Sabrina Li

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.



Machado spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**SL: One of the main questions we’re asking in our themed issue “Feast” is what happens when desire is given an audience? What happens when individual hunger turns communal? Your work deals so much with desire––queer desire, female desire, an archival desire to represent the marginalized––and by nature you are expressing those desires publicly. I’m curious what thoughts you have about the expression of desire in your work?**



CM: For me, desire is a kind of engine. It's the most interesting thing to me. And the fact that my desire is not met by so much art is definitely part of the engine of my creation. It's partially what brings me to the table––saying I feel this way about certain things, and I think other people do as well. And it's funny that you would talk about it in terms of a feast because I feel like the act of feeding someone else is one of the most human and basic kindnesses that we can do. And it feels connected to the desire to write for myself, and then also by extension for other people. It feels like the center of what I'm doing.



**SL: One of the aspects of your work that I admire so much is how you play with the story’s relationship to the reader. For instance, in the chapter “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” in your memoir and your short story “The Husband Stitch” you give playful and incisive directions to the reader––what voices to read your characters in, how they should feel when they haven’t followed your instructions and read a page they were never supposed to, what the sky should look like after they’ve read a scene. In these pieces of your writing, the work feels almost like a talk story, that it is meant to be spoken aloud. For you, how does the role of the reader operate in your writing, and how does it come up in your drafting process?**



CM: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I feel like it really depends. I mean, generally speaking, the reader is actually at the very bottom of my list of people that I'm interested in writing for because I actually believe that I write for myself first. At least I feel that way about my fiction. I had the interesting observation that for this memoir, I feel I actually was writing with a larger audience than myself in mind, because I was thinking a lot about how the narratives that I wanted didn't exist. And so I needed to create them for myself, and then, by extension, for other people. So I feel like I was more aware when writing the second book of who my audience would be. But for my first book, I liked the idea of being playful––of being playful with the reader, whoever they might be, not assuming that I know who they are, but assuming that if they're reading my work that they're in a playful place, you know? I think that is definitely interesting to me and has become a part of my process.



**SL: And how did you come to those forms that subvert the reader and playfully chide them? How did you discover those, and how did they emerge in your work?**



CM: I mean I think I’ve always liked work that did that. I obviously did not invent that. One of my favorite books as a kid was The Monster at the End of This Book. It follows [the Sesame Street muppet] Grover, and Grover is telling a story where he's like, Don't get to the end of this book, there's a monster. And he's constantly trying to make the reader stop moving, so he tries to brick up the pages, and you turn the page and he's like, Oh, you broke through my bricks. And so the whole book, he's actively fighting you because he doesn't want you to get to the end of the book because there's a monster there. And the twist is that he is the monster at the end of the book. I remember being so enamored with that idea as a child, and so much of what I liked to read had metafictional qualities to it in which the reader was either a character or somebody who was being considered or talked to. I also really loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that also had a lot of gestures to the reader. And I think just the idea that a writer could reach out of a book in that way was just super-interesting to me. And I feel like there's a lot of ways in which a reader, by reading, the author gets to engage with their brain, and you get to suggest to them things like their complicity in reading, or question their assumptions, or poke back at them, or tell them a joke, and I feel like that's really magical. I really love that.



**SL: As I've been reading your work, I've seen that a lot of your writing borrows from fables and fairy tales. What does the world and mechanism of the fairytale open up for you in your writing? How do you negotiate the universalizing and flattening qualities fairytales tend to have?**



CM: Fairy tales have that effect by design. The form of the fairy tale flattens, and that creates a depth of response in the reader, which is an idea that Kate Bernheimer has kicked around, and there’s actually a really lovely essay that I teach of hers called “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale.” So, there's just a lot of space for the reader to go when you have these “flattened” stories or these stories that are dealing in abstractions or a lack of more realistic characterization––this is a feature, not a bug. I've always found fairy tales to be very interesting and useful for my writing. Fairy tales show us that archetypes exist for a reason. And that human stories, while being incredibly diverse, actually have common elements, I think was very helpful and instructive for me, especially for the memoir. I found that actually quite comforting. Because I feel like I went through this weird phase writing that new book where I kept thinking I thought my experience was unique, and it's actually really common, and that's painful. But on the other hand, it's this way of saying like, you're not alone, you know, you exist. You, you human being at this very moment exist in a continuum, you exist in a context, in a space with other people, and I think that's actually kind of beautiful.



**SL: An idea that really resonated with me that you talked about in In The Dreamhouse was the idea that trauma and pain, if not exercised to their physical extreme, feel less significant. For example, when you are talking about how you wish you had a mark on your body, a photo as proof of the trauma from your relationship. I was wondering if you could speak more about that––this olympics of trauma, hierarchies of pain.**



CM: It's weird because I feel like I don't believe in it, and yet I still engage in it. You know, like, I don't believe me. There are lots of different kinds of pain, and they're not necessarily comparable, or they're not more valid than others. I feel like people right now get very invested in hierarchies of oppression and pain and trauma, and I don't exactly know why. I'm not sure I have a larger societal explanation for it, but I think we are very focused on it, and it really bugs me. And yet I understand it because I understand, you know, what it was like to say I had this experience, but I know that you're not going to give it as much credence as if I showed you a photo with a bruise. And that's sort of the reality that I've had to exist in and I have existed in ever since this experience that I had. So it strikes me as completely unuseful, and yet we sort of feel compelled to engage in it, and that makes me really sad.



**SL: Writers are now more and more on social media. Publishers are encouraging writers to craft a public persona. For you, being on Twitter, how does this rise of social media and the public writer interact with the very private, introspective act of writing? How have you reckoned with these tensions as both a fiction writer and a memoirist?**



CM: I'm lucky in that I don't feel like I've been pressured to do anything. I think the pressure that comes on writers from social media happens a little more with commercial genres. My publisher would not really care if I was or was not on Twitter. They've never said anything to me about it. I like Twitter, and I'm on it because I like it. And if I ever start really hating it––and I honestly feel like I'm getting to that point because it's become really shitty in the last like six months––I might just leave it because I find it annoying. But I do it because I enjoy it. I like taking photos, and I like talking about stuff that interests me with a large group of people. And as soon as it becomes not interesting, I'll stop doing it. I used to keep a LiveJournal for years in the early aughts, and I did that very actively and was very public, and a lot of people read what I had to say when I was very young, and I really liked it. So I feel like Twitter right now for me is just like LiveJournal. And maybe at some point I'll move on from it. But for now, it's sating a pleasure, a desire. It's a kind of pleasure that I enjoy.



**SL: Do you ever find that readers conflate what you say in your tweets with your fiction or memoir writing? Like I now have a version of Carmen's thoughts from what she says on Twitter, and now I think I have an idea of what Carmen’s like, and this is the lens through which I’ll now read her writing.**



CM: That's so interesting. I mean, yeah, maybe a little. I mean, I do think it's funny. I don't know if it's actually about Twitter necessarily, but people do say to me that I'm funnier and nicer than they expect me to be when I do events, and I'm always like, What's that mean? I think I'm relatively nice, and I do think I'm funny, but I guess the work does not suggest that, and I don't know how to process that. But what I say on Twitter is real in the sense that it's my thoughts and feelings. But just like any kind of forward-facing platform, it's curated, and it’s specific to a certain persona, and I'm obviously not sharing every single fucking thought I have on Twitter, thank God. So you know, it is me and it is not me at the same time.



**SL: Are the truths that you're writing in your fiction different than in your nonfiction? With nonfiction, obviously, the things that you're writing on the page are supposed to be read assuming they've happened in real life. Does that change your writing process at all? Does it make you feel freer in certain ways or more limited in others?**



CM: It's a formally really different process, because when you're writing nonfiction, you're stuck with the things that happened. It's different than writing fiction because if you're like, That is inconvenient to me, I will simply change it because that is fiction and I can do whatever I want. And that's obviously really fun. And I miss that. And I feel like that level of liberation is helpful to me as a writer. But also, doing research for a nonfiction book and writing from experience is a kind of challenge that's really pleasurable. And I think it is actually very interesting.



**SL: On a technical level, is your process for writing short stories different from the way you wrote your memoir?**



CM: Oh, yeah, I mean, it couldn't be more different. Short stories are thematic-based. They come to me as What if I did this? or What would this look like? And I feel like I write them in bursts. And with the memoir, I had a weird, skeletal draft, and then I added all the research, and then I had to mix it all together. I almost can't even explain it because they're so different, like the processes were as different as it possibly could be. Also it's the issue of writing short stories versus writing a single book, you know, one full book. That is one thing which is also just structurally really different.



**SL: A theme that In The Dreamhouse looks at a lot is the archival silence surrounding queer domestic abuse and violence. How do you go about writing a history that doesn’t exist, and how do you grapple with your own personal history interacting with this nebulous one?**



CM: I mean, how do you do it? I don't know. I guess one has to decide if I did an okay job. And if I did, then I say, well, I just looked for as much stuff as I could, and then I tried to put it in order. And then the more I wrote about it, the more it made sense to me. I'm not a historian by trade, which for me was the hardest part about working on this book. I felt like I was really outside of my level of expertise. If you asked me to write a short story, I'm on it. But to sort of go at this as a historian was quite difficult. And I worried that I wouldn't do it correctly. And by the end of the process, I had sort of done enough research that I was like, well, I don't know much of anything, but I do know about this one topic from these dates to these dates in this country. I can speak to queer domestic violence in lesbian relationships in the United States between 1980 and 2010. That is a thing that I can speak to. And that's very specific. So, I had to sort of pull it together when it made sense to me, and I had to also be comfortable with the fact that I might not be right, in that I might do something wrong, which is also its own challenge.



**SL: How did you reconcile with that latter part, knowing that your work is a part of this canon that at the moment has very few works in it, unfortunately, but something might go wrong. How did you deal with that?**



CM: I had to just accept that it was a possibility. I had to be forward-thinking about it. I had to just know that I'm doing my best. I'm doing my utmost, and that is what I can do.



**SL: To return to the theme of this issue, I am curious what thoughts or images the notion of “feast” conjures for you?**



CM: Pleasure. Things we don't allow ourselves. Feast is a very interesting topic because I feel like we live in this time where the idea of a thing being a feast is so unthinkable. We've changed the language about it. We're no longer talking about low-calorie diets, but we're talking about wellness. But it's all the same kind of, like, eating disorders and body dysmorphia and body policing that we've always had, and fatphobia and things like that. So I find the fact that the theme is feast to be actually quite lovely.

*Pixy Liao is an artist born and raised in Shanghai, China. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. For the past thirteen years, Liao has been working on the photography series “Experimental Relationship” with her boyfriend Moro. The four photos printed in this issue all originate from this series. Through her work, Liao has subverted ideas of gender, sexuality, performance, control, and race. Liao spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**SL: “Experimental Relationship” has been an ongoing photo project for thirteen years. What inspired the project? How has the project evolved for you?**



PL: It started in 2007. It was one year after I started dating Moro, and I was studying photography. I think for me, it was the time to really look for some kind of photo project that I felt belonged to me. When Moro and I met, it was a different type of relationship than what I had before. He is younger, and he's my first foreign boyfriend, and also he is Japanese, which makes it a little complicated because Chinese and Japanese usually have that impression about each other. So I think what's more different about this relationship is I found his personality to be very different from other boyfriends or men I knew before. He's very open-minded and also he doesn't have a very strong opinion about the usual idea of how a man should be. Like usually when you think about Japanese men, they usually think, according to stereotype, that they're very arrogant, that they're very, you know, masculine. But he's not like that, and he's younger, so he relies on me a lot. So I think that kind of changed the way I work with him in photographs. In the beginning, when I was shooting this project, I was asking him to help me with my other photos. And he usually wouldn’t reject me. He would always try to help me without considering what you usually think a man will consider. So I think in the beginning, when I shot those photographs, when I was using him as a model or prop, people would react less to my photo conception and more to how it was possible that a man would be willing to model like this in my photographs. Then that got me thinking that maybe, you know, there's something really special about this relationship, and I can make it into a photo project. That's how I started to photograph the two of us together.



**SL: Have you noticed a change or a different trajectory in the photos throughout the thirteen years you’ve been working on the project, and have the goals of the projects shifted for you at all?**



PL: Yes, definitely. I think in the beginning, when I first met him, I was at a point that I started to change my life into more like that of an artist’s. Before, I would never have thought about becoming an artist. And I met this new boyfriend and his style is very different from my other relationships. So I think I started to take up this new role as a woman leading the relationship. So I think in the beginning, I was very obsessed with the idea that, you know, I have so much power and control in the relationship. I think it shows up a lot in my earlier photographs. We’ve been together for so long, and there are periods of ups and downs. So later, like after a couple years after we graduated, I started to think of whether maybe my photographs were too much, maybe I’m overpowering him a little too much in our relationship––I would sometimes reflect on that, and this would show up in my photographs. And I think, especially in recent years, he has grown up so much. And we basically grew up together in the United States. I think our difference is getting smaller and smaller, and I think he's more mature than me in many different aspects of life. So I think later on in my photos, you will see we sometimes are in very equal kinds of positions in the photographs. And recently I think I kind of turned the lens more towards myself. In the beginning, I was just exploring the possibility of what I can be as a woman. And now, after taking pictures for so long, I think I have a pretty clear idea of what type of woman I want to be.



**SL: And what is the idea of the “woman you want to be?” How do you communicate this to your audience?**



PL: I think growing up in China, I always had this doubt. You know, in China, at least when I grew up, the idea of what a good woman is, what a good girl should be, is very limited: a good woman will be somebody who can find a good husband who can support her, but at the same time, she needs to sacrifice her life to the family to support her husband's career. People didn’t really consider independent women or strong women to be successful. And through my work I like to think about what is the best way to define a woman. I think the definition of woman is very limited. People just think of female as worse––like a woman would be somebody who's tender, who's soft, who's caring. I don't think any of that is true. I mean, we can be, but at the same time we can be something different.



**SL: So when you're setting up a photograph for “Experimental Relationship,” what does a typical dialogue sound like between you and your partner Moro when deciding on a pose? And to what extent is he an active participant in choosing what poses to put himself in or yourself in? And does he ever choose your poses?**



PL: I think in the beginning, I was very much into controlling every aspect of the photograph. So I didn’t expect him to do anything other than what I asked him to do. So I would tell him very simply, Oh, I want you to stand this way. I would move his body to look exactly the way I want him to. You know, I would say, Oh, you're looking at the camera. You don't look at the camera. It was very simple instruction. During the photoshoot, I would touch his body to modify his pose, and he would respond to that. And then sometimes he would give me an expression or a gesture that I would recognize as something I see in our real daily life. It was something that wasn’t designed by me. He was just naturally reacting to the situation that I set up. And then I realized that his improvisation and his input in the photograph is so, so important. It makes the photograph much more interesting and it adds a lot more life to it. So nowadays, I will tell him I want this kind of situation, and then I would ask him to get comfortable and do whatever he wants to do, and then I put myself in my own pose. Usually, I would just decide my own pose and sometimes I would do a pose based on his reaction. So if he reacted to a situation in a certain way, then I will also respond to that in the photograph as well.



**SL: One of the features of your photographs that immediately struck me was that you almost always see either you or Moro clicking the shutter in the image. So it's made very clear to the viewer that you two are the ones photographing yourselves and that you are in control and that this has been a shot that has been set up. I was wondering how you would describe your and Moro’s relationship to the audience and the viewer. Is your relationship to the audience different from Moro’s relationship to the audience, and in what ways?**



PL: I think the shutter release started from the very beginning because I was shooting with a film camera, and there's really no way to take the picture ourselves except for using the extension cable. And in the very beginning, it was because the cable release is so hard to squeeze, I just couldn't take the picture. Like my facial expression would be off if I had to take the pictures, so I always gave it to him. And we have a very early photo of when I was pinching his nipple, and he's taking the picture, and we're both standing in front of the camera. That picture I think kind of set the direction of this project because I feel like there's a connection going through me pinching his nipples, which almost signaled him to take the picture, and then he's the one who is actually taking the picture, and then the extension cable goes out of the frame and then extends to the audience. So it's like a circle going through this image. So I think after that image I always just accepted having the cords left in the image. I think it's a clue. And sometimes people will be confused because in a lot of the photographs, he’s the one who is actually taking the picture. So I think it's really interesting if people would think, Oh, the guy was taking the picture, and then afterwards they realize, Oh, actually the photographer is the woman, and how their response to the photograph would change dramatically based on their knowledge about who is the author of the photograph. One thing that is very interesting is that Moro is the person who actually controls the exact moment of the photograph. So I always tell him, I'm ready, you can take the picture. But he will always wait until he feels ready. So after I tell him I'm ready, I have no idea when he's going to take the picture, I just have to be there and just wait for the moment. And I think in that period of time he actually has a lot of control in the photograph, which is very interesting to me––I have control, but at the same time he has control. It’s almost like in a relationship where sometimes you think the person who's in control is actually being controlled by the other person or vice versa.



**SL: That’s a really interesting dynamic of agency. It reminds me of when I was reading once in an interview that you were saying that “All the photographs are staged...When we are in the photos, we are performers for the camera, to create an image. We are not completely ourselves.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on the version of yourself that you perform for the camera. Have there been photographs where you noticed that the photograph was less of a performance than you would have liked? How important for you is this barrier between performance and authenticity, the barrier between you and the viewer?**



PL: I think the me in the photograph is an image of a version of me that I want to give to the viewer. Of course, in each photograph my role is actually slightly different depending on my idea for the specific photo. I think it is me, but it is not the real me. The real me could be more normal. The me in the photograph can be more focused on being the strong woman in a heterosexual relationship. I think the performance part is very important because I think, for me, the person is not really me, but it's me in fantasy. So it cannot be too real. So I think in regard to performance whenever I was in the photo, I was very concerned about how my expression is, how my body is. But occasionally accidents happen and I lose control and I can’t perform as I’ve designed it. One example is in a photograph of both of us on a couch, and I was wearing a pink sweater, and Moro is lying on top of my shoulders. In the photograph my idea was that I am such a strong woman, you know, I can carry him on my shoulder. So I set up the frame and I took the picture. But when I saw the picture, I was very disappointed because during the photoshoot Moro was actually much heavier than I expected, so when he was lying on top of my shoulders, he was too heavy, so I was always being pushed down in the photograph. So even though I composed the picture, there's a lot of empty space at the top of the image because he was too heavy. I thought I could sit up much taller, but in reality, he just pushed me down. And I really liked the result in the very beginning. And I think after a while, I don't remember how long, but I realized that what was really happening is that a lot of the time when I think about a photograph, my ideas are so far from my old point of view that I really don’t think about the reality of it––what's happening in your life or what your imagination is about, who you can be or what you want to be is a different thing. Sometimes I think I'm such a strong woman that I can handle everything, that I can handle this heavy burden in our life. But actually, it sometimes crushes me. So, I think after I realized that, I started to appreciate that photograph, even though I couldn't be as strong as I wanted myself to be in the photograph.



**SL: So going back to this idea of fantasy, I remember hearing during a talk when you said, “My work is not about equality — it’s about my fantasy.” I was wondering what the difference is for you between equality and fantasy, and has your fantasy changed throughout “Experimental Relationship”?**



PL: I get asked a lot whether my work is feminist. And for me, I feel like feminism is about equal genders. But in my photographs, it is very obvious we are not equal. And I don't want it to be translated as a feminist work because I really don't think from a feminist point of view. Otherwise, my work would look very different. So I think in my project the fantasy is more about what do people want? What do they desire to be? Without thinking about moral concern and political correctness. It is a lot more personal than being equal, being fair, it's not about that.



**SL: Does it ever bother you that the audience tends to impose that feminist lens on your work and in the process creates a binary of one person is in power and one person isn’t, rather than a more nebulous gray zone?**



PL: I think I can understand why people associate my work with feminism. There are a lot of similar ideas between my work and feminism. But I think I have the fear that people will misread it as a feminist work. And then because my photo is not really about equality, then they will say, Those feminists, they're horrible. Look at what Pixy Liao did to her husband. I don't really want to go into that. I think it’s very dangerous to measure artists’ works with political correctness. I think they will lose a lot of freedom.



**SL: You once said in an interview that even though your work is better received in the West, you always feel like your work is still viewed as different, other. How do you feel that the West others your work?**



PL: I think that it depends on where I am and what the public thinks in that place. Especially when I started the project in Memphis, there are very few Asians there, and I think a lot of people’s first impression is not that this is a work about a female photographer and her boyfriend, but it is, This is Asian. They're so weird. Their first impression would be you’re somebody else and this is your lifestyle. I think New York is very different because New York has so many people from different races. I think it also depends on your life experience and whether you're in close connection with different races. So it depends on the person––whether or not they see Asians and feel surprised. And I think in Europe, it depends on which city you go to. If it is very white, your photo will be seen as a very exotic thing even though you're talking about a very universal topic. But people like us, I feel like they are more open-minded, and I think they will accept the ideas of what I'm talking about in a photograph.



**SL: Do you think Chinese Americans' understanding or reactions to your work are different from mainland Chinese viewers’ reactions?**



PL: That’s a very interesting question. I think that’s the first time a person’s asked me about that. I think Chinese Americans respond to this project a lot. I would say even more so than other Americans, for sure. I think how they react to it goes back to your family. I think if you grew up in a very traditional Chinese family home, I think maybe your reaction to it will be similar to the audience in mainland China. What do you think?



**SL: Oh, me?**



PL: Yeah, you're Chinese American right?



**SL: Yeah. Um, I haven't really been to mainland China that much though.**



PL: Do you think your family or your friends have an idea of what a good Chinese woman should be?



**SL: Definitely. I think I especially resonated with what you were talking about before of how the fantasy you're portraying in your photos is othered because of your race. I remember reading in one of your interviews that you were saying how one of your pieces in which you’re eating papaya off of Moro was in response to people wanting to eat food off of Asian women. I could definitely see parts of America reducing your pieces as portrayals of weird Asian dynamics and seeing it through that more racial lens, because I guess the narrative still is that Asians have crazy solutions to intimacy, and that results in othering and dehumanizing them. But for myself personally, when I saw your work I was really struck by it and it moved me a lot. I saw myself in your works, and this playfulness and subversion of racial and gender stereotypes I still see in American media. And when we were talking before about equality versus fantasy, I felt like your works do such a great job of complicating what it means to be in an equal partnership and what it means to live within hierarchies, particularly dominance and submissiveness––the people you think are in power are never fully the ones who are.**



PL: Now that you talk about it, I think there might be a difference between Chinese Americans and Chinese audiences in mainland China. I think one difference is maybe the women in mainland China feel more of a social pressure, and I think maybe it's better in the United States. And I think the other thing that’s different is the idea of being Asian. I think that could be something that people living in mainland China would never think about. They would never think about how other people might react to it, because we are Asian, and I only experienced this after moving to the United States. So in the beginning, I was very confused about how it was possible that when people first see my photos, the first thing they think is we are different. That's the first thing they think.



**SL: How do you react when you get those responses?**



PL: I think I have accepted the idea that once you produce the work, how people react is out of your control, and it actually has very little to do with your work, or what you made, or what you have in mind. It has more to do with who they are. So when I hear different responses, I realize there's so many people, and we are so different in many, many ways.



**SL: Do you ever see yourself ending the photo series?**



PL: I don't want to end it unless I couldn't make it anymore. And I think my life is leading this work. So it depends on how my life goes. How my and Moro’s lives go.



**SL: And what is your next project?**



PL: Recently, I've been really thinking about female leadership. I am interested in female leaders from Asian history because they are so rare. I'm interested in what kinds of methods they took to get their power, and I'm interested in their desires and ambitions. So I think my new project is going to be called “Evil Women Cult.” I want to create a cult for these women so people can actually get to know them and recognize them as a group of ambitious women who existed thousands of years ago. They existed. And I want to promote them and let more people know about them.