*Zoë has a cat named Dude who I’m slowly growing to love (I pet him for the first time in five years like a week ago). Although we didn’t talk about him nor feature any of his portraits, he was very much a part of the interview as he flaunted his cat butt in our faces while we discussed tattoos and professionalism, IUDs and (safe)sex positivity, and necklaces and Jewish pride, among other things.

Zoë: It’s weird to think of tattoos as possessions… but in a way, they are. In the same way that there are little pieces around my apartment that I’ve collected and slowly curated over the years, my tattoos are little collections of memories and experiences and times in my life. That’s so stupid and corny to say, but it’s true. 

Many of my tattoos have been based on experiences, like the one on my shoulder of the celestial sphere; that was such an intense experience that I knew would shape me, and I knew I wanted a constant reminder of it for the rest of my life. I feel like my body is and is becoming a map of the experiences that have shaped me. 

Rachel: And it makes those abstract things tangible for us to understand and show other people. 

It’s super interesting that we feel the need to make those intense, special moments tangible, to transform them into something that’s really not personal at all. Like, why do I feel the need to take something so special and personal that no one else will ever understand, and then feed it into this machine and have it spit out something that I can show off to people? 

But also why do you think that makes it not personal?

I don’t think that as soon as something comes in contact with the ~consumerist capitalist machine~ (you have to say it in a dumb voice; we have to make fun of ourselves) that it necessarily becomes less yours. But in a way, just the fact that it would ever cross my mind that I want to take this thing that’s really special, and then spend money to have it accessible to everyone else, kind of depersonalizes it. I haven’t really thought about it just because my tattoos are for me… but I’m very aware of the fact that I like to show them off. 

Something else about tattoos is that there are these assumptions that come with them, especially being in law school. I was very conscious at first. I knew, the first few days, I was going to make an image for myself and I was going to have people thinking things about me just based on my tattoos. 

It’s interesting to even think of the fact that I am conscious of how I want people seeing me based on my tattoos - even though I am so proud of them, they are on my body forever, and they are a huge part of me. As much as we like to think that times are evolving (which they are, no doubt), I still think there’s this very strong connotation with tattoos. It’s unfortunate how I am so aware of the fact that I’m going to need to cover these very important parts of my body for likely the entirety of my career, and to think that I’m going to especially have to cover them when I’m going to want to be taken seriously. Sure, there’s something really empowering in the action of a ‘fuck you, I’m going to show my tattoos off and take me seriously or don’t.’ But when you consider the context, and especially within the professional world that I’m slowly making my way into, you don’t have that luxury. Maybe one day when I run my own firm. ‘TANK TOPS FOR ALL!’

‘TATTOOS WELCOME! IF YOU HAVE A SEPTUM PIERCING, EVEN BETTER!’ 

‘Friday is tattoo day! Everyone gets a tattoo! Or you can’t work here!’

I feel like that’s what ultra, ultra conservative people are imagining—

When the feminists take over!

It’s like a law firm slash abortion clinic.

I would totally start a law firm slash abortion clinic; I think that’s amazing. 

That would actually be wonderful. I think we just invented something?

I think Planned Parenthood already has legal services…

Of course they do. They’ve thought of everything. 

Whatevs. I will always aim for what my friend Anna told me: ‘One day, you’ll be the supermom badass businesswoman with tattoos under her power suit.’ Honestly… goals. When you click the mission statement tab on the website of my life, it’ll say, ‘Wannabe supermom tattoo’d badass bitch. Will fight you in court.’ 

What other objects are super wrapped up in your identity?

I don’t want to say something stupid like clothing…

That’s not stupid!

But everyone has clothing.

Yeah but not everyone has your clothing and wears it in your way. 

Clothing is weird when you think about it in the context of a male-dominated professional field. I use clothes to express myself (like most people, I’d say), but at the same time, there’s this lingering idea in my head that no matter what I wear, I want to be taken seriously. It’s a major parallel with the tattoo stuff. You don’t want to stand out at all, because you don’t want people to be looking at your clothes; you want them to be listening to what you say. And that’s kind of upsetting to me, because my whole life, I’ve always wanted people to look at my clothes and listen to what I have to say. I spent my whole life using clothing as a way to express myself, and all of a sudden, not only do I not really have that luxury, but also I don’t even really want to anymore. Which is really sad, because I always liked to wear cool, funky clothes, and all of my friends have been like, ‘wow Zoë, you’ve really toned it down these past few years.’ 

When I think about you, there are certain objects that are like The Zoë Objects. I think of your cat, your tattoos, IUDs and Diva cups... 

Yes! Oh my god! I would totally pick my IUD as an object that I own that's part of my identity! We could talk about that for so long. I love my IUD. Just like my tattoos, my IUD is literally a part of me in that it is literally inside of me. 

For context, I have been on birth control since I was sixteen, which also coincided with when I started to drink alcohol, and when I started to drink, I would get really sick. I just assumed, because I had never known any different, that I was a little bit intolerant. It was unfortunate, but in the long run it kind of saved me a lot of money. But, it never occurred to me that the time I started drinking was also the same time I started taking hormonal birth control. I also, then, started getting these fainting spells; I would get nauseous and dizzy out of nowhere. And this would happen once every two months. But it happened for, like, five or six years. I figured that this was just a part of my body. I went to doctors in Montreal and Halifax, and no doctor, after I described my symptoms, could tell me what was wrong with me. 

Then there came these weird few weeks, where I was at the end of a long term relationship and I was breaking out all over—things I hadn’t experienced since I was 14. I was talking to my boyfriend at the time and I said, ‘I think I’m going to try going off birth control. I don’t even know my adult body without it. I want to see what happens.' We had that discussion and I decided to go off of it… And I then broke up with him, which was awful. My roommate had a party the night after, and I was like, ‘FUCK IT I’M SO SAD!’ and I got super drunk! And then I didn’t throw up! 

PLOT TWIST! 

I was like, ‘Holy crap. The thing that I’ve been promoting and care so deeply about access to, and that I’ve been so lucky to have access to for free with my school and family coverage, turned out to be betraying me!’ It was very weird thinking of my identity as a person who has been telling everyone, ‘Take control of your body; go on birth control!’ JUST KIDDING! It was making me violently ill for all of these years and no doctor could tell me why! 

I then was off birth control for five months, which also happened to coincide with the time when I was single for the first time in a very long time, and sleeping with a lot of people. I decided to go back on birth control for my own sake. I just wanted to not have to worry about babies. Also, I wanted to not have to worry about periods being unpredictable and shitty and painful. And, because I had been on birth control for so long, I knew my adult body on birth control more (and for longer) than I did without. I did my research and decided to get an IUD. 

Another part of my identity is that I am a feminist, and I am a woman who has sex with a fair number of people, which is fun. I’m very conscious of the society we live in and how that sometimes taints women who are sexual as promiscuous, or sexually deviant, or sluts, or whores, or less worthy of your love. My sexuality is a huge part of who I am, and is and was a huge part of me coming to terms with myself—and coming to terms with loving myself. I want to be very clear that what I’m not saying is that having sex with people made me feel better about myself because I got their validation. It didn’t hurt that people wanted to sleep with me. That’s a really cool feeling: for people to like your body in all of its awkward nakedness. But I was lucky enough that the experiences I’ve had sexually have made me feel really empowered as a woman—confident and in charge of my sexuality, and comfortable to talk about it.

I’m really lucky that my identity as a feminist played into me taking ownership of my sexuality and using my sexuality to empower myself. I like to think that I helped to empower my other femme friends to do the same thing. I think that the more I talked about it, the more it became normal. And none of that would have been possible without my confidence as a feminist and as a woman. 

I think that my IUD is an object that I purchased that is representative of the control that I have over my body. My IUD lets me ease my worries about pregnancy, which is something I would like one day, but absolutely not now. I’m so hyper-aware of the fact that I’m so fortunate to live in a place where I can do that. It is so important to me and it is something I talk about all the time with my friends, because I think it’s so important that you can be in control of your sexuality and be free to do what you want without worry of babies.

Does not apply to STIs! Use condoms for that! And get tested! 

My Magen David necklace represents my Jewishness and my Jewish identity. I’m really careful to use the word ‘Jewishness’ as opposed to ‘Judaism’, because I feel like that’s more appropriate for me personally. Judaism implies just the religious aspect of it, whereas Jewishness encompasses so much more for me: culture, identity, religion… It took me a long time to be comfortable wearing objects that made me easily identifiable as a Jewish person. I actually never wore or felt comfortable wearing a Magen David, a Star of David, necklace until I moved away. I kind of grew up on the peripheries of the Montreal Jewish community, and ss soon as I moved away, I was the first Jew many of my peers had ever met. I became the reference point, and it was very weird for me to, all of a sudden, have to explain things like the words that I use daily. I didn’t realize until I left Montreal that such a large portion of my vocabulary is actually Yiddish. That was also the first time I had experienced actual anti-Semitism, mostly masked as very vehement anti-Zionism, which is, of course, of a whole other conversation. It made me reflect a lot on what I believe, and that’s when it occurred to me that my Jewishness is a much bigger part of my identity than I thought it was. That’s when I started wearing my Magen David around my neck.

It’s something that’s very personal, but that I’m very proud to display. The fact is, half the time when I wore my Star of David around my neck, no one knew what it meant. But it holds meaning to me, and I like the thought of people seeing it and then knowing that I’m a Jew. It’s something I’m very proud of. There’s something very thought-provoking about how my ancestors— and when I say ancestors, it makes it sound like it was so long ago, but it was only three generations ago—were forced to wear Stars of David as markers so people would know that we were Jewish. I think that there’s something really powerful in wearing that same Star of David as a marker that says, ‘This is who I am’ in a totally different light.