The Greater Trenchcoat

It took all of a week. They broke up at recess. She did not take it well.

meme + emoji reactions

The 1993 film Mi Vida Loca depicts young Latina/x’s living in a Los Angeles neighborhood controlled by gang violence. One of the main characters (Angel Aviles) is named Sad Girl, with the name tattooed across her knuckles. Explicitly from the film, Sad Girl was picked up by Tijuana- based feminist art collective Sad Girls Y Qué (Calderón-Douglass 2014). Offering an “alternative” to white feminism, they “retaliate against the culture of machismo prevalent in Mexico and the world at large while reappropriating a girly ‘feminine’ aesthetic. Since their [2013] inception, they have garnered fangirls … who identify with their chola chic propaganda and messages of feminine solidarity.” Sad Girls Y Qué reclaim “feminized things and anything pink … [things] usually devalued, made less important” (Calderón-Douglass 2014). The collective/symbolic sentiment hails Muñoz’s “brown feeling,” or a raced, gendered, affective “receptor” that transcends time space, a tool of resistance against violence specific to lived experience (Mooney).