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Artwork: Haneen Odetallah

“How Important it is,especially for women,to claim that space, to take up that space through what one does with one's body…. And so when I am at my table, I am also claiming that space, I am becoming a writer by taking up that space.” (Ahmed 11)

How Important it is,especially for a woman: Jules’s style

In the first episode of the series, our first impression of Jules is that of a colorful stylistic “Sailor moon” (“Pilot” 09:14) girl, smitten with love, on her way to a date in a motel room with a guy she’s been texting on a (gay) dating app. The date seems pretty dreamy; the guy is there, well dressed with the champagne glass he promised, gently handing it over to Jules while he caresses her face and calls her very beautiful. The next thing we know, he inserts his thumb in her mouth, flips her on the bed, tears apart her clothing, and engages in a somewhat violent sexual

intercourse until he is relieved. Jules later flips through his phone while he’s in the shower to learn that he’s married, she leaves disappointed like every other time. This pretty much sets up Jules’s character and subjectivity.

Since a very young age, Jules has been engaging excessively in self harm; she’s been a gender dysphoric clinically depressed boy, the gender she’s assigned at birth, who just hated himself, body and soul. As a “boy” she had spent her time in and out of therapy until she was abandoned by her mother in a psychiatric hospital for some time, then, some time later, her mother retreated from her life to alcoholism. In the fourth episode "Shook Ones Pt. II" dedicated in part to Jules’s backstory, her young “boy” self is portrayed in an androgynous style: colorful oversized

“feminine” shirts that conceal her body, tight pants and Hello Kitty backpacks, while her mother is already emotionally distant and clearly fed up. When Jules is back from the hospital trap feeling better, her mother leaves. At sixteen, she had already been three years into transitioning, and since then, she enlisted herself on a quest to become the very image of femininity (Doane,

Masquerade Reconsidered 42); to become “all that men desire” (“Fuck Anyone” 06:24). And every other date of hers has been the spitting image of that one described in the opening, an unavailable white “cis” man who would “always, always” insists upon being “a hundred percent straight” (“Shook ones’’08:00 ), a sensational and imaginary love story, epitomized in the first meetup, and concluded with a mini “heartbreak” routine for Jules herself. This need for love or acceptance as female is her style, one repeatedly haunted by rejection or failure.

Taking up that space: Jules’s phenomenology

The previous chapters offered a phenomenological account of the female figure as that which emerges against a background of perception as dramatized, as some projected\foregrounded routine of that background (situatedness in the male-scape) which constitutes the positivity of that figure, established upon Merleau-Ponty’s account of the background of perception as normative to the perception of a figure:

When we perceive things, however, we are constantly sensitive not only to what we perceive but also, and essentially, to how well our experience measures up to our perceptual needs and desires. The norms involved in perception, therefore, are norms about how best to see the thing perceived (Kelly 97)

The background as norm, is that which elaborately discloses the perceived thing as that “thing”

by accounting for the perceptual needs and desires of the viewholder. For Jules’s character, her subjectivity is entirely based on a willful dislocation of desire—she desires to be an object of desire for men. This desire then constitutes the normative background of the female figure Jules

aims to become; how is it perceived best such that it achieves love and approval as female, yet Jules is aware of it as such.

Young Jules hates “himself”, she doesn’t find any possibility for subjectivity within that original framework or “background” of a male gender identity. Merleau-Ponty accounts for the

perceptual experience of the background of a figure as those objects “having a point of view on it” (Kelly 97) which I can’t have and thus “perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision” (Kelly 92). Such angles are considered to reveal more of the figure’s revealing or exposing features, that is, when young “boy” Jules observes her figure, she doesn’t find

standpoints from which she can perceive herself as a subject (or as a subject of desire) or: the standpoints offered by the original background do not reveal her as such. In her “backstory”

young boy Jules stands in front of the mirror, she hates her brain, and her body, “not every part”, just her shoulders, arms, hands, chest, stomach, thighs, knees, ankles, and her feet. “And it would just play on an infinite loop, until she can’t breath or think or even stand to be alive” (“Shook Ones’’ 05:35), so she attempts to destroy that perceived non-desirable figure by self

harm—cutting herself. This “destruction” lands her in the psychiatric hospital from which she returns better and starts transitioning i.e. she admits herself to a new background; that of femaleness. A background which would offer a view from many standpoints or ideally from

“everywhere” from which her figure would be perceived as “desirable”, as female.

But Jules does in fact perceive that a female figure is essentially of a “background” status apropos maleness (the foregrounded\projected background as routine described earlier). She recognizes that “conquering femininity” (“Trials and Tribulations” 40:09) or becoming female

means abandoning any object of desire outside of her body; becoming the object of desire. So she bases her subject over a background of being female for being female—hence she embodies

“the very image of femininity” (Doane, Masquerade Reconsidered 43). She gives out herself as a

“canvas” for males’ desire to borrow Long Chu’s phrasing (L. Chu 25) i.e. she lives out her sexual function, she basesher “entire womanhood around men”, building her body, her

personality, her soul, around what she thinks men desire(“Fuck Anyone” 06:24). In other words, Jules tries to embody a fully subordinate sexual position—a functional sexuality as per male apprehension—as she perceives a female of this world “should”.“By sixteen, Jules had gotten a little slutty”the narration goes on while we skim through an overview of Jules’s dates and sexual evolution, we see her piercing a seductive look into the camera while dressing up. In the series, Jules is hardly present without looking sexy; always in mini skirts and dresses, “Jules certainly stands out among her peers in a pastel-colored babydoll top or floral-embellished turtleneck”

(Bobila). An image that mimics those erotic Ecchi (soft-porn) anime girls both in erotic lolita-ish clothing and colors, she is “like eye candy on camera” (Bobila) and on dating apps; always ready to be consumed sexually by men.

But the conscious element of this performance relegates it to that of the masquerade of a

spectator (Doane, Film and the Masquerade 82), in the sense that Jules recognizes that she must

“see herself” in order to properly present herself as a spectacle for males. The creative aspect of her fashion style, particularly shining in her outrageous neon and glitter geometric yet casually worn eye makeup for example, conveys something more than simply taking up

the—male—audience’s point of view as given; it necessitates an intuitive “illustration” distance that she takes. In the date described in the opening, the “cishet” married man, or the closeted

bisexual “locked into sexual identity” (Doane, Film and the Masquerade 81) of a cishet male, point’s to Jules’s style saying “you generally look like this? You’re beautiful…I am envious of your generation.. You don’t think much about the rules” alluding to Jules’s capacity to switch backgrounds particularly at “I look at you and I think there are two versions of how your life can go” (“Pilot” 32:17); her capacity to overlook and choose backgrounds. “The effectivity of

masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman”

(Doane, Film and the Masquerade 87). Jules thus recognizes the need for a distance, she

recognizes that in order to produce her “figure” she must produce its background, as in to inhabit points of view that “reveal” something about that figure’s constitution, and in her case, that reveal more of a female object (of desire).The backstory, the narration, continues on Jules’s dating history:

Some were sweet, some were weird, a few were aggressive. And whenever anything got too uncomfortable, Jules would just imagine that she wasn’t really herself, and this wasn’t really her life. She was just a character in a book or a movie or a show. That none of it was real, and if it was, how did it matter? It’s not like her body ever really belonged to her in the first place. But fuck it. She’d save it for the memoirs” (“Shook Ones”)

Some points of view are more revealing of the female figure she attempts to become than others.

Jules must embody revealing standpoints every time to allow the positivity of her figure to be constituted, “To be ‘potentially lodged in’ the background object that now stands behind the figure” (Kelly 99), thus for Jules to produce her subject as orientated accordingly. Jules’s masquerade simultaneously attempts to conceal the masculine that she possesses i.e. to abstain

from viewpoints that potentially overlap with the old background; her subjectivity is thus entirely spatial work.

After all, things must get “too uncomfortable” before Jules could abandon a certain standpoint she currently occupies and reinscribe that distance once again: to imagine “this wasn’t really herself”, but even if it were, “it’snot like her body ever really belonged to her”, Jules recognizes that her figure is just the embodiment of that spatial work she does with her body. That distance Jules attempts to maintain is haunted by failure to be perceived as she intends, it closes in precisely when Jules occupies those standpoints she had sought to inhabit before, “saving it for the memoirs” indicates both the failure of that distance (the retreat from those standpoints) and a self-representational moment—the reinscription of that distance once again. In artist Monica Majoli’s portrait paintings of photographs of her ex-lovers in the mirror,“the portraits are made after the love affair has ended and represent what we think of as failure—the failure of love to last, the mortality of all connection, the fleeting nature of desire. Obviously desire is present in the very gesture of painting, and yet desire here, like the black mirror, devours rather than

generates, obliterates rather than enlightens.” (Halberstam 104). Jack Halberstam calls this desire as a reinscription of a distance away from a subject position, in Majoli’s case the lover, and in Jules’s case the female subject, “The queer art of failure” (Halberstam).

Queer failure: Conquering femininity

“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style” (Crisp 196)

Later in the second episode of the series, Jules starts texting an anonymous guy online, he loves her looks and her nudes; Jules falls in love once again. Jules falls really hard for the guy, they text and sext for hours and days and by the fourth episode they plan to meet, that's when the guy is revealed to be Nate, her classmate and Maddy’s boyfriend. Jules is disappointed given their history (he bullies her and tries to attack her in the first episode) but Nate, seemingly so sincerely, confesses that he’s never gotten this close to anyone and he kisses her by the lake.

If an “optimal view” (Kelly 90) on the figure she attempts to produce is a view by which the

“real” figure of femininity is revealed, it would be a view from which Jules has really

“conquered femininity”—managed to become that female figure she’s after. Yet Jules always fails to “be really loved” as female. The kiss with Nate takes a turn when he inserts his thumb in her mouth and mimics the guy from the motel Jules had met with earlier, after that, it’s revealed that Nate has been scamming Jules in order to blackmail her with the nudes to prevent her from speaking up about the motel sex date; as the motel guy turns out to be his dad. This is the case with Jules, she’s constantly pointed out for her female inadequacy, every guy she meets “always, always” begins the date with “I’m a hundred percent straight” (“Shook Ones’’08:00 ); they already begin with dismay regarding her non-heteronormative femaleness, which subsequently points to a denial about their own sexuality. Even Nate, who despite the fact that he tracked her as a plan to blackmail her in the end—and to attack her as one of the reachable subjects of his (childhood) traumas regarding his dad’s secret homosexual life—was implicitly attracted to her.

Hewasn’t really obliged to kiss her but her did, and he did in fact sexually harass her in the street in the beginning of the first episode even before he learned about both her identity and relation to his dad; thus he, like the others, did recognize her as female *yet* inadequately so.

Jules recognizes this point of view on her, she always hunts for emotionally unavailable men;

married with kids, in a long-term relationship, etc., precisely because she cannot recognize

“what’s next?” (“Fuck Anyone”), given that she is perceived as such. In that sense, the

subjectivity impasse for Jules, the symptom hovering over and preventing the perception of the subject she tries to produce, is the insufficiency of the image or the background she is trying to produce (the standpoints she attempts to inhabit around her figure which reveal that figure’s features as full\positive or three-dimensional à la Merleau-Ponty); some of the viewpoints are inaccessible to her and\or implied through the other as simply not revealing of the features she attempts to articulate. Afterall, she constructs her female image, or the background that would reveal her figure on a gay dating app for example, a figure doomed to failure by heteronormative standards. This failure is the failure of abandoning subjective desire, the failure, of an “ideal”

female subject articulated solely through the other’s desire, due to “the fleeting nature of desire”

(Halberstam 104); that desire demands constant reinscription of distance because it’s essentially about perceiving a projected self-image rather than accommodating the other’s viewpoints on one’s image or figure.

Ahmed writes that “Perception hence involves orientation; what is perceived depends on where we are located, which gives us a certain take on things'' (Ahmed 27). Jules’s perception of her own figure “faces” a problem of inhabitance—inhabiting certain standpoints. “If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails.” (Ahmed 11). To understand Jules’s impasse as a problem of orientation, of how the extension fails to constitute these standpoints, we therefore admit to an

unfamiliar position, an unfamiliar location vis-à-vis location (Ahmed 12), a relationship which Jules cannot establish, a direction Jules cannot take to face her figure.

“For Husserl the interpretation of the object as having this or that property is a secondary act involving what he calls a ‘twofold directedness’. First, I am directed toward an object (I face it), and then I take a direction toward it (for instance, I might or might not admire it)” (Ahmed 28)

When accounting for objects of perception or the perception of an object, such as “the table”, Husserl turns to "the table" as an object by looking at it rather than over it (Ahmed 35), “that phenomenology must "bracket" or put aside what is given, what is made available by ordinary perception” (Ahmed 32); or what is familiar. That is, only by abandoning what he terms a

“Natural attitude, which keeps us within the familiar indeed” (Ahmed 32), towards an object, in other words "to put out of action", can we actually see the object as an object, as “self-same”

(Ahmed 35). Seeing requires some distance from familiar assumptions. Husserl suggests that

“the table as object is given as ‘the same,’ as a givenness that "holds" or is shaped by the ‘flow’

of perception” (Ahmed 36). Ahmed continues: “Phenomenology for Husserl means

apprehending the object as if it were unfamiliar, so that we can attend to the flow of perception itself” (Ahmed 37). And if that table is Jules, then to actually see Jules’s self-sameness as the

“female” figure she’s trying to constitute is to lose sight of her function in this mess—as a

producer of an image, a projection of some normative subject that is capable of desiring, which is a position unfamiliar to Jules herself. In succumbing to the male gaze, Jules is conditioned to experience herself solely as an object of desire, and this would mean losing familiarity with the subject she’s creating, by turning solely to the male’s subject position as a view on herself. The flow of perception is broken when, in the second fold of the attempt to interpret her figure as

female, Jules loses direction toward her self-sameness, when she is denied femaleness by the apprehension of the other—she grows disoriented as she fails to extend her body through space when she is denied that revealing standpoint by the male subject occupying it.

It is from here that the world unfolds: That changes when she encounters Rue

When Jules enters a relationship with Rue, a new possibility for subjectivity opens up as Jules’s figure comes into view as female (Rue “sees” a female named Jules). Rue falls in love with Jules and Jules falls in love with Rue. This new possibility opens up only insofar as Rue offers a continuation of the perceptual flow Jules is trying to maintain. In other words, Rue comes to offer a view from which Jules’s self-sameness is perceivable (afterall Jules didn’t "introduce”

herself as female to Rue rather she was perceived as such), and so Rue familiarizes a position once unfamiliar to Jules herself; where Jules needn’t lose sight of her function rather her function is bracketed as background from Rue’s standpoint—when Jules fantasizes about a “happy

ending” with Rue, Rue is seen assisting Jules inject her feminizing hormones. The relationship

“puts out” or displaces both of their (sexual) functions. Rue’s usual apathy which extends to her sexuality from a male point of view is viewed as not functional (as discussed in the previous chapter). But this position is disregarded for a short while, as Rue is attracted to Jules (until her relation to Jules is revealed as just another addiction that cannot see beyond the emotional escapism, as a substitution for the actual drugs). The alignment of the desire for euphoria and sexual desire in Rue’s case is achieved with the figure of Jules entering Rue’s picture, which relieves the anxiety of having to seek euphoria through the introduction of the euphoria of love

via Jules. All the while, Jules also finds her figure constituted as desirable without functionalizing a fully male-subordinated sexual function or without having to produce a

subordinate figure—without altering her subject in the process of inhabiting a male viewholder’s position, Rue doesn’t share heteronormative standards nor does she insist on being straight.

However, as described in the previous chapter, for Rue’s part at least, the impasse cannot be overcome, as her self-sameness is already constituted through alignment with that function: her only aim is to relieve her anxieties; she already lacks foreground, that lacanian ideal-I (Loos).

But for Jules the impasse is overcome (she is desired and loved for the female she is) and it is precisely when it’s overcome that Jules’s subject (or current background) collapses because the masquerade ceases to be necessary as a tool to denote self-sameness for Jules. Rue’s perception is not guided by a direct introduction from Jules such as “offering” herself on a dating app but rather she approaches Jules, in the first episode, exactly in a moment when Jules is holding a knife to Nate’s bullying face, thus a moment of dropping that sexy female-subordinate attitude she has put up—suspension of the masquerade.

And so the perception flow of Jules as female becomes a matter of Rue’s towardness not as a function of a masquerade designated towards a certain type of desire (Male desire)—Jules’s corresponding spatial work of foregrounding her femaleness to be particularly articulated by the viewholder (creating an image). “The object is an effect of ‘bringing forth,’ where the ‘bringing forth’ is a question of the determina tion of form: the object itself has been shaped for something, which means it takes the shape of what it is for” (Ahmed 46), Rue’s towardness gives form to Jules as a desirable female. When Rue and Jules’s relationship is at its best, Jules ghosts Rue for

a weekend in New York where she ends up sleeping with another girl, Jules “allows this girl to paint her makeup” while the girl flirts with Jules; Jules “takes the shape” by being brought forth.

By the end of the series, Jules sets her mind on actually pulling off the New York escape plan with Rue—she’s orientated towards what she was brought forth to by Rue’s desire, towards a new background that reveals a new female subject. Rue agrees for a short while, until she relapses in the train station; but by then, Jules had already decided to leave, even before asking Rue (in fact, she has made up her mind since last weekend in NY). Jules thus had already

perceived the fall of the masquerade\background and decides to abandon the unfamiliar and start anew. This is where the series ends, the image (background) Jules was attempting to create ceased to be familiar to her, that is the gaze offered by Rue, it altered Jules’s entire perception of her situatedness as female.

An effect of towardness: Female as homing devices

In the aftermath of the series, HBO released two special episodes depicting the two protagonists' status after that cold ending: Rue’s dramatic and sharp relapse into drug abuse following Jules’s escape to New York. The two installments “grounded the series in reality” (Elwood) as opposed to the highly stylized and glamorous nature of the first season, as the two protagonists, Rue and Jules, each engage in a reflective and confessional conversation with their therapeutic

accompaniment. The second episode titled “Part 2: Jules” or “Fuck Anyone Who's Not a Sea