Women

When sophomore Rachel Marsh first arrived at Columbia, she felt like something was off, but wasn’t sure what. Marsh, a sprinter on the track and field team, came to New York from Garland, Texas, and spent her first semester caught up in the whirlwind rhythms of practice, competition, and academics.

You can’t be what you can’t see, and the 10th Athena Film Festival took that mantra of representation to heart this year. Through a series of screenings and panel discussions, the festival shined a spotlight on the lack of LGBTQ representation in the media, the dearth of female heroes and villains in popular culture, and the inspiring women who are running for office and changing the male-dominated political landscape.

María Irene Fornés stands on the beach in Miami, looking out over the endless ocean, to free herself from worry. Yet as the scene changes, she forgets that she is in Miami; she forgets that she hasn’t written a play in over five years. By the film’s end, she forgets the name of her friend Michelle Memran, the filmmaker who is capturing the scene. But while her memories fade, Fornés’ creative, outgoing, and jocular personality persists.

“Venmo me for my emotional labor” reveals that the cult of individualism and the commodification of empathy are rampant on our campus. Research shows how children from suburban high schools are conditioned to view every social interaction as a transaction. In this frame of mind, every conversation, text, cup of coffee, and like on social media is supposed to manifest itself in the initiator’s securement of an acceptance letter, job offer, sexual gratification, monetary gain, social capital, etc. One is then forced to approach every interaction with the question: How can this person advance my status? Empathy for the sake of human connection is completely out of the question.

In the English language, there’s this very delicate dance that we spin around the n-word. We have conversations over who can say it and who cannot. We reserve it for certain scenarios and contexts. We create impossible hypotheticals that serve to push people to some type of ethical extreme: “If there’s a kid with a terminal disease and his last wish is to say the n-word, do you tell him he can’t say it?” Meanwhile, I pepper the n-word into all my casual conversations. I grew up hearing the word: It simply is a part of my vocabulary, and it’s a word I carried to my time as a Columbia student. I even said it abroad, yelling it across Avenida de los Presidentes in Cuba to catch another student’s attention one or two times. The word exists, however, outside of Make-A-Wish-sponsored philosophy questions and my mouth.

She stands tall, her hands wrapped around her iconic torch and tablet. Her green, dashiki-inspired dress is accompanied by an Afro that peeks out from under her crown; her large hoop earrings cascade down her shoulders.

Summer in globally-warmed New York City is the cruelest of seasons. The 90-degree sun melts the skyline to a sooty mirage, and the air curdles. A merciless landscape for a curly-haired 18-year-old prone to fainting in the heat. Even the gum-scarred sidewalks sweat. In the past, I had escaped to the verdant hills of the Adirondacks to study violin. But music costs money until you’re trained, lucky, and brave enough to make your own. This summer, it was time to get a job and save for college expenses, and practicing in my room wasn’t going to cover the cost of my Lit Hum books.