An Outcast’s Rebellion

We interrupt your scheduled broadcast to bring you a special Thanksgiving address, from one of my favourite outcasts: Wednesday Addams!

Wednesday’s Thanksgiving address, announcing her and her fellow outcasts’ overthrow of Camp Chippewa is both infamous and controversial but this remix by The Halluci Nation feels irresistible!

Last week I published a piece on Literary Hub exploring my childhood obsession with Wednesday and how she made me feel less alone in a confusing and hostile world.

The things we love most about Wednesday—her “resting bitch face” and her monotone voice, for starters—are common autistic traits. As the Wednesday series creators have said, she is a socially awkward outcast, a classic outsider, who sees things mainly in black and white and “says the things the rest of us wish we could say.”

You can read the full article here.

Wednesday returns!

And last night Tim Burton’s Wednesday premiered on Netflix to the delight of young, aging and old goth girls everywhere. I have not made it through the whole series yet because I was busy celebrating my birthday (38!) but I’m excited to see where Jenna Ortega takes this 21st century Latina reincarnation of Wednesday Addams. This latest iteration of the beloved Addams Family franchise leans in to Wednesday’s weirdness more than any other and we finally get to see what a school for people like Wednesday, like me, could look like:

“Have you ever been told you’re different, odd, or simply don’t belong? In a world full of normies, do you feel like an outcast?”

If you had asked this me a year ago, I would have said yes on all counts but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why exactly. I might have said it was my queerness, or having grown up in an extremely liberal family in ultra-Catholic Ireland where I always felt somewhat out of sync with the normies, but I could not have said it was because of undiagnosed autism.

And, if you had told me, at 13, that there existed a refuge for freaks and outcasts where I could escape the crushing conformity of secondary school, with all its arbitrary rules and regulations, I would have said yes without hesitation. If that meant I could have gone to school with Wednesday Addams you would have fulfilled all my tween fantasies in one.

Everything about Wednesday, from the opening credits to the Nevermore Academy uniforms, is steeped in the Netflix aesthetic, alá Tim Burton. Together, the ubiquitous streaming service and the legendary director, whose most recent projects feel like a pastiche of a pastiche of his own oeuvre, have conjured a world which sits somewhere between Sabrina’s School of Unseen Arts and Hogwarts (without the dorm for evil children, apologia for slavery, and the long shadow of transphobia cast over the franchise by its own author). I’m not sure if this is good or bad but I’ll be spending this weekend trying to figure it out while getting reacquainted with my childhood hero.

Have a happy holiday?

Wednesday premiered on my birthday, but also the day before Thanksgiving. Was this decision made so that the much publicised show would have a captive holiday audience in the US? Or was it because Addams Family Values has become a sort-of Thanksgiving movie due to the aforementioned speech?

Only Netflix’s marketing department knows.

I’m from Ireland and I’m generally cautious when commenting on other cultures’ holidays but, I wouldn’t be much of a decolonial scholar if I didn’t acknowledge the genocidal roots of Thanksgiving. So while you’re here, please check out these powerful reads from indigenous writers:

• Elissa Washuta, forElectric Literature, rightly points out that Wednesday, however rebellious, is just another white settler.

• I love Joseph M. Pierce’s newsletter

  Indigiqueer Confidential
  focusing on all things indigenous, queer and academic. This analysis of land and settlerism in Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog is not to be missed.

• For a longer read, I cannot recommend enough Robin Wall Kimmerer’s incredibly moving and engaging book, Braiding Sweetgrass, blending history, botany and Native spirituality in a compelling argument on cultivating alternatives for our wounded world.

If you’re in the mood for some alternative holiday viewing The Hemispheric Institute is running a series of week-long screenings showcasing contemporary indigenous cinema from across the Americas throughout November and December. All the films featured in the series look amazing and streaming is free!