sin la mujer no hay revolución

i love linh so much 😭 linh is different from the other girls because she is an adult, and as an adult, she has a little more knowledge, a little more agency, a little more power than the girls. at least that’s how her story starts. the show uses linh to first draw and then blur a line between teenage girls, who are so often trapped in situations they can’t control, where things happen to them and they are forced to react, and women, who can also be steamrolled and manipulated (see martha and fatin’s moms) and can be treated unfairly (perhaps gretchen’s loss of tenure? it’s not clear yet) and have to make do in the same misogynistic world as their daughters, but also have the power to make choices that girls don’t. 

and linh is making use of her power! she’s in grad school, she’s loud and opinionated, she knows who she is. she’s also very young, and although she knows too well the kinds of violent things men do to women, she doesn’t have quite the same cynicism and the same ability to protect herself when it comes to abusive/manipulative women. she is old enough to make choices for herself when she chooses to work with gretchen, but she doesn’t have the wisdom to understand that gretchen’s work is just more of what she hates: the powerless being manipulated by the powerful. and she is one of those powerless girls whether she knows it or not. there’s a racial element to it too; it feels consequential that she’s a young asian woman whose controlling white boss is asking her to put herself in a dangerous situation, to be a pawn for her. it’s tragic irony that linh set out to do something that would stop men from hurting women and, in the process, the selfishness and power hunger of another (white) woman was what got her killed.

i think linh represents a transitional stage that can be really hard for passionate young women–the stage when you know enough about the world to be angry about how women are treated in it, and you see the patriarchal frameworks that keep women marginalized, but you still can’t anticipate every warning sign that tells you you’re walking into another trap. when you’re angry and traumatized, it’s easy to be seduced by the logic that you can use violence to stop violence without seeing what you’re really doing. and by the time she did see it, and her role in it, it was too late. so all she could do was say sorry.

she realizes, too, that her father’s superficial niceness and permissiveness were for his benefit and not hers, and that while her mother invested time and care in protecting her children, her father only wanted the easy parts of parenting–getting his kids to like him. he wanted her to treat him not as a trusted guardian but a friend. it was always rana who put her children first–even though she had to sacrifice that friendly relationship with her daughter to do it.

martha’s mom, bernice, similarly wants her daughter to grow up safe and protected in a world where native women are at great risk of violence. she is horrified and guilt-stricken when she realizes that martha was abused by a trusted community figure and has been suffering in silence. bernice tells toni that although there were signs of what had happened, she did not want to believe the truth because she loved martha so much, and seeing her pain would have conflicted with her highly complimentary image of martha as a happy, safe kid: 

“dr. ted said the bedwetting was related to her injury, but come to think of it i never understood why it only started after she was getting better. dr. ted… i can’t believe we let that sick fuck into her life. she just always sees everything so positive, you know? everyone’s good and nice and full of sunshine. and here i was telling myself that’s ‘cause we raised her good. ‘cause we protected her. but all this time it was just a fantasy world she created because her reality was too painful.” 

The Unsinkable Eight + Smile