Baby talk

Molina, Anahi (2023) Baby talk. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

In the summer of 2022 I was caught in a thought pattern I couldn't escape. What would I write a degree-granting thesis about, and how was I going to write it in less than a year? It was then, thinking myself into a spiral, that the idea came to me: I would write a book critiquing the institution which had forced me into the loop in the first place. It felt, after all, almost purposefully designed to ruin the artmaking process to write a thesis on deadline, to write it for class credit, to "defend" it at the end. I hoped to call attention to the design of the system through my work. The project I first wrote—one hundred and twenty pages from scratch—was harshly critical of neoliberal spaces in general, of art spaces in particular, and of the MFA directly. It named experiences (though not people) that were complicit in my multifaceted oppression in the space of the university. That project was squandered by the space it attempted to name, and by those who perpetuate it still. Negative comments on my project were couched in comments about craft or wasted talent. But I saw that the project was, at least in part, perceived as a threat; that I was the problem child. And so, my thesis became BABY TALK: a version of those original thoughts, molded into a thesis-shaped box. The narrator of BABY TALK is nervous, depressed, fearful, but also direct, deliberate. She is self-aware and critical. She is the product of one concept squashed, her authority a form of self-preservation. How, I asked myself through the making of this project, could I retain my voice, my power, while also protecting myself from further systematized alienation? My answer became to write with an attention to narrative voice, to write always from a position of questioning, but to write with authority nonetheless. In BABY TALK, my narrator desires complex challenges, and faces them in order to parse through them. The unsureness with which she approaches topics that are nuanced and difficult to navigate is not just there to make the point—it is the point. A decidedly self-conscious work of documentation, the project functions as a confrontation, melding my thoughts on community, labor, and systematized spaces with cultural critique, personal narrative, and formally unconventional intro- and retrospection. Among the things documented in the project are cultural objects in the Great Acceleration and my critique of them; labor issues across institutions I’ve existed in for my whole life; and the people and communities who made me who I am, for better or worse (though, usually for better). Together, the narrator and reader move through seemingly disparate yet ever-connected settings—Zoom meeting rooms; the hiding holes of mice on campus; intestinal walls and stomach linings; a strange apartment in New York City; or inside a scene from The Sopranos. BABY TALK is the culmination of an overthinker; of a writer and narrator alike in their fear of doing the wrong thing, of documenting the wrong way; of a writer who gazes at the world with a critical eye. This work asks: why is the world the way it is? But also: How do we make it better? It is a direct response to systemic oppression, to neoliberal hegemony. But ultimately, I aim not only to call attention to the negative, but also to acknowledge, to document, to appreciate that which exists and functions outside of or despite those things.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	American fiction
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PS American literature
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	23 May 2025 15:14
Last Modified:	23 May 2025 15:14
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6172

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