what I projected as expected of me and the things my self-critic identified as failures.

For the second month, I needed to do better, and YouTube had lots of theories on how to achieve "better." I didn't fall into a pyramid scheme by trendy coaches. Instead, I went on a rabbit hole of Epicurean hedonism. Focus on friends, no romantic relationships, no decadent eating, and no big ambitions. Clearly, I had been doing it all wrong. For the philosopher that inspired the first hippie communes, less is more; just go live in the mountains with some friends, reading the most and working as little as possible. Entirely unfeasible, in my opinion. If I had followed Epicurus, I would have dropped out, broken up and not eaten five slices of vegan tiramisu.

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I wasn't searching for symmetry, but I found the closure of the experiment in a book.

There are a dozen and a half marks in my copy of Made-Up by Daphné B. Most of them highlight exciting ways of thinking about make-up and capitalism. Close to the end, B. remembers Anne Carson's vision of desire: the movement to pick the fruit on the highest branch of a tree. The book then proposes a new question: "Why not write biographies from the point of view of what a person desired, rather than what they achieved?" I marked on the page a huge arrow and wrote: "EXERCISE IT!!!"

Epicurus was wrong. A big part of pleasure is ambition. And it is not about the lack of pain, it is the will to search for joy even when a person is exhausted and defeated. Through the mix of Carson and B.'s thoughts, the answer to “How much pleasure fits in a woman's life?” is always as many times as I go up the ladder to reach for the furthest fruit.

My “stupid winter hat” is a run while I am sobbing, and hangovers of wonderful nights. Pleasure is searching.

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Laura Mota is a Brazilian writer, portrait photographer, and shameless experimentalist in other mediums based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. Her poetry has been published by PRISM International, carte blanche, High Shelf, and elsewhere. Laura's creative nonfiction was included in the issue "Generations" of Held Magazine.

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The Significance of a Balaclava

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Artwork by the author, Alison Margaret B. Moule

A meme that has been circulating recently illustrates a person lying on the ground, presumably unconscious, and a distressed-looking crouched figure crying out “HELP!!! Is any one of you a doctor?” One in a crowd of unalarmed onlookers replies “I can crochet a balaclava.” This occurs under the title, “Year 2030.” Many of us who have been confined to our homes throughout this 2 year-long (and still ongoing) pandemic have taken up hobbies like knitting and crochet, and this meme pokes fun at the growing winter trend of hand-made balaclavas. No, we are not doctors. We wake up feeling perilously stuck in the cycle of lockdown and gradual-reopening, unprecedented and uncharacteristic weather, minimum-wage jobs and the knowledge that even if we were doctors, we could never afford a house in this economy. So what’s the point? We are shifting away from careers that make money and towards creativity.

In pursuit of coziness

 I made my first balaclava in early January of 2021, after seeing one posted on Instagram by knitwear designer and photographer, Harry Were, for sale for over $200. Unable to afford the beautiful and aptly priced hand-knit head-warmer, I set my mind to knitting my own. Although I do not know how to follow patterns, I am proficient in the binary code of knitting and purling. By trial and error, I cast on a blue merino-wool balaclava, making up the pattern as I went along.

Since that first bala (as I affectionately call them), I have knit and sold enough to cover about three months of rent. Not wanting to charge a price that I myself could not afford, while still trying to value my time that goes into hand-knitting, I sell by sliding-scale. Most people who buy my balaclavas are also students or work low-paying jobs, but are graciously willing to give up $90-130 to get their heads in a soft, hand-knit wool bala. I am curious about the popularity of balaclavas that has allowed me to make a small income by doing something that I love.

Some attribute the trend to the pandemic, as masking has been mandatory for nearly two years, and balaclavas seem to mimic the effect of a semi-obscured face. However, balaclavas were first reappearing in fashion in the pre-pandemic winter of 2018-2019. Still, I imagine there is some connection between masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and everyone wearing a balaclava this winter. Perhaps we appreciate the warmth that masks provide to the lower half of our faces in sub-zero temperatures, but require a more fashionable, comfortable, outdoor version of this warmth we are now accustomed to. I surmise that the trend has to do, most of all, with coziness. Winter fashion has not always been as practical. In most recent winters, we have seen more emphasis on keeping warm, with puffer jackets and wide-leg pants (with lots of room for long johns underneath). Balaclavas reject the cold ears of excessively rolled-up beanies. 

Balaclavas in and against power 

Balaclavas first appeared under this name in the 1880s. During the 1854 Crimean War battle —dubbed the Battle of Balaclava, after the nearby town of Balaclava, Crimea— British soldiers were sent hand-knit head and face coverings, then called Uhlan caps, to keep warm in the frigid Russian October (Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting, 1987, pg. 135-138). These were no doubt knitted by women and girls, who often aided in war efforts by providing hand-knits to soldiers. 

Balaclavas have this military history, and are still very much associated with violence. When I mention to a person of an older generation that I knit balaclavas, the common response is “You mean like bank robbers?” Balaclavas are commonly worn to conceal the identity of individuals committing crimes, including police and military forces. Of course, there is a difference between military-style black balaclavas, that conceal everything but the wearer’s eyes, and brightly coloured, hand-knit wool balas that encircle the wearer’s face in a way that reminds me of a well-swaddled baby. That said, it is hard to separate the garment from connotations of violence. I post selfies in my knitted balaclavas on social media with the hashtag #balaclava, and I receive messages like “Hey beautiful,” from military-fetishizing men in tight, black balaclavas. I block them with a feeling of uneasiness about my most beloved winter accessory.

Balaclavas show up also in contexts of political resistance. Balaclavas were worn by Indigenous activists in Chiapas, Mexico, during the Zapatista uprising, beginning in 1994. Face masks are not just a way for the Zapatistas to conceal their identities from an oppressive government: a Zapatista balaclava is a symbol of non-hierarchical collectivity, and a statement about the invisibility of Indigenous peoples in a colonial empire.

Band and performance art group, Pussy Riot, put a spin on the balaclava's Russian roots. Wearing bright-coloured, ski-mask style balaclavas, they retain anonymity while making a strong visual statement, in their fight for feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights in Russia and worldwide.

In Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), the animals wear balaclavas they call “bandit hats” when confronting antagonistic farmers who are destroying their homes. The animated comedy tells a story about land rights and habitat conservation, while using balaclavas as a symbol of resistance. 

Who can cover their heads and get away with it?

Many of the folks who bought my balaclavas live in Montreal, where the cold winters welcome the warmth of the accessory, and the Quebec Bill 21 bans workers “in positions of authority” from wearing religious symbols including hijabs while at work. While a balaclava is generally knit and worn outside as a winter hat, and a hijab is generally a woven-scarf wrapped around the head and worn daily by Muslim women who choose to wear one. The visual similarities between the trendy headwear and the traditional head covering is striking to many Muslim women. Head and face coverings are politicized, and wearing a garment that conceals the head is not a choice that everyone can make safely. A balaclava worn by a white woman may be cute and unique, while a Muslim woman wearing a hijab —which covers the same features as a balaclava— may lose her job. Nuanced connections between race, religion, and our favourite winter accessory raise questions about who has the privilege to participate in this trend.

What is hand-made and what is made by hands?

The balaclava trend highlights a renewed appreciation for hand-made. In a time when many people’s main hobby is watching Netflix, we are reclaiming hobbies. We are learning how to value the work that goes into creating, when the time we put in at our day jobs is usually valued at less than $15.00/hour. Hand-knitting is anti-capitalist. Supporting friends and local makers is anti-capitalist. We understand the detrimental effects that fast-fashion has on the environment and on human rights, and we refuse to support it. While fast-fashion prices have taught us to expect cheapness (in price and quality), by hand-making, we are learning to appreciate the work that goes into making anything that we wear. In my opinion, even a shirt made in a factory in China is “hand-made,” as I don’t yet know of a sewing machine that can operate without hands controlling it. 

In a global situation that feels quite apocalyptic, I fear the culmination of this winter trend that will send balaclavas to thrift stores and landfills. My hope is that we will hang on to our balas and our making-skills for a future where resistance and self-sufficiency may be more valuable than financial capital.

Alison Margaret B. Moule (they/she/elle) is a maker and lover of textiles. They graduated from Concordia University in 2020, with a BFA in Art History and Studio Art and a minor in Classical Archaeology. Their work has been published by the Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History (CUJAH), Yiara Magazine, Hoplon (Journal of the Concordia Classics Student Association) and the Fine Arts Reading Room (FARR). They are a current graduate student in Cultural Heritage Conservation at Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario.

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