Fawns Forever
In the past few years, the fawn has come to function as the coquette mascot. As the coquette aesthetic rapidly became more mainstream, fawns began to adorn everything from Pinterest boards to Wildflower phone cases. And just as camo lingers, so do fawns, for who wouldn’t want to be prey-faced, doe-eyed, spindly-legged, hunted by guys who bought their Realtree pants on Grailed? It’s natural.
But please, don’t be mistaken in thinking that fawns are symbolically linked to any sort of male gaze. The emergence of imagery directly coincides with the emergence of girl blogging, itself. Though, one could speculate that there is some kind of evolution of the popular, but vaguely grotesque 2016 deer Snapchat filter at play. I first became obsessed with fawn imagery during the early months of the pandemic, a time of personal fragility, when I began to follow @fuzzyfawnwildlife. The account was the originator of one of the most reposted and memed images of fawns. It’s a particularly surreal image, seven fawns, in various stages of unconsciousness, serenely lounging in the backseat of a car, in a makeshift bed comprised of blankets and pillows. The image has been routinely captioned “girls night” and “me and my mutuals”.
The account, @fuzzyfawnwildlife, documents the rescue and rehabilitation of fawns. Fawns are shown drinking bowls of milk, running eagerly for bottle feedings, but just often they are shown with bandaged limbs, strange infections, or in worse states of distress. Though the most viral images are pretty banal and cute, if one were to aestheticize all the imagery from this account, the implications of feminine fragility could read as much darker.
As I began to dig deeper into the account, I learned more about the woman who dedicated her free time to caring for fawns. Leondra would sometimes post stories where she spoke directly about her experiences, offering advice to those who might encounter a fawn in distress somewhere in the suburbs. She’s a New York State licensed wildlife rehabilitator. She has platinum blonde hair and a maturing beauty queen quality to her, a sort of parallel universe Lana Del Rey essence. She says she has the best non-paying job in the world. She’s often posting about getting up at 5 AM, bottle feeding three times a day. She names each abandoned fawn she rescues. She’s Mother.
But Leondra also has one of the strangest paying jobs in the world. She works as a makeup artist for the deceased, a job which she simply sees as “interesting”. And though bizarre, it makes sense. She appears to understand what Joan Didion described as the “irreconcilable difference” of womanhood, “that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death”. Leondra and her fawns exist in the muck of nature and femininity. The ongoing cycle of birth and death is simply an integrated aspect of her daily routine. She shares when she has to euthanize a fawn, just as she shares when she brings her fawns to their release sites, in a makeshift bed in the back of her car.
Juliette Jeffers is an essayist, poet, and lifestyle columnist for Delude Magazine.