Picturing Common Ground

This is what villainy looks like

What does it mean to be in a ‘villain era’—collectively? From peasant uprisings to placard protests, this post traces the etymology of villain back to the village, explores the current call to boycott billionaires, and reflects on the quiet power of No Other Land. A meditation on the shared ground we must continue to stand together on.

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I’ve started re-reading Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, one of the core research texts for my doctoral thesis. Now that I finally have the space to focus on a single book, I’ve been able to home in on certain aspects I’d only skimmed over before. This time through, I’ve found myself transfixed by Federici’s interwoven etymology of the word villain.

Villain resonates hard for me right now—not only because of my recent interest in community as methodology, but also in light of the violent globalist expansion unfolding with renewed voracity in the West Bank. That expansion includes the systematic appropriation of land held in common cultural trust among Palestinian villagers.¹ The word villain comes from villanus—the villager, the peasant—the one tied to the land, to the commons, to community. To call someone a ‘villain’ is to reference this bond and its role in the refusal to bow down and bow out. Thus, in the eyes of the powerful, it wasn’t cruelty that made someone a villain—it was the threat of the collective. Federici outlines how this threat has been consistently suppressed by capitalist (and colonial) interests, again and again over the past four hundred years. And more often than not, those most thoroughly villainized have been women—precisely because they’ve historically been the ones most dependent on, and most invested in the commons.

This deeper etymology brought my attention forward in time to the popular social media meme phrase, “I’m in my villain era.” The villain era marks taking on a defiant stance, where one accepts being perceived as “mean” if it means finally putting themselves first (and, again, this framing often applies to women removing themselves from damaging, extractive relationships or situations). Linked to the archetype of the dark feminine, the person in her villain era has shunned her former tendencies toward people-pleasing, and now wields the sword of boundary-setting against burnout and betrayal.

But what if this could be extended further—through an intersectional feminist lens? What if a villain era wasn’t just about personal reclamation—but about collective refusal? Not seeing oneself as an isolated bastion of wicked self-interest, but reaching fiercely toward one another in ways that resist domination—through solidarity, shared labour, and community?

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A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at a protest outside a Tesla Service building. I’d been biking by and was drawn to the small, well-behaved gathering—polite in its insistence, yet charged with a sense of connection between its participants and the non-Tesla drivers honking in support. Among the many creatively hand-drawn placards, one stood out to me most. It read: “In this country, we hate Nazis,” with a red Canadian maple leaf replacing the O, next to a cut-out image of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute. I snapped a photo (below)—not just to document the moment, but because the woman holding the sign was radiant with conviction, and the sign itself was well-crafted and aesthetically compelling, with wet glue ripples in the paper adding extra wrinkle to the suit and face of the warped subject.