Distributive Woundings: What Halsey's Lillith / Diablo IV Anthem Teaches Us About Digital Power

"The more that you give away, the more that you have; the more that you have the more that they take."

This is the endless bind that both starts and ends Halsey and SUGA's pop Diablo IV anthem, which was released in 2023. What began as a song written by Halsey in 2021 under the title 'Lillith' found a new home in the game's universe as it's musical anthem. Both inspired by, shot in, and transposed to digital from Chapelle des Jésuites in Cambrai, France, both the game and the music video take the 17th century's 160-ft mural as the springboard to tell a story about claiming power back from the hands of the pre-bibical figure of Lillith herself.

To understand what digital power, pop and k-pop stars Halsey and SUGA, game universes, and distrubitive wounding all mean in an arguably posthuman 21st century, I think we need to start by looking at Lillith - who she is and what she stands for in contemporary storying. We can move on to the rest later.

Briefly, in Semitic folklore, Lillith is written as Adam's first wife or consort, banished (or escaping depending on who you read) from the garden for not being quite docile or subservient enough to Adam. Even the oldest man in the world had a bit of a midlife crisis it seems. Eve came along after. And according to the Old Testament, she stirred up some trouble herself. Lillith is interesting because you might argue that she was the Semitic world's first recorded feminist. And of course she's been demonised for thousands of years, and been the subject of many revisions and re-writings in 20th and 21st century.

Diablo IV is a pretty dark game that sees you - the protagonist player - enter into hell to confront Lillith who needs your blood to enter the human world. Creepy. But a story that’s not unheard of. What's interesting is Halsey and SUGA's anthem because through it we get to explore young people's view of the processes implicit in demonisation of all kinds and how this plays out in daily life - especially through concepts of distribution and distributive agencies so associated with 2.0 platforms, games, and digital life in general.

So what is distributive agency. Well, we can see it perfectly described here in the pop video:

In the video we see Halsey dressed as a knight entering Lillith's chamber / Chappelle du Jesuites. The forces that attack her don't seem to belong to any-one in particular. Instead, the mural itself seems to throws deadly arrows, or wound with deadly claws without any materialised archers or wild beasts present in the chamber. What we do see, however, is the mural itself. These assailants do not exist in the paintings, but as the paintings, and every time Halsey glances at them they attack her. The interesting thing is that these attacks are very real. Her body is visiably ripped and scarred. As scholar Karen Barad states, bodies are the marks that make them (Barad, 2007). This is to do with how identities materially form bodies. Identities are not things that are applied to a body that pre-exists them but exist as the marks that make them and that they make. Everything is material-discurive. Everything is entangled.

So what's this thing called 'distributive agency'? Kochelman (2017) describes semiotic agency in distribution not just as an image or signifier (so an alarm call or cry signifying trouble) standing in for direct contact with the troubling thing itself (and thus crucially giving you a chance in the gap between signifier and signified to get away) but where "organism and environment are so inseparable when functionally understood that it is tempting to call such a unit an evorganism". Ok this is a bit clunky, but basically, as we see in Halsey's video, it means the gap isn't there. The signifyer (the beasts and archers in the painting) is the thing it represents. The image is no longer representative it is performative. There's no gap. The image wounds. It 'marks bodies'. It creates just a smuch as it was created.

So let's go back to Lillith. Does she represent the so called first 'evil woman/demon' or does 'she' in fact create her, as part of her becoming-reality-process? In other words what we see in the video is a story of multiple flows. Halsey becomes Lillith at the end of the video, but Lillith simultaneously becomes Halsey. Who creates who? In semiotic distributive agencies, everything is crumpled together like a piece of paper squashed down into a ball. You don't know which came first because that doesn't make sense. Image is reality just as reality becomes image. And importantly, there's no gap, no easy way to point the finger because everything is performatively entangled with everything else and what results is emergent phenomena from within all this . In some social science universes this is called complexity.

This is fascinating when we look not just a Lillith, but at ideas of demonisation and how these fuction as a way to create the illusion of an us/them stable or simplified universe. If everything is co-creative then there is no outside. Where does the 'demon' go? What are we trying to achieve when we 'demonise' (a verb that means 'to make someone into a demon'). Halsey herself resists such labels and labelling in her own life. When interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine Halsey rightly lashed out at 'the internet' (another distributive phenomena loosely brought together in one term that doesn't quite fit the reality of it or its many complex parts) when 'it' (the internet) called her 'tri-bi' (meaning bi-sexual, bi-racial, and suffering from bi-polarity). "I fucking hate it, the idea that something like that would be trivialized down to a fucking hashtag." Here the experience of existing at the intersection of groups that have historically been demonised (racial; sexual; mental health) is not something she wants labeled, categorised, and thus in some ways, easily targeted.

Halsey's songs deal with all sorts of feminist, LGBTQIA+, and disability issues and she's become something of an icon for this. (It is possibly also of interest here to mention that Halsey is a stage name, and actually refers to a place - a street name rather than person's name. Halsey herself is thus a street composed of multiple people, architectures, and histories, a true distributive sense of personal identity, echoing, in line with Deleuze 'that we are already more than one'.)

Returning to the Diablo IV music video as well as in the interview in real life, we see Halsey not battling Lillith, but taking on the image of Lillith. This is interesting because after all the distributive wounding she suffers in the video from the images of devils attacking a human young woman just for being there, she becomes the myth itself. BUT given Halsey’s oeuvre its not hard to imagine that here she is not the demon, but what the demon originally stands for. remember: Lillith was simply cast off for displeasing Adam in the garden. In other words, perhaps the rebellious woman is the trope being reclaimed here, drawing attention to how ‘monsters’ are made rather than taking them at face-value.

The lyrics of the anthem suggest that this is the originary 'stitch-up', as it were. "The more that you give that more that you have" is a classic tale of learning how to be generous and how that generosity actually benefits you. Performatively speaking, the act of giving makes you spiritually or in some way rich on the inside. But here lyrics subvert: "The more that you give away the more that they take." Suggesting that if you are generous in this society, 'they' (and again this is not one or more persons but a distributive agency) still will find away to take the inner power that that generosity itself has given you. I would argue that this really sums up a lot of GEN Z's cultural zeitgiest - 21st century contemporary neoliberal society has found a way to monetise every part of life to the point that there's really not much left for anyone outside of this. Everything is ripe for the taking. Everything is commodified. If there's an inner richness, the world will find a way to take it and monetise it. Ultimately, to steal it away.

This classic meme speaks to this kind of thinking in a somewhat hilarious example: if we can accept ‘there are more than two genders’ then amazon can find a way to market our hard fought for acceptance. The marketing of course - the structure - is still binary though. So nothing can really be rebellious at the structural level. Anything - any stance or cause is ripe for the market and the market-rules haven't changed, not one bit! Furthermore, like in the murals in Halsey's video, there's no one unit to point the finger at. The violence is distributive.

But Halsey didn't write this version of the song alone.

K-pop, multi-million selling artist SUGA here is featured addressing young people's angst and aggression, singing: "step out of the moment that's been trapping you in all this negativity of hatred and insanity, don't dwell on the past it's time to make a change, look around believe in what you see, I have returned to hell."

SUGA doesn't come to 'save' or ‘kill’ Halsey/Lillith, but is adding to the complexity of distributive voice in the video. Halsey/ Lillith describes herself in the song as "I've been disruptive, I've been corrupted, I am disgusting" as she crosses the hall of distributive attacks, seemingly a contemporary young woman's journey taking on all the labels given to a modern day Lillith. SUGA himself has described to the press his own struggles with rage and angst, but most interestingly he has been at the centre of a pop culture explosion as to whether he is straight, gay or bisexual, with fans rallying to question why obsession with this labelling is in any way important. What I want to focus on here is that both Halsey and SUGA are involved in pointing out the deep scars that ever tightening categorising inflicts on young people - now digitally from all directions, with a big neo-liberal digital consumer-capital aspect to it all.

One of SUGA's more interesting k-pop videos plays with similar notions of distribution and identity. In Daechwita , which is a Korean word that refers to a kind of military service music, we see SUGA turn into a traditional Korean king - a historical image made real. SUGA appraches himself as king, expecting the kingly version to lop off his head only to find the executioner has actually released his bonds. In a sense SUGA has crumpled time, going back into the past to undo the originary military experience of being executed (for desertion, perhaps?). His idenity as embodying a legacy of military service is in conflict with another side of his identity - the objector. The myths we inherent shape us, but so does the present day. We can be Lillith and we can reject the processes that made us Lillith in the first place. Again, timelines are crumpled in the complexity of our lived experiences. But being entangled material-discursively (Barad, 2007) with the myths that made us as the myths that made us doesn't mean we cannot enact choices (or 'cuts' as Barad might have it).

In Daechwita present-day SUGA shoots the image of himself as historical king, breaking free from the myth that he has been doomed to walk in the footsteps of in the present day. Which one in the end however, is sacrificed? Historical 'SUGA' or 'contemporary' SUGA? In distribution it's hard to tell, because that’s not the point. The point is that reality - like history - is multiple and it wounds. In 'real' life In September 2023, SUGA finally went up to do his compulsory military service, having managed to postpone it beyond the usual compulsory age so it’s not hard to read the song as SUGA modelling a very interesting form of protest strategy that draws on distribution in and through a reworking of the notion of ‘time’. in other words, stories can be changed by reworking the multiple agencies present therein. Very 2.0.

It's not hard to see how the Diablo IV Anthem music video was made buy these two pop icons in light of all this. It's a rallying cry against - well no-one in particular, but the very processes involved in distributive wounding and distributive self-making that are so present in contemporary digital cultures. The most important thing is however, that right before Halsey becomes Lillith at the end of the video, she first changes into the digital image of a woman-warrior in a game world. She momentarily becomes rendered, signalling that she could indeed be puppetted by you, the player, the supposed agent of the game. This is the most critically exciting part of the whole lot of it, to my mind, because it fuses ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary myth-making with new 2.0 digital image-making as if to say: don't you see this has been going on forever. Another agency becomes present: you. Viewer, reader, audience. The ‘real’ protagonist in the attention wars of 21st century digital media.

Game cultures have come under huge flack for being and encouraging deeply misogynistic behaviours and here we see a quick few frames of Halsey undergoing attack, as herself, as Lillith, and now as a game character. The lyric "because you let anybody with a body control you" draws attention to this. Who's body? Which Body? How do we undertake activisms in a world where the body itself is no longer just a unit but has become part of a distributive agency in a digital multi-platformed world?

What do art, science, NDEs and novel writing have to do with changing the way we 'do' education

My newest publication is out! And it's part of this weird and wonderful edited collection on new ways of doing research in and beyond the academy. In the chapter, I talk about how arts (novel writing), sciences (diffraction and the way light moves) and histories (the infamous tale of Countess Bathory) all come together in my newest project, a novel called 'The Blood Countess' to create different ways of understanding the world. In the edited collection, I take the opening part of the novel - which is about near-death-experience (NDE) - and ask, what happens if we see the world from the non-binary perspective of 'not-quite-dead-but-neither-entirely-alive'? What assumptions about the world change when we start imagine it from a totally different perspective?

Ok sure, but what has all that got to do with education? When we challenge what knowledge is, how it functions to create the world we live in rather than see knowledge as a tool that describes the world, we get to do different kinds of things with it. We get to dream the world differently. We get to create new dynamic solutions to seemingly impossible problems. The same way light shifts and moves its basic structures (from particle to wave) depending on the obstacles it encounters, knowledge diffracts into new forms, making new approaches to the world possible. What kind of worlds do we want to create from this perspective? That's a question for education, because education feels stuck in the same old boring patterns that don't quite fit the world we live in anymore. As scholar Donna Haraway says 'we need new stories to tell the world with'. I would add to this, we need new forms of education to create new responsive worlds...

The edited collection got a write up in The Guardian for - well - being weird and rebellious. Exactly what it says on the tin really! (You can read the article by clicking on the link below). My chapter is called 'The Heart of Research: Fictioning and Diffractive Writing as Critical Research Practice'

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/04/meet-the-rebellious-researchers-embracing-rap-magic-and-circus-acts

Teenage Girls' Spirituality on Film: Fieldnotes from Twin Peaks and Dr. Sleep

There's a generational difference between David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and Stephen King/Mike Flanagan's Dr. Sleep (2019) - and it shows. I'm a lady-of-a-certain-age, and so when Fire Walk with Me came out I too was a teenage girl. It was blaring on the TV late one night as I partied and poured ridiculously named and coloured drinks (as only teenagers can do) and I remember hearing it in the background. I turned to my boyfriend and I found myself saying, "this film is all screaming and crying", the mode by which Lynch established Laura Palmer's teenage angst and PTSD. I reckon if we'd matched each scream drink for drink, we'd have ended up wasted. But despite all this noise and distraction, I caught the scene where the angel in Laura's twee little painting disappears in front of her eyes and the utter pain actress Cheryl Lee portrays Laura subsequently experiencing at this seemingly small detail. I made a mental note to watch this film properly later on. I wanted to know if the angel came back. I think a lot of teenage girls have the same question.

Angels are key in Lynch's/Laura's world. In another scene, when Laura's best friend asks: do you think if you were falling in space you'd slow down after awhile or go faster and faster and faster? Laura responds: Faster and faster. And for awhile you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. And the angels wouldn't help you, because they've all gone away. This still gives me shivers (interestingly the angle of the shot from above does suggest that angel is hovering, and is actually us, the viewer). And I think it really hits something very urgent and very true when it comes to teen girls' experience of the thresholds they face that often seem otherworldly or beyond their human ability to deal with.

You can watch the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VPFi-GxqiA

There's been a lot of speculation on whether Fire Walk with Me was Lynch's interest in the states of consciousness associated with Ancient Indian writings (such as The Upanisads) written in the language of film. The famous dream scene that shows Laura walking into a world between worlds after being beckoned by herself is suggestive here of how multiple layers of consciousness are envisioned in meditation traditions. In this scene, Lynch uses key imagery to explore the trope of a dark vs light battle. Here we see dark ancient forces preying upon human experience, leading Laura away from herself and into a world of pain and sorrow (which turns out to be the food these dark forces need to sustain themelves). When in a later scene the angel in her painting disappears, Laura resolves that enough is enough and that it up to her and her alone to save her own soul and rescue the town of Twin Peaks from the dark spiritual forces that keep ‘possessing’ the people she knows. Lynch shows her doing this by finally taking a supernatural ring continually offered to her by the dark forces in her dreams, which will allow these forces ‘in’, something she has struggled against throughout the entire trajectory of the film. Where previously she has avoided taking the ring, we see her resolve to face her fears In a very brutal spiritual battle that she knows will likely cost her her life. As she puts the ring on and we hear her final assailant (her own possessed father) plead with her to take it off so he won’t have to kill her.

What's interesting is how Lynch frames this act of self sacrifice - martyrdom even - as the very thing that ushers her missing angel right to her. The angel isn’t simply restored to her painting, it’s right there with her in that moment - the scene of her murder, shining in the train car that will mark Laura's demise. The angel does nothing to save Laura herself, but instead saves her friend Ronette Pulaski (often analysed in film as Laura's alter ego and darkest side). As soon as the angel appears, Ronette's bonds mysteriously disappear as if by magic and she is able to exit the train car. It is Laura alone who shoulders the physical and spiritual violence of the Black Lodge, a place that penetrates our world but is also veiled away from our world; of Bob/Leyland (her father); and of all the townsfolk. And I often wonder if sometimes that's how teenage girls are left feeling about their own lives - left to shoulder a whole host of other people's projections, their own growing adult powers, a strange world they are at the mercy of, and their own relationship to their experience. A feeling that can be so overwhelming and so high-stakes that learning how to deal with it well is crucial for teen life.

Laura is the prom queen. Her body is graphically sexualised and then desexualised regularly throughout the film. One minute she is the long, wool, tartan skirt wearing awkward teenager, and the next we see her in adult lace and silk lingerie. In one scene she goes to a bar, sits down, cries her eyes out at a beautiful song (the singer Julee Cruise is lit to create a clear visual echo of Laura's missing angel), and then, tears still falling, accepts money from two johns to have sex with, seducing both in a weirdly violent moment of languid eyes mixed with asking aggressively 'so you want to fuck the prom queen?!' and then violently grabbing one's scrotum before gently kissing him.

You can watch the first half of the scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti_2LJWqan4

Laura's sexuality and how pretty much everyone uses and misuses it (including herself) is at the heart of this strange tale of spiritual warfare. Laura is so much more than this. But it is through sexual abuse, sexual barter, and consentual sexual encounters that Lynch shapes Laura's deeply mystical journey. Why is it that so many portrayals of young women's spirituality are framed as a fight for sexual autonomy? There's a gender gap here in how young women's spirituality is written and it's been going on since the first historians started talking about it. Young women's spiritual autonomy and sexual autonomy have been mysteriously wrapped up together. And it’s not quite the same in the stories of spiritual or supernatural experiences in young men.

Laura is objectified, raped, and overly sexualised and it nearly consumes her. She has to carry the weight of everyone's sexual projection all by herself. To fight it and reclaim her inner angel she has to die to save yet another overly sexualised teenager. It's disturbing and it strums a few deep seated chords that lie at the heart of representations of the spiritual and how these emerge in and for the context of young women's experience.

Enter: Dr Sleep, originally written by Stephen King who has also been called America's dark theologian. Indeed Cowen (2018) discusses King's work as dealing directly with a kind of deep spiritual warfare pervading the lives of his human characters battling more than human forces. Here we can see a really interesting, potentially generational shift taking place in how teenage girls' spiritual experience is constructed in film. In Mike Flanagan's 2019 adaptation of King's Dr Sleep, Abra Stone is played by an African-American actress, which adds a whole extra layer of racial readings into the contextual mix. Like Laura, Abra also faces continual dark forces and entities that wish to eat her 'Shine' (her energy and power) much in the same way the creatures of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks want to eat all the pain and sorrow they create in human experience. Also, like Fire Walk with Me, we see Rose the Hat orchestrate and take part in truly gruesome murder of a child. Here it is a young boy simply known as 'Baseball Boy' who is killed and drained of his life force, and much like Bob/Leyland's murder of Laura, there is a disturbing orgiastic sense to it. Sexualisation is thus still very much present and alive in its associations with spiritual warfare in a world that is represented as both painfully human and more than human at the same time.

Interestingly though, in Dr Sleep Abra does something very, very different to Laura. Whereas Laura is utterly alone in her spiritual warfare, Abra has learned that she can reach out for help. She contacts Danny, a man in his forties who also 'Shines' and who also battled dark forces as a child at the Overlook Hotel (The Shining, 1980), and together they forge a series of plans to wage spiritual and physical warfare on the entites known as the True Knot. It is easy to argue that the key difference between Laura and Abra is that Laura has experienced dark forces take possession of her family - her father - and at times her community, so what we are seeing is how psychological trauma presences differently and thus creates different kinds of spiritual experience and relationships (or lack of them) in teenage landscapes. In Laura's case, we can't just point out the 'bad guys' and fight them. But the Laura-type isn't far away in Dr Sleep either.

The character Snakebite Andi, abused as a child, is shown as having incredible psychic powers which she uses to lure older men, posing as a child for them to abuse on the internet and subsequently using her phenomenal psychic and suggestive abilities to rob, scar or stab them. Sexuality and representations of teenage girls' relationship to themselves and their power to influence behaviours are still linked here. Only, unlike Laura, Andi lost to the dark forces, becoming the newest member of the True Knot. Abra, by contrast comes from a relatively 'safe' family and community (until she encounters the True Knot which she goes seeking). No one is other than they seem in her circle, and so is she arguably portrayed as having less difficulty in trusting in the help and guidance of others. When Rose the Hat comes for Abra in an absolutely fantastic scene depicting meditative practices, realised by Flanagan's superbly researched imaginary regarding concentration, and the slowing heartbeat associated with Eastern traditions, Abra is waiting for her.

Abra has asked for help and learned how to battle her inner terror and thus, engage the dark forces that come for her. Abra's spiritual journey does not require her sexuality as a key territory through which she can claim her own growing powers, and this small but central fact breaks with a longstanding tradition haunting the representation of teenage girls' spirituality. Abra knows her own power and isn't afraid to use it. Her story is not one of sexualisation per se but of being in possession of the kind of vitality people would kill for. In Flanagan's adaption - the kind of vitality mostly white-presencing forces would kill a black girl for. Abra's journey is about breaking from the othering lonliness of being powerful, and reaching out to others. Of course it is to a white male that she does so, which conjures up all sorts of questions about how Flanagan explores what it means to claim purchase on power for a black teenage girl. In the back of the car when facing the entity Crow Daddy, Abra 'channels' Danny. In a sense she becomes a forty year old white male to defeat the entity out to attack her. Crow Daddy clocks this asking, 'who are you?' and then 'it's nice to meet you' when Danny/Abra responds. Flanagan does rectify this however. When the car crashes and Danny is thrown 'out of' Abra, Abra faces Rose the Hat's psychic form alone and simply walks straight through her. She has fully claimed her own power now and it has nothing to do with sexuality or sexualisation OR with becoming-white (being ‘possessed’ by a benevolent white male). You can watch the fantastic scene here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uv1NKxbRO6g&pp=ygUQQ3JpdyBkYWRkeSBkZXN0aA%3D%3D

It's easy to argue that in Flanagan's adaptation of Dr Sleep the sexualisation trope that does occur is taken on by the male characters: Baseball Boy (discussed above), and Danny himself. Here, Danny is the person we see caught in a trap of alcholism and sexual mistreatment. It is at his lowest ebb that he starts on his journey of spiritual and physical recovery. Danny discloses that he turned to alchol to block out his ‘spiritual powers‘ - namely the personal and unique ways in which he understands the world around him and which are depicted in the story metaphorically as ‘psychic’ or special abilities.

Spiritual experience and spiritual battle are depicted in all sorts of fascinating ways in contemporary film, but I'm eternally interested in how films handle the idea of these when they emerge in and for teen contexts - particularly teenage girls. What are we teaching teenage girls through metaphor and trope about their own very real power in the real world? What languages are we giving them (through film and media) to explore any questions of spirituality they may have? When the dangers of the world feel like a phenomenal power that is in fact so powerful that it can be described as 'evil' or as an 'evil entity' that we need to fight, what kinds of imaginaries are young people drawing on? As a teacher at FE and in pupil referal, I talked to so many teenagers who described their very real everyday struggles as being like battling a demon or a power so great it's stronger than human. And taking them at their word, it must really feel like just that. So many teens I worked with described themselves as needing to become or harness a supernatural force, a spiritual force, or a superhero-like force to help them face challenges that seemed beyond their capability to handle as teens. What kind of stories are we giving them? How are they relating to the concept of the more-than-human, the spiritual, or the powerful in and for their everyday lives?

Laura Palmer is the image of the frightened, suffering, gendered body taking on the evils of a world that constantly sexualises teenage girls who is simultaneously forced to take responsibility alone for the whole lot of it. Her struggle reminds me of theatre supremo Jerzy Grotowski's famous interview: if god exists then he can have a spiritual life for us. But if god doesn't exist... The second half of the sentence is left hanging in the air (...then we must have a spiritual for ourselves). Laura brings her own angel into being, battling the mingling of sex and violence in her experience on her own to claim her angel as herself. Abra's journey is different. She draws on her community. She uses her powers to reach out and find her kindred spirits, helping them as much as they help her. This is a story about lateral service and community rather than the lone spiritual warrior trope, beloved by so many mystical and spiritual traditions worldwide.

Interestingly, just as Laura died saving Ronette, Danny dies saving Abra. It seems blood must be spilled in our spiritual stories. Only here, Abra is the one to survive in the 'real' world, which offers an interesting lesson on how young people orient themselves around their relationship to their own power when it comes to beneficient adults. In Dr Sleep, just as Danny saves Abra, she saves him. By calling out for help, she gives Danny the opportunity to reconcile with the demons of his own childhood by helping her face hers. As we learn from his encounter with his own mentor, there is a cycle to a spiritual life, and helping others is a central part of that cycle.

Just as O'Halloran helped Danny, Danny needs to help Abra, and soon generationally, Abra will need to help someone else to continue to grow. (It is of note in the context of this analysis, that Danny's childhood spiritual mentor, Dick O'Halarann was cast as a Black male in Kubrick's original The Shining. O'Flanagan stays faithful to this in Dr Sleep). In the scope of Fire Walk With Me, Laura doesn't get that opportunity (at least not outside of the Lodge). She dies to the real world, living in another.

These are fascinating and tumultuous modern day stories dealing with the very real issues that teenagers face: sexual violence, alchoholism; destructive and downright terrifying experiences that they are barely equipped to deal with, as they grow up. What new popular generational representations of these kinds of inner journeys and support systems can we imagine beyond the solitary claiming of sexual autonomy or benevolent white mentorship alone? What stories can we re/write to address the challenges of growing up in the 21st century and to affect new, wise changes for teenagers and young people trying to claim their powers and find their voices in a very real and very confusing world?