Author: Hannah Tang

  • “omg you people can’t do anything”: notes on chronic illness

    i was the youngest patient waiting in st. thomas’ hospital endoscopy unit that morning, three days after christmas, an emergency sunday booking. my mother, who knitted beside me, was the second youngest. after donning a hospital gown that would disintegrate in a light breeze, i sat alone in the second waiting room with my leopard print slippers. at this point, i had not had food for nearly twenty-eight hours, and my last sip of water was seven hours ago. they hadn’t even deployed the fentanyl drip yet, but i felt high. i started to cry without knowing why, and sent lucía selfies of my heinous hospital drip and intravenous cannula. she made sure to comfort me with many a picture of kush the kitty, and instructed me to throw my younger brother at my older brother, which was incredibly helpful. then i was stowing my phone and slippers below the bed, four of us in the small room, and god above, there were so many wires. someone gave me banana-flavoured numbing spray for my throat that tasted a whole lot like pure absinthe, and i was pushed and pulled and straightened out for the first endoscopy.

    less than a month before the Scary Procedures (the bite of ‘87, if you will), my test results had returned abnormal and i was placed on an urgent suspected cancer pathway for colon cancer. i am not exactly a stranger to chronic illnesses, but up until this point, i had been branded with a big fat question mark on what exactly i suffered from. this was no longer a question of making accommodations for strange symptoms and chronic pain, but a quick escalation into pre-surgical triage and colonoscopy preparation appointments. it was christmas time, and i was in a state of muddled confusion. to downplay the Happenings was silly, and a little performative – double colonoscopies and gastroscopies at 21 are not exactly commonplace. but to take it seriously and soberly felt like an acceptance of what was, at that point, unknowable and terrifying. it also implied a tinge of guilt. i was not yet labelled with any diagnosis, and i felt like to worry about it was dramatic and sympathy-seeking. yes, it’s a little stupid. especially as i had suffered the same alarming symptoms a year before. now i know there is no mass in my colon, it provides a small sense of relief. still waiting on my small intestine MRI, though, so watch this space.

    of course, the physical manifestations of my mystery illness have had a significant impact on my life. however, i do believe that experiencing such a swiftly alarming Horror had a more potent effect on my way of thinking than anything else. instead of being preoccupied with essays on the Alienfranchise and surveillance, i spent a lot of time reorienting my body in my world; there was a newfound awareness of its fragility, i think. it was the recognition, within myself, that something was wrong and i hadn’t been overreacting in thinking so. now, being referred back to hospital for further investigation, there is still no clarity as to what’s actually cooking inside there, if you know what i mean. it is hard, sometimes, to admit that you need help and that you are sick, and i realised i had been chastising myself for my fatigue instead of believing myself.

    but this kind of reflection on the body hasn’t just been limited to myself. yep, you guessed it, i’m pivoting into the political. why is it that images of illness and suffering are so easily swept aside in places like Palestine, or Sudan, or Iran, or Lebanon? Naomi Klein refers to locations like these in Doppelgänger as the ‘Shadow Lands’, the understory of the gleaming capitalist dream. crucially, she underlines the fact that these spaces of exploitation, brutality, and even genocideare not random one-offs: “not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run”. i sometimes struggle to grasp how and why this is dismissed in favour of “oh, i’m not into politics”, when the UK government has played such a heinous role in the Palestinian genocide, for example – perhaps it is simple when it is limited to a phone screen documenting atrocities from far, far away. does it not upset you to see 22-year-old activist Umer Khalid unable to walk, refused bail, and denied medical care for his muscular dystrophy? all while imprisoned in Shepherd’s Bush? how much closer can it get for people to care? while i may require a lot of medical intervention to remedy my condition, i have access to it, but others cannot say the same: the global suffering we see without access to free healthcare should not be something to be complacent about (magically even if it doesn’t directly affect you!), be angrier.

  • “where are all the thinkers”? faux-intellectualism and knowledge capital

    o god, i’m the world’s biggest hypocrite. i have a zine, i lecture the omnipresent you, dear reader, on my personal philosophies. in an era in which anti-intellectualism is rife and entire departments of education are being slaughtered, that is not what i am here to say. there is a pervasive strain that is invading our lexicon of “what if the curtains are just blue?”, with no inherent meaning behind anything. but there also exists a desire to overdetermine our culture to sound as philosophical as possible. i think this especially irritating in the case of the politically inactive, but fear not, all will be divulged.

    this begins with a tiktok from user @eugbrandstrat, who makes the incredibly salient point that knowledge is becoming the ultimate status symbol, the idea that identity is loosely triangulated around exclusionary references in culture and media that the person invoking has no real connection to. i have contemplated this in my piece on the performative male. it is becoming a signifier of status to gesture vaguely towards the possession of the capital of knowledge, when financial and economic capital is shifting: both in the skyrocketing costs that pervade spaces like london, and in the way privileged individuals are no longer signifying their wealth to dominate the social hierarchy. instead, you will hear many a claim that “i’m not posh, it’s just that my family is comfortable”, or “i only ski once a year, i’m hardly privileged”. i couldn’t possibly comment on whether this has been said to me. teehee. as theories of class consciousness infiltrate gen z, there lies the denial of one’s access to resources (rather than feeling attacked, i think it may be more beneficial to educate oneself about wealth inequality, coming from a person with greater proximity to capital relative to the state of the world). in the wake of this, intellectualism evolves into another way to signify capital. it is also imperative to me that i posit the fact that education within our societal structures is exclusionary, and access to this is incredibly dependent on monetary and geographic means. in a few cases, access to knowledge can be a subtle tactic of investigating another’s relation to class, or demonstrating one’s own: par exemple, latin is not widely taught in state schools. inch resting.

    my powers of prophecy are not here to critique the process of creation or commentary – it is beautiful that such philosophising is more readily accessible than ever. rather, it is the unwillingness to engage with theory beyond what it can offer as social and cultural capital, and the political ignorance of some who posture as thinkers. if there is an entire lack of desire in engaging with the political, but no qualms in weaving elaborate thinkpieces around complex ideas, is this merely a smokescreen that does not reflect one’s thoughts, or even a text that aims to generate social validation rather than interrogate anything meaty? i think this a particular shame in my faculty of arts and humanities, in which theory is our bread and butter. once again, i couldn’t possibly say if i have observed this personally. the image of the intellectual is key, to be seen as one who thinks. i have seen many point to examples of surface-level video essays that do not truly engage with the subject at hand, or analyses littered with buzzwords. do not be fooled, this is Nuanced – the more interrogative work that is done around critical concepts, the better. it is when knowledge is wielded as a tool of social currency, a simple regurgitation of current discourses and framed as revolutionary, that we stagnate. i think it intriguing to read this as a possible form of virtue-signalling if such intellectualism is used as an embellishment. it may come across a little disingenuous if the statement “i’m a white woman, but don’t worry, i’ve read angela davis!” is simultaneously accompanied by a disinterest in any real and direct activism to protect the rights of people of colour, or an inability to not centre whiteness in conversations about race.

    this resurfaces in the tool of the debate, something that has exploded on social media in the last two years. perhaps my view of this is biased because when debating cancel culture in front of my entire school, my opponent declared that cancel culture was stupid because harvey weinstein has made great movies, apparently. thankfully i was able to channel my rage into my tattoo appointment after. i’ll leave you to stew on that. right-wing figures such as jordan peterson excel as pseudo-intellectuals due to their intent to sound philosophically superior, regardless of the truth of their statements. i point to this with the context of the deputy leader of reform, richard tice, having been invited to king’s college london by our very own politics society, not forgetting later inviting the founder of the german far-right party AfD. you can extrapolate my feelings on this, but the reason i introduce this is to play with ideas around intellectualism and politics. if we frame spaces of intellectual thought as stages in which all must be heard out, hate speech has entered the chat. pseudo-intellectuals who peddle their own rhetoric under the farce of educating and debating students don’t just want to win people over by persuasion, but also use the turnout of these events to prove the validity and intellect of their ideologies. have you considered just googling their policies instead of showing up? shocking, i know. this is why it is genuinely important to engage with social and cultural critique beyond a quote in a substack article: so that concerning trends can be identified, and maybe even an original thought can be formed.

    beyond this though, we are all eager to say something, and i do wholeheartedly believe that this is overall for good. i think that, most of all, we deprive ourselves when material is not fully explored. it is worth noting that this is not just cultural capital, but also generates financial capital – many podcasters and cultural critics are making thousands from clicks and misinformation. the fundamental crux here is ignorance and superiority: i’m sure we’ve all met that one guy who loves feminist theory but treats the women in his life like shit. to return to the tangtang niche of modern desire, this can and has been wielded like a weapon in friendships and relationships alike. (Lucía commentary: men that have never read or seen or listened to woman-centred media and theory but steal talking points from ex-girlfriends to manipulate other women into thinking they engage with this media and theory… many such cases). even if you genuinely read and understand sedgwick, dworkin, wynter – it means nothing if an undercurrent of misogyny pervades how you treat your girlfriend and your insatiable need to intellectually dominate her. likewise, one can have read a hundred books on class critique, but if one still refuses to fully grapple with their privilege, i fear no one gaf. yes, i’m so aware of the irony in writing a thinkpiece on thinkpieces. stay humble and quote nietzsche less, you are not rust cohle.

  • muniching

    ill travelled as i am, i’ve never been on such a short flight. they have tended to stretch infinitely, across oceans and sustained by meals of lukewarm chicken and rice, mysteriously possessing both qualities of mushiness and Crunch. lucía and i sit on the end of each aisle and hold hands during takeoff. perhaps it is due to my dopamine receptors being intrinsically out of sync since birth, but i always get the strangest thrill from the roar of the engine as the plane moves from solid ground to weightlessness. 

    before we know it, we are Muniching and i queue for an extra forty minutes with my non-EU passport (thank you brexit, held on my twelfth birthday). then we are deposited safely in the back seat of an Uber as we plan our future band tangtang, which turned into something else very familiar. i wrestle my suitcase around and remember how kush the Kitty curled up in it the night before, against my clarice lispector. he is wise beyond his years (barely a year old, mind you). susana hauls it up six flights of stairs before we gain eternal rest in her lovely apartment, which is light, airy, and refined with the trinkets of a woman who knows her shit. feasting on pho loaded with teriyaki sauce from the viet place downstairs we reflect on the current states of our lives. there is Much to Say that won’t be repeated here. susana tells us tales from her youth as we sip on jasmine pandan tea, perched on red plastic stools. the rest of the night is spent on susana’s balcony with red wine and wiseness. this was not my healing hysteria seaside holiday, but nevertheless i find a certain comfort in the padded seats of the outside bench and saying repeatedly, “oh, and of course he could never understand…”

    there is something so delicious about these days. we wake around noon, and have eggs and bacon and avocado seasoned with herb infused salt for breakfast (my plate finished with a generous serving of pickles). despite rain and generally dreary weather, we tourist in an appropriately lucíahannah way: buying scented body oil from the french perfumery, stopping to collect taro brown sugar tea, sifting through crystals for an unspecified amount of time. when susana finishes work we drift in and out of solemn churches and pause to light candles for our opps. this time of indulgence is punctuated by quiet moments in which lucia reads, and i potter about in my usual fashion. it is only a few stops to Marienplatz, where the city centre and old town resides, so we can flit back and forth between the city and susana’s quiet flat with ease. the Residenz München is near impossible to find, but once we traipse in, damp and slightly Over Things, there are decadent sights from bavarian monarchs and delights in the tiny gift shop to be discovered. once home, i find myself drifting to our familiar resting place of the terrace, armed with a pint of bergamot sorbet. something about the fresh air is unquestioningly perfect for debriefing for hours at a time. we can always find new ways to beat a dead horse. if we find something we must rehash in increasingly granular detail, beat it we must, and beat it we shall.

    on some nights, we stay in with pho and face masks and horror movies, and play our very own Zombie Apocalypse game for over two hours (we would do marvellously, despite missing our many rituals and treats). on others, we share a bottle of yuzu aperitif as the munich skyline dims and my spell candles flutter in the twilit breeze. together lucía and i arrive at the conclusion that time and a trip away can heal all wounds, especially with the aid of a few glasses of yuzu. not that this time away was about food, but oh did i dine. carbonara after church-seeing, pan-fried dim sum, cheesecake and hojicha from the little café downstairs. that was healing in its own way. ed asks if i will have yuzu withdrawals, and frankly, he is entirely right.wandering through the ‘trees / time / architecture’ exhibition was another joy amongst the many Joys of munich, naturally coupled with my frequent and repetitive singing of Hoochie Coochie on the metro. oh, the joys. i show lucía annihilation, curled up on susana’s couch, and she tells me of the book differences, which i still really need to read. i find myself healed from something i cannot quite put my finger on, some malignancy i have not named. perhaps some luxuriating with your best friend is all you really need. munich i will be in you again, trust and believe.

  • everything is embarrassing: the performative male epidemic and the panopticon of aesthetics

    in the expansive sea of internet lingo, a new and incredibly boring twist emerges in the figure of the‘performative male’, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the 2020 ‘male manipulator’. how creative. if i felt the need to emphasise this and also insufferably flex my work on Freud, i might invite you to engender some analysis around the quote that “the finding of an object is in fact the refinding of it”, but i think it speaks for itself. bluntly put, this ain’t about him.

    in summary, to the sweet summer child who has not been cursed with such knowledge, the‘performative male’ typically dons visible signs (as one would a costume) that function as an outward display of his personality: in a consumerist culture that defines its participants through the items they own and flaunt, the individual assumes traits associated with the cultural capital of the feminine. he might read feminist literature in public, flashing a MUBI tote bag, or listen to Bags by Clairo at full volume on his morning commute through wired headphones, while his AirPod Pros sit comfortably in the back pocket of his unwashed Levi’s. God forbid you ask him about Audre Lorde though, he’s barely ten pages into The Handmaid’s Tale.

    the case of the performative male is doubly irritating: both the existence of the performative male who strives to prove to you that he’s “one of the good ones”, and the man who mocks this undefined concept to dunk on the feminine and promote the homogeneity of the patriarchal masculine force. what has irritated many online is that this elusive figure may not find himself seeking these facets naturally or organically, but more unsettlingly, to consciously align himself with a concept of masculinity perceived as trustworthy – a farce of faux softness to hide his disinterest in the rights of marginalised communities, or his undercover misogyny, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. it has been questioned if this is constructed as a disguise of one’s own active role in upholding patriarchy. clearly, no one is going to crucify you for listening to Beabadoobee, but i think it important to self-reflect on whether it is enough to be perceived as a trustworthy man, or alternately, simply going outside and being one.

    it is intriguing to me that the idea of the ‘performative male’ is a recent or sudden phenomenon, because, frankly, that is incorrect. men have been donning traits perceived to align them with safety and vulnerability (the anti-masculine) for quite a while. and of course, in a judith butler sense, to be a man is to perform the expected gender role of masculinity. something rarely mentioned is that the majority of men are performative – in the direction of other men. they become a caricature of a hazy idea of maleness, homosocially, to secure the validation of other men, their brothers-in-arms. violence at football matches, dramatised displays of aggression, perceiving women as conquests – these malodorous habits seek to gain a pat on the back, a rung up the ladder of masculine social capital.

    of course, it’s impossible to ignore the capitalist element of the performative male. this is something you can buy and obtain in seconds: these signifying markers are meant to indicate something deeper and more esoteric but are entirely centred around consumption. the fundamental crux (my signature phrase taken from a rant about DILFs) is that more widely, and perhaps more insidiously, we are becoming defined by the items we consume, and precisely what it means to consume them. rayne fisher-quann excellently details this in her 2022 Substack article, ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female character’: “the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.” one only needs to turn to the Friends tab on Spotify as an example of this panopticon – you cannot guarantee who may be watching, and thus have to act as if watched constantly. of course, this foucaldian thinking began with a centuries old prison model, but could this not be imagined as a kind of prison itself?

    this microdose of a sort of surveillance state is not limited to the performative male. fisher-quann particularly notes its dynamic to womanhood: “i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences… has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing”. accessorising your personality with specific strains of media and the symbols of billion-dollar corporations is beginning to encroach upon the rituals of daily life. even in private, we perform to invisible audiences, flattening ourselves to easily consumable objects. i would like nothing more than to introduce a positive note at this stage, but my pessimism fails me. with social media slowly infiltrating every aspect of our lives (which i also partake in #notahypocrite) it is difficult to see beyond it sometimes, as if characters on a stage. all i can hope is that we are all freed from these mind games to prevail as our most authentic selves.

  • The Year Of The Situationship

    “What’s He to Hecuba,

    Or Hecuba to Him?”

    – Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

    HT: In a linguistic sense, the invented word ‘situationship’ does not have a stable meaning in the same way that ‘relationship’ does. It is deliberately ambiguous. What situation, you may ask? We have no idea. It could range from we have made eye contact once at school (The Eyecontactship) to I am having his child, he has met my entire family, but we aren’t putting a label on it. The moment you give it the label of ‘situationship’ you instil within this dynamic the same instability that exists within the meaning of the word.

    LG: I have a very personal qualm with people that use the label situationship for a situation in which they are not actually involved with each other, or are just friends. Lowkey… I Be In Situations.

    HT/LG: A Humiliationship!

    LG: I don’t relate to this but I find that for a lot of people, there has to be an inherent suffering, and I do believe it is an inherently feminine thing to pine and yearn. It is a way to keep yourself occupied. It is a real phenomenon… people seek having crushes to have someone to think about, to fantasise about, to kill time.

    HT: We have to consider the commodification – I sound like FKA Twigs – of love as an object which you can purchase. You see it in Hollywood, you buy it on Valentine’s Day. It is marketed to you.

    LG: More now than ever with our very short attention spans, we wish to dissociate and fabricate a world. I suppose doing this is easier when it is someone that to some degree you cannot have…

    HT: It doesn’t require any sort of action from yourself. You have two passive participants, you are not required to act on anything. This is not a condemnation of being casual! Many people are in casual relationships with people, and it works, but there is a passiveness to the situationship where you remain in limbo.

    LG: Do you think there is a difference between a situationship and a casual relationship?

    HT: Yes, and I think all of it has to do with whether you call it a situationship or not. What’s a situationship to one person is nothing to another.

    LG: Well, this is what I don’t understand, maybe you can clarify this for me. I’ve never liked the term situationship, because to me… we are friends that fuck, right? If we’re not friends, what are we doing? Is situationship a term we’ve created to avoid being friends with benefits… because that requires friendship? I would like to argue a lot of situationships don’t require that.

    HT: It also sets no standards in specifically cishet relationship power dynamics where there are no expectations, even if you would like to set certain expectations.

    LG: It’s embarrassing to ask for that.

    HT: Exactly, like as if you don’t deserve this. Having those expectations is shameful, it is shameful to have agency and want to be treated like a human being. It’s not friends with benefits because they’re not even providing that friendship to you. They just text you at 3am like “wyd”.

    LG: Who is this man in your house? You don’t know his last name!

    HT: Show me his STI results babe.

    LG: Do you know his LinkedIn? 

    HT: Where is his birth certificate?

    LG: Do you know his birthday, does he know yours? No! The situationship is filling a gap in an increased avoidance of connection with each other, but my question is why?

    HT: I also think in the age of dating apps – which I have no issue with – we are trying to keep on mediocre options and seeing how many more mediocre options we can get.

    LG: The whole concept of the roster.

    HT: Exactly, I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing if every person on your roster is emotionally intelligent—

    LG: Valuable to you. A good person to begin with.

    HT: Kind, listens to you, which is not exclusive to romantic connections.

    LG: Sex requires trust. Do you trust these men?… No. Your roster cannot be full of men who realistically who you would not ask to watch your dog. It is relatively inevitable that if you are sleeping with someone for a prolonged amount of time, one of you will want something more. Further wanting to know each other, being closer friends, or a committed relationship. I do not think anyone can pretend that two people can have an intimate relationship without at the very least wanting to be friends, you have to somewhat hate that person to not want that.

    HT: I think the stasis of the situationship is very interesting, one person always wants more. There is always a stagnation.

    LG: Is it delusional to pretend otherwise?

    HT: I do think it is. It’s perceived to be kind of ridiculous to want or expect anything more because you’ve already put that label of situationship on which does not imply anything else.

    LG: But how shameful is it to call each other a situationship, have you ever heard of anyone agreeing to call each other… a situationship?

    HT: Is it a one way street? You use the term of situationship to explain it to your friends. People are uncomfortable with communication as much as we champion it, I see this in friendships as well. Sometimes you have to be really fucking honest, and it’s shitty, but it has to be done. A lot of this could be solved with people just talking to each other.

    LG: The mistake people make is that they think that by having one conversation about it, you’re done

    HT: It’s a dialogue.

    LG: How have my feelings evolved as this has progressed? I think it is a matter of pride, it is so shameful for people to admit that they are vulnerable. Mind you! We are so vulnerable with someone in relation to our bodies and still, we are extremely ashamed of saying, “Actually, this is how my feelings have evolved over time.” This is a poison… that could be so simply solved by offering yourself some respite from pining and suffering alone in your bed at night.

    HT: A very specific image of vulnerability has been sold to us, especially as women. This idea of this beautiful woman with a full face of makeup crying, naked under her sheets, smoking a cigarette. There’s only a few ways women are allowed to be vulnerable, especially in romantic or sexual connections. When it’s not, we see it shamed in media, in our personal lives.

    LG: And I do think it’s extremely silly that in your early 20s you would be expected to be thoroughly emotionally coherent with your vulnerability. I think having a mental breakdown—

    HT: Or three.

    LG: Or three! Very realistic, relatively healthy. Listen, better doing this with your situationship than your boyfriend of two years. Explore yourself through these men… if you’re not gonna keep each other around…

    HT: I am tired of seeing women losing their teens and 20s to seeking male validation and constantly searching for connection in men who aren’t going to give it to you.

    LG: It’s the chasing of grief, wanting pain.

    HT: Which we are sold as women, and let’s not forget that suffering sells. Suffering sells like hotcakes.

    LG: For some reason we think that we are our most organic and pure when we are suffering.

    HT: Situationships (humiliationships) are a sado-masochistic pressing of a bruise.

    LG: At the end of the day, constant suffering makes people cold. Not me! Becoming cold and uncaring is championed… convenience and circumstance are immensely significant factors in our connections with other people, but that’s not all we are looking for.