WOKE ME UP INSIDE: Evanescence, Wokeness, and 2018

January 4, 2019 12:30 PM

WOKE ME UP INSIDE: Evanescence, Wokeness, and 2018
(note to mods: I posted this two months ago when it was a little baby; it is now a Whole Done Thing and I thought it might be OK to repost it as such. Feel free to slap my hand, delete, etc. if not.) A complete essay series reconsidering Evanescence's major label debut Fallen through a variety of feminist-theory lenses, because... why not. Or, from the intro post: "What I do want to do is take an album I liked, and still like, and reconsider it as the person I am now, in the world I’m forced by the dreadful circumstances of linear time to live in today."

As it went on, the series became more of a "use Evanescence song as a jumping off point to yell into the void about 2018" essay series. Includes: tangents about things like Louis CK, Nanette, ContraPoints, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia; approximately 87% of the Google Image Search results for "Evanescence"; many, many more words than was probably necessary.

Individual Essays, In Chronological/Tracklist Order:

1. Introduction/Thesis Statement
2. GOING UNDER and Gaslighting
3. BRING ME TO LIFE and the Bad Ally
4. EVERYBODY'S FOOL and the Beauty Myth
5. MY IMMORTAL and Posthumous Emotional Labor
6. HAUNTED and Rape Culture
7. TOURNIQUET and Intersectional Hazards
8. IMAGINARY, aka In Defense of Safe Spaces
9. TAKING OVER ME and Putting the “Self” in Self Care
10. HELLO and Survival Mechanisms
11. MY LAST BREATH, WHISPER, and Coherent Mission Statements

A snippet/preview to which I am partial, from the final essay:

There are always footholds we can use to find purchase in others’ experiences. They will not let us enter the cave at the precipice or in the pit, but in climbing the exterior we can scale and perhaps begin to comprehend the breadth of the interior. The difficulty isn’t seeing those footholds, but grabbing on to one after the other, the next always another strain away no matter how hard it was to find the last one. Sometimes we will slip or a foothold will break; we should climb regardless, because it’s the only way to know how high the walls go, how craggy their texture, how fragile the form.

Role: author

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