Content warning for non-explicit discussion of real life death, expulsion of bodily waste and fluids, pregnancy, childbirth, needle use in a medical context
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I am a woman. My experience as a woman is one of the less common ones, statistically, because I didn’t have it in me to assert that I was one until a good quarter century after most women are informed that this is what they are. That there are rules to this, and ways to perform womanhood, and perhaps most importantly for a lot of people, certain baseline genetic requirements that separate women from non-women. That last part is the sticky one for me, and because of this there are a lot of people out in the world who hate me, who want me to simply not be. Many of these people are powerful and they make decisions every day about my privilege to exist, but many many more of them are regular people out in the world. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who they are by the looks they give, the things they say; sometimes it’s not so immediately obvious. It is stressful to go outside, often, and occasionally it is outright difficult. Nevertheless, I am a woman.
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Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French writer who has been prolific in many fields over her six decades of writing, but I often find myself thinking of her most famous work, one of her earliest publications - 1980’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, because it is the only thing by her that I’ve read. It’s a 200-ish page book that builds heavily on old Freudian theory to, among other things, consider the ways people use powerfully negative experiences to define and value the self.
Kristeva defines abjection like this: “The human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Abjection, in a way, forces us to choose our identity; we define ourselves via rejection, by how we think of ourselves in opposition to things that disgust or harm us. It preys upon this idea of selfhood, of the boundaries we construct and maintain to create identity. It preys upon the divisions we create when we erect these boundaries. One example of this that Kristeva uses is things we naturally expel from our bodies, stuff like blood from a wound, teeth that fall out, semen, piss, shit, vomit. One second these things are subject – they’re part of you – and the next they’re object – separate from you entirely. This may not seem like much but this intrinsic mental separation from what was a part of you as soon as it leaves your body highlights how fragile these boundaries actually are.
I am, because I am not.
Kristeva thinks it’s a thin line.
She most often frames abjection in terms of violence, revulsion, disgust, and trauma. And it’s true that we tend to use the word “abject” as a maximalist adjective to highlight negative things. Abject terror. Abject misery. Abject poverty. But for Kristeva it’s not actually a bad thing in the grand view; on the contrary it’s an essential part of making us who we are as a collective and as individuals. She talks a lot about childbirth as the first moment of abjection. Birth being as much a kid fighting to live, to create a self, a sense of being, even as they tear away from the safety of their mother’s womb. It’s an inherently violent act and it’s the only way to become. It’s an ongoing process throughout life; kids have values imposed on them - language, culture, law - all things contrary to totally natural impulses but also things that most of us agree are necessary for them to grow into society as we know it. This is a process that repeats constantly throughout life to varying degrees. It can be painful, horrible, and disgusting, but it’s necessary. These experiences sharpen our sense of who we are, in our sense of opposition to the things that cause us pain, horror, and disgust.
I am not, so I am.
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Silent Hill 4: The Room has, if I’m remembering all My Gaming from last year correctly, the largest cast of characters of any Team Silent game, but it is almost entirely concerned with the thematic opposition of its player character, Henry Townshend, and its central figure and villain, Walter Sullivan. Henry is cursed, you see, trapped inside of his apartment by supernatural forces, unable to be seen or heard by anyone on the outside even as he becomes increasingly aware of a deadly, ghostly threat haunting the complex and its inhabitants. Walter uh, IS that threat, the ghost of a serial killer returned partially from the grave to finish his cruel sacrament with the six-ish murders he had to leave off in life (all according to his grand plan, of course). His ultimate goal, it’s eventually revealed, is to get permanent access to Henry’s apartment, which he sees as the vessel for his own mother, whose spirit he believes will awaken when he completes his twenty-one ritual murders.
Walter has a tragic past, raised within an evil cult, abused constantly by his caretakers, turned out onto uncaring streets with only his brainwashing and occult dogma to motivate him to go on. He’s a man who experiences moments of abjection and rejects them, becoming singularly focused on rescinding his identity. He is in constant pursuit of a mother he doesn’t remember, his mission to return permanently to the safety of her womb, where he can exist eternally, unburdened and unfettered by both his trauma and his self.
In all of the early Silent Hill games, aspects of the world take on attributes specific to the psyches of particular characters central to the story, and in The Room that person is Walter himself, whose fears and hates dictate the worlds that Henry and his neighbors are dragged into throughout the game. Walter’s fears are decidedly more mundane than previous Silent Hill fear generators, with environments like normal forests and subway stations, urban blocks and apartment complexes. Walter is afraid of, generally speaking, the Out There. He wants to retreat. Enemies are other people. They squish, they slurp, they burp grotesquely (bodily expulsion is a hallmark of abject experience, remember). Ghosts pursue you doggedly, without pause, and the worst thing they can do is just be present, their very auras radiating sinister energy that hurts Henry without action.
Henry himself is a mirror to Walter, trapped seemingly eternally in the thematic womb, his only escape the long long tunnel that forms in his bathroom wall, one that spawns him into these frightening outside worlds, often in the fetal position (I know writers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards, etc). While he does face trauma in these worlds and after every moment of abjection retreats back to his apartment for nourishment and healing, Henry does, ultimately, want to get the fuck outta there bro. He’s desperate for human connection too (and connection beyond murder – his moments of abjection always come via Walter doing something fucked up to one of his neighbors), desperate enough to peep on his direct next door neighbor Eileen through a hole that a previous tenant left in their shared wall. Tellingly, Henry can’t even begin to have a real connection to Eileen, or anyone, until he symbolically begins to separate himself from the room; once they meet for real and succeed in evading Walter’s attacks for the first time, the room stops healing Henry, and becomes open to hauntings that actively harm him.
The titular room is Henry’s place of refuge and comfort, at first, but it’s also his ultimate enemy. This is true the entire game, not just after Walter’s influence begins to infect the space. He’ll die if he stays here. He has precious little food, and during gameplay he gives away his last bottle of chocolate milk (milk being one of Kristeva’s confessed personal objects of great disgust, in a moment of fun serendipity). He has no one to interact with, and even though it’s stated in game that he was not a social guy before he was cursed, once you’re down to zero everything seems like a lifeline. Eventually, of course, he’ll be literally killed by the curses that infect the room. He can’t stay. He needs to be born, and he knows it. It’s a false security, and it intrinsically can’t last.
Walter and Henry aren’t the only figures central to the game, though. There is, of course, a third pillar here: you. Er, me. Y’know, The Player. There is essentially nothing to Henry – this is part of why he exists primarily as a thematic contrast to Walter, and part of why it’s hard to ascribe much character to his actions. You’re Henry in large part. When he’s in the apartment you even control him in first person. You are the ultimate voyeur, in the same way that Henry is to Eileen and Walter is to Henry. And this is part of why Walter’s worlds and the creatures that populate them are on the surface so much more generic than the places and monsters of past games: applicability.
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I have this uncle who died in his apartment. I didn’t know him, really. From stuff I’ve been told he wasn’t a good guy. I was a kid, and we lived states away. I only met him a handful of times at big family parties. The only reason I ever think about him at all probably is because he died in his apartment, and even then I’ve only started thinking about him so much recently, in the last couple of years, because we’ve all been spending a lot more time in our apartments. It’s covid, bay bee. The reason I think about him so much is because when he died in his apartment, nobody knew. Nobody cared to check in. They only found him, weeks later, because his landlord went into his place because they had assumed he had run out on it because he hadn’t paid rent or responded to any communication, for weeks, because he was dead.
So I think about that a lot the last couple years.
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I mentioned that Walter’s hellscapes are mundane places and his monsters are other people and I do think this is a reflection of where the developers thought maybe a lot of their presumed audience was at when Silent Hill 4 came out. Which is pretty funny. But it’s real, too, for me. There’s not a lot that’s scarier for me as a trans person than An Only Vaguely Familiar Public Place With An Off Vibe. That’s alarm bell central. It’s hard out there, man. Rarely do I feel outright unsafe but often do I feel eyes. It’s difficult to tell a lot of the time if the eyes are real or if I’m inventing them, and that doubt can make it even harder to feel confident in my place in perfectly normal spaces. Just yesterday I was actively frightened waiting in line for the bathroom in an inexplicably crowded gas station in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You just never know when it’s going to be a problem. I was never the most confident person, but this low level thrum of unease colors every moment of public life. In talking about abjection in an academic sense and especially when talking about fiction it’s easy to forget that part of it is that it is upsetting by nature. But in life it sharpens me. I know who I am.
It’s a harsh dichotomy – every day I am more visibly transgender in more irreversible physical ways. Every day I become more obviously Neither Male Nor Female and while I love this about myself and I am truly happy with these changes they are the same changes that make me less safe and more vulnerable in ways that become harder and harder to cover up with clothes and masks. It would be easy to retreat to my womb, metaphorically. I want to, sometimes. I work remotely on a permanent basis. I live literally across the street from the grocery store. My girlfriend is here, my cats are here, my friends are online.
But I am transforming. Every week I stab myself with a needle. I force through this needle the fluid that makes my body into what I want it to be. A violent transmogrification. I feel the most beautiful in these moments. They are moments of clarity, of self expression, of definition by rejection. I am not a man. I am a woman. This needle in my leg is my signature. Living in fear of living in fear can’t be the way.
I am not who I was. I oppose that. I am becoming. Every week I am new. I need to tear away.
I want to be born.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am a woman. My experience as a woman is one of the less common ones, statistically, because I didn’t have it in me to assert that I was one until a good quarter century after most women are informed that this is what they are. That there are rules to this, and ways to perform womanhood, and perhaps most importantly for a lot of people, certain baseline genetic requirements that separate women from non-women. That last part is the sticky one for me, and because of this there are a lot of people out in the world who hate me, who want me to simply not be. Many of these people are powerful and they make decisions every day about my privilege to exist, but many many more of them are regular people out in the world. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who they are by the looks they give, the things they say; sometimes it’s not so immediately obvious. It is stressful to go outside, often, and occasionally it is outright difficult. Nevertheless, I am a woman.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French writer who has been prolific in many fields over her six decades of writing, but I often find myself thinking of her most famous work, one of her earliest publications - 1980’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, because it is the only thing by her that I’ve read. It’s a 200-ish page book that builds heavily on old Freudian theory to, among other things, consider the ways people use powerfully negative experiences to define and value the self.
Kristeva defines abjection like this: “The human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Abjection, in a way, forces us to choose our identity; we define ourselves via rejection, by how we think of ourselves in opposition to things that disgust or harm us. It preys upon this idea of selfhood, of the boundaries we construct and maintain to create identity. It preys upon the divisions we create when we erect these boundaries. One example of this that Kristeva uses is things we naturally expel from our bodies, stuff like blood from a wound, teeth that fall out, semen, piss, shit, vomit. One second these things are subject – they’re part of you – and the next they’re object – separate from you entirely. This may not seem like much but this intrinsic mental separation from what was a part of you as soon as it leaves your body highlights how fragile these boundaries actually are.
I am, because I am not.
Kristeva thinks it’s a thin line.
She most often frames abjection in terms of violence, revulsion, disgust, and trauma. And it’s true that we tend to use the word “abject” as a maximalist adjective to highlight negative things. Abject terror. Abject misery. Abject poverty. But for Kristeva it’s not actually a bad thing in the grand view; on the contrary it’s an essential part of making us who we are as a collective and as individuals. She talks a lot about childbirth as the first moment of abjection. Birth being as much a kid fighting to live, to create a self, a sense of being, even as they tear away from the safety of their mother’s womb. It’s an inherently violent act and it’s the only way to become. It’s an ongoing process throughout life; kids have values imposed on them - language, culture, law - all things contrary to totally natural impulses but also things that most of us agree are necessary for them to grow into society as we know it. This is a process that repeats constantly throughout life to varying degrees. It can be painful, horrible, and disgusting, but it’s necessary. These experiences sharpen our sense of who we are, in our sense of opposition to the things that cause us pain, horror, and disgust.
I am not, so I am.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Silent Hill 4: The Room has, if I’m remembering all My Gaming from last year correctly, the largest cast of characters of any Team Silent game, but it is almost entirely concerned with the thematic opposition of its player character, Henry Townshend, and its central figure and villain, Walter Sullivan. Henry is cursed, you see, trapped inside of his apartment by supernatural forces, unable to be seen or heard by anyone on the outside even as he becomes increasingly aware of a deadly, ghostly threat haunting the complex and its inhabitants. Walter uh, IS that threat, the ghost of a serial killer returned partially from the grave to finish his cruel sacrament with the six-ish murders he had to leave off in life (all according to his grand plan, of course). His ultimate goal, it’s eventually revealed, is to get permanent access to Henry’s apartment, which he sees as the vessel for his own mother, whose spirit he believes will awaken when he completes his twenty-one ritual murders.
Walter has a tragic past, raised within an evil cult, abused constantly by his caretakers, turned out onto uncaring streets with only his brainwashing and occult dogma to motivate him to go on. He’s a man who experiences moments of abjection and rejects them, becoming singularly focused on rescinding his identity. He is in constant pursuit of a mother he doesn’t remember, his mission to return permanently to the safety of her womb, where he can exist eternally, unburdened and unfettered by both his trauma and his self.
In all of the early Silent Hill games, aspects of the world take on attributes specific to the psyches of particular characters central to the story, and in The Room that person is Walter himself, whose fears and hates dictate the worlds that Henry and his neighbors are dragged into throughout the game. Walter’s fears are decidedly more mundane than previous Silent Hill fear generators, with environments like normal forests and subway stations, urban blocks and apartment complexes. Walter is afraid of, generally speaking, the Out There. He wants to retreat. Enemies are other people. They squish, they slurp, they burp grotesquely (bodily expulsion is a hallmark of abject experience, remember). Ghosts pursue you doggedly, without pause, and the worst thing they can do is just be present, their very auras radiating sinister energy that hurts Henry without action.
Henry himself is a mirror to Walter, trapped seemingly eternally in the thematic womb, his only escape the long long tunnel that forms in his bathroom wall, one that spawns him into these frightening outside worlds, often in the fetal position (I know writers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards, etc). While he does face trauma in these worlds and after every moment of abjection retreats back to his apartment for nourishment and healing, Henry does, ultimately, want to get the fuck outta there bro. He’s desperate for human connection too (and connection beyond murder – his moments of abjection always come via Walter doing something fucked up to one of his neighbors), desperate enough to peep on his direct next door neighbor Eileen through a hole that a previous tenant left in their shared wall. Tellingly, Henry can’t even begin to have a real connection to Eileen, or anyone, until he symbolically begins to separate himself from the room; once they meet for real and succeed in evading Walter’s attacks for the first time, the room stops healing Henry, and becomes open to hauntings that actively harm him.
The titular room is Henry’s place of refuge and comfort, at first, but it’s also his ultimate enemy. This is true the entire game, not just after Walter’s influence begins to infect the space. He’ll die if he stays here. He has precious little food, and during gameplay he gives away his last bottle of chocolate milk (milk being one of Kristeva’s confessed personal objects of great disgust, in a moment of fun serendipity). He has no one to interact with, and even though it’s stated in game that he was not a social guy before he was cursed, once you’re down to zero everything seems like a lifeline. Eventually, of course, he’ll be literally killed by the curses that infect the room. He can’t stay. He needs to be born, and he knows it. It’s a false security, and it intrinsically can’t last.
Walter and Henry aren’t the only figures central to the game, though. There is, of course, a third pillar here: you. Er, me. Y’know, The Player. There is essentially nothing to Henry – this is part of why he exists primarily as a thematic contrast to Walter, and part of why it’s hard to ascribe much character to his actions. You’re Henry in large part. When he’s in the apartment you even control him in first person. You are the ultimate voyeur, in the same way that Henry is to Eileen and Walter is to Henry. And this is part of why Walter’s worlds and the creatures that populate them are on the surface so much more generic than the places and monsters of past games: applicability.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have this uncle who died in his apartment. I didn’t know him, really. From stuff I’ve been told he wasn’t a good guy. I was a kid, and we lived states away. I only met him a handful of times at big family parties. The only reason I ever think about him at all probably is because he died in his apartment, and even then I’ve only started thinking about him so much recently, in the last couple of years, because we’ve all been spending a lot more time in our apartments. It’s covid, bay bee. The reason I think about him so much is because when he died in his apartment, nobody knew. Nobody cared to check in. They only found him, weeks later, because his landlord went into his place because they had assumed he had run out on it because he hadn’t paid rent or responded to any communication, for weeks, because he was dead.
So I think about that a lot the last couple years.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I mentioned that Walter’s hellscapes are mundane places and his monsters are other people and I do think this is a reflection of where the developers thought maybe a lot of their presumed audience was at when Silent Hill 4 came out. Which is pretty funny. But it’s real, too, for me. There’s not a lot that’s scarier for me as a trans person than An Only Vaguely Familiar Public Place With An Off Vibe. That’s alarm bell central. It’s hard out there, man. Rarely do I feel outright unsafe but often do I feel eyes. It’s difficult to tell a lot of the time if the eyes are real or if I’m inventing them, and that doubt can make it even harder to feel confident in my place in perfectly normal spaces. Just yesterday I was actively frightened waiting in line for the bathroom in an inexplicably crowded gas station in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You just never know when it’s going to be a problem. I was never the most confident person, but this low level thrum of unease colors every moment of public life. In talking about abjection in an academic sense and especially when talking about fiction it’s easy to forget that part of it is that it is upsetting by nature. But in life it sharpens me. I know who I am.
It’s a harsh dichotomy – every day I am more visibly transgender in more irreversible physical ways. Every day I become more obviously Neither Male Nor Female and while I love this about myself and I am truly happy with these changes they are the same changes that make me less safe and more vulnerable in ways that become harder and harder to cover up with clothes and masks. It would be easy to retreat to my womb, metaphorically. I want to, sometimes. I work remotely on a permanent basis. I live literally across the street from the grocery store. My girlfriend is here, my cats are here, my friends are online.
But I am transforming. Every week I stab myself with a needle. I force through this needle the fluid that makes my body into what I want it to be. A violent transmogrification. I feel the most beautiful in these moments. They are moments of clarity, of self expression, of definition by rejection. I am not a man. I am a woman. This needle in my leg is my signature. Living in fear of living in fear can’t be the way.
I am not who I was. I oppose that. I am becoming. Every week I am new. I need to tear away.
I want to be born.
10 Comments
you have probably the most insightful and moving on a personal level writing on this site, especially considering that most writers in the medium you (we?) cover probably shouldn't be trusted with a lot of it. excellent as always
Thank you for such leaving such personal, powerful commentary of games that mean a lot to you. This is what this site is for, and we all appreciate it
i know i said this in dms but just want to reiterate that this is my favourite piece of yours. incredibly powerful and beautifully written and visceral. incredible stuff
It should be illegal to knock it out of the park this good you have simply turned in fantastic and moving work here
genuinely one of the best reviews on the entire site; i hope nothing but the best for you and your future !
probably one of the best and hardest-hitting reviews I've ever read, much less on backloggd. Always a treasure to hear your thoughts.
well shit everybody thank you all for these extremely kind words, they mean a lot! I am pretty proud of this one but it is certainly nice to be validated when you put a lot of personal oomph into a piece.
That was one of th best reviews I've read in my life wtf
poyfuh
1 year ago