Outside the Box
Tiffany Tsao • 27 May 2022
Our lives don’t always fit in the boxes allotted to them by larger society. This edition is devoted to those who spill out of these boxes, or who refuse to climb inside them, or who dismantle them and exhort us to do so too. We kick off with an essay that asks us to rethink the current obsession with efficiency. The following pieces invite us to think beyond the norms that govern the spheres of sport, music, freelance work and dance.
Against Efficiency
This very necessary essay delves into the history of 'efficiency' as a concept and management tool, looking at how principles once vaunted as a means of freeing up time have morphed into a mindset that demands we use our free time to labour.
We are not living under twentieth-century Taylorism anymore, but an internalised version in which we ceaselessly monitor and manage ourselves. The growing pressure for people to optimise their free time – for instance, signing up to the work meditation app to manage work-stress – turns our free time into just another aspect of work.
No Limits: Trans Sporting Lives
In this essay about being trans and loving sport, Ellen van Neerven identifies the regulations and attitudes that bar trans people from the fulfilment to be found in athletic activity and sport communities. Included are conversations with Maddee Clark, Zakaria Shahruddin and Louis Blake.
My utopia isn’t a trans utopia. My utopia is a utopia where everyone gets to find pleasure and joy in moving their body, be aggressive and be strong and be together in that space despite their gender. Which in itself is a trans utopia. It’s my utopia and I happen to be trans. This is what I hope for the future.
(Note: Thank you to Griffith Review for granting temporary free access to this essay.)
An Interview with Lesley Chow
One of the most fun and challenging things to do as a critic is to try and decode that kind of strangeness and try to work out why that sound or that image has this specific hold on you. I think I’m drawn to writing about sounds that have puzzled me for years. So, it’s been a time of trying to work out, 'why does that sound bring up these sorts of textures? Why is it so specifically tinny or tarnished?' So I think I’m looking for enduring strangeness. That’s what I’m drawn to writing, anyway.
Music and film critic Lesley Chow talks to Haley Patail about the value of genuinely strange sounds and the shift towards 'tweezerfied' over-curation in the music industry.
The Mundane and Alienated Life of a Freelancer
Lily Meyer reviews Kavita Bedford’s Friends and Dark Shapes, looking at how the novel’s portrayal of freelancing resonates with her own position as a freelancer in the gig economy era.
Bedford is refreshingly committed to portraying writing not as a calling or craft but as work. She shows freelance writing as a form of what the journalist Sarah Jaffe, in her recent book Work Won’t Love You Back, calls 'hope labour': toil performed in the hope of stability, prestige, and fulfilment down the line...Both she and her narrator understand well that hope labour’s promise is often false.
Misfit Ballet
Just a bunch of people who love to dance but most of whom would feel out of place in a traditional ballet class. We joke and call ourselves the misfits.
Melanie Saward writes about finding a ballet studio in her thirties that accepts its students for who they are.
(Note: Thank you to Kill Your Darlings for granting temporary free access to Saward’s piece.)