Welcome to the “Objects of Affection” Issue
This abbreviated special issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine is organized around the theme “Objects of Affection”. Through reported writing, creative nonfiction, poetry, and an audio essay, the issue explores the ways relations of having and being had can animate and complicate our lives.
Zack Hauptman
In my Humanities course, Possession, we talk often about the many different ways of “having” something. In one discussion, we tried to define a class of “inalienable possessions.” These were things which were—either literally or figuratively—impossible to take away. No chair without wood, no person without a soul, etc. Lots of things seemed, at least to some degree, inalienable from the entities which possessed them.
A classmate had recently taken out her nose ring and suffered an unexpected dysphoria, a loss of identity. She didn’t feel cool anymore, or else worried that without the nose ring, others would not be able to recognize that she was cool. Our lives, we realized, were bound up in these subject/object ties. We asked: What can we lose without losing ourselves?
This abbreviated special issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine is organized around the theme “Objects of Affection”. Through reported writing, creative nonfiction, poetry and an audio essay, the issue explores the ways relations of having and being had can animate and complicate our lives.
In Awuor Onguru’s piece, “A Spiritual Home: Notes on Black Hair Care,” Onguru meditates on the sanctity of Black hair products and the losses suffered when white influencers “discover” them. In Avery Mitchell’s essay, “Twelve Fox Years,” a stuffed animal becomes a metonym for a long-distance boyfriend, and in H’s essay, “Hammy,” acts of consumption test the boundaries of religious dogma. This issue is also suffused with love—given voice in Adin Feder’s poem, “Breakfast at Savta’s” and Suraj Singareddy’s audio essay, “Roommate Love Stories.”
When we put out a call for submissions for this issue, we were thrilled to see the sheer range of interpretations of the theme. “Objects of Affection” can be politically urgent, tragically ephemeral, and hilariously funny. The pieces in this issue bring all of that to light.
As always, the publication of the YDN Magazine is made possible by our editors, writers, and designers. I am so grateful for their talent, diligence, and imagination. Enjoy.