Writing Herself Into the Frame: Jenna Ortega and the Aesthetics of Latina Self-Authorship

“Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill,” (1628), Pieter Claesz. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

IN THE NETFLIX series Wednesday (2022–), writing is not just a habit—it’s a means of survival. For the titular character, it serves as both a narrative device and a lifeline, allowing her to document the world around her while asserting control over her own story. From the outset, Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) insists on presence, voice, and authorship. Her writing is pointedly self-reflexive: she investigates violence and secrecy not only through her actions, but by crafting stories that mirror and process those experiences. Chief among these is her ongoing fictional series about a teen girl detective—a sharp, morbid Latina protagonist who blends noir, horror, and crime genres while channeling Wednesday’s own investigative, transgressive spirit.

Writing becomes her way of narrating—and surviving—a world that treats her as both outcast and threat.

Through both the character Wednesday and Ortega’s public persona, we witness a deliberate act of self-authorship that reclaims gothic aesthetics as a site of Latina cultural resistance and narrative agency. This reclamation is made clearest when an editor within the series rejects Wednesday’s writing as “gratuitously morbid” and recommends psychiatric help; such a moment reframes the trope of the failed gothic writer, long tethered to figures like Edgar Allan Poe, and casts suspicion on a young Latina’s engagement with darkness. But Wednesday refuses to internalize that script. Instead, she reconstructs the figure of the gothic writer—historically imagined as a tortured, melancholic man—into a defiant author of color whose morbidity signals not pathology but critique. She “browns” the gothic, transforming it into an aesthetic of cultural presence, spectacle, and resistance. Writing becomes her way of narrating—and surviving—a world that treats her as both outcast and threat.

Ortega amplifies and extends these strategies into her public life. Hailing from La Quinta, California, a working-class, predominantly Latinx desert community far removed from Hollywood’s elite enclaves, Ortega brings with her a rootedness that infuses her visual politics with grounded cultural resonance. Since her acclaimed role on Wednesday, Ortega has cultivated a signature aesthetic that merges gothic edge with high-fashion sophistication. Her red carpet and editorial appearances draw heavily from the moody palette established on the show—especially black—and incorporate lace, veils, dramatic silhouettes, and vintage couture, channeling a mode of gothic glamour. Whether dressed in vintage Versace, custom Thom Browne, or avant-garde Saint Laurent, Ortega’s gothcore style walks a fine line between the macabre and the modern, between theatrical heavy metals and satin elegance.

Her gothic glamour is not merely about mood or fashion; it is a strategy of visibility that writes her into cultural spaces that have long excluded or exploited women of color.

Importantly, this exchange between character and actress is not unidirectional. Ortega’s own subjectivity as a young Latina public figure inflicts the role of Wednesday with cultural visibility that would not exist otherwise. Wednesday, colloquially understood as Latina by both the show and its fanbase, becomes a space through which Ortega articulates her own sense of Latinidad. The aesthetic vocabularies of character and actress intertwine, producing a gothic Latina presence that is both embodied and performative, lived and fictional. For Ortega, this becomes a mode of self-authorship: a way of shaping a public life that resists flattening. She rejects the tendency of US media industries and dominant cultural scripts to render Latina identity legible only through narrow, often stereotypical tropes—hypersexuality, domesticity, passivity, or criminality. Instead, Ortega inhabits a gothic that is sharp, stylish, and unsettling—one that makes space for a Brown femininity that is intelligent, morbid, powerful, and uncontainable. Through this aesthetic strategy, she transforms cultural legibility from a mode of restriction into a field of play, using her style to complicate rather than simplify her identity. Her gothic glamour is not merely about mood or fashion; it is a strategy of visibility that writes her into cultural spaces that have long excluded or exploited women of color.

This process exemplifies what can be understood as authorship of the self: the active construction, narration, and performance of identity in resistance to social, cultural, and institutional impositions. Ortega’s fashion, public persona, and portrayal of Wednesday are not passive reflections of identity but deliberate acts of self-authorship. Latina authorship here becomes both a strategy of visibility and a politics of reclamation—asserting aesthetic and narrative agency in spaces that have historically stereotyped or silenced Latina subjectivities. Her gothic glamour thus functions to structure a resistant, citational mode of storytelling enacted through the body, through active performance, against a backdrop of erasure. Each gesture—each veil, slash of black lipstick, sculptural silhouette—claims narrative power. Ortega’s public persona reworks the gothic as a medium to reshape, a story to be told. In doing so, she opens the gothic to new protagonists: dark, sharp, Latina, and in control.

Ortega’s recent appearance in a draped, black-and-white, newspaper-print dress crystallizes this dynamic. Originally made famous by Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City (1998–2004), the iconic John Galliano “newspaper dress” embodies its own layered textuality. As a fictional newspaper columnist, Carrie crafts her public persona through writing—scripting her romantic and existential life into print. By referencing this specific dress, Ortega visually cites a lineage of feminine authorship tied to media visibility and reframes it through a distinctly gothic and Latina lens. With its striking asymmetrical architecture and bias-cut fabric featuring the bold Christian Dior Daily headline, the dress blurs the line between fashion and media spectacle. It evokes both the glamour of celebrity and the fraught legibility of Latina identity in US popular culture, transforming a garment into a site of cultural inscription. The newspaper—historically a site of public discourse and narrative gatekeeping—becomes a literal and symbolic fabric. Ortega dons the very medium that has long sensationalized or scapegoated Latinx communities. But here, she becomes the author and the headline. The dress reclaims the spectacle of text as Latina self-fashioning. It is not just gothic—it is deeply political. In a media landscape where Latinas have rarely controlled the narrative, Ortega’s dress becomes both critique and countertext. Visibility, in this gesture, transcends simple aesthetics. It is a demand for cultural authorship on her own terms.

It wasn’t just music or style—it was a subcultural refuge.

Returning to the show Wednesday, these same politics of authorship are dramatized through the character’s literary ambitions. The show repeatedly references gothic forefather Edgar Allan Poe, whose presence looms large—literally—in the school named Nevermore Academy. Within this Eurocentric framework, the Latina figure is not peripheral but central. Poe, known for populating his tales with spectral women and haunted men, helped cement a gothic tradition in which racialized and gendered others often exist as corpses or ghosts—absent, pathologized, or rendered silent. By positioning a young Latina writer at the symbolic center of an institution named after a central archetype of American gothic tradition, Wednesday stages a rewriting of literary inheritance from the margins. Ortega’s dual presence, on screen and in public life, extends this rewriting. It signals a larger shift in the cultural imaginary: a reimagining of the gothic in which intelligence, darkness, and authorship are not limited to white male figures. Instead, these attributes are claimed by a Latina figure who is self-made, agentic, and alive with sharp purpose.

This reclamation also speaks to a broader Latinx relationship to Eurocentric goth and post-punk culture—one explored in A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022). The book traces how Latinx communities in the United States have long embraced and recontextualized the melancholia and spectral aesthetics of British post-punk to navigate their own racialized experiences. As author Richard T. Rodríguez notes, post-punk didn’t just reflect white alienation; it offered Latinx youth a soundscape and aesthetic through which to process dislocation, queerness, and racial melancholia. Ortega’s gothic styling, then, draws from this rich archive of cultural remixing. Her look is not simply derivative of Euro-American goth traditions; it is situated within a lineage of Brown melancholia, queer affect, and self-authored strangeness. In this sense, her fashion is not costume—it is citational, a wearable archive that collapses subculture, memory, and critique.

This legacy of self-authored strangeness resonates deeply with me. Growing up as a Latina in Southern California’s Inland Empire, I was surrounded by Latinx youth who didn’t just listen to post-punk, goth, and new wave music—they performed it on their bodies through goth fashion and style as a mode of cultural and emotional expression. Bands like The Cure, The Smiths, and Joy Division pulsed through Mylar-draped bedrooms, high school corridors, and backyard kickbacks as Latinx youth embodied the melancholia and theatricality of goth in dark clothing, dramatic makeup, and stylized gestures. It wasn’t just music or style—it was a subcultural refuge. This embodied gothic aesthetic offered a counterspace to the racial and economic precarity of our surroundings. Watching Jenna Ortega take up this visual language today—on red carpets and in fictional worlds—feels like witnessing a full-circle evolution of that aesthetic legacy, now made visible on the scale of mass culture.

Ortega’s styling authors a visual politics rooted in a storied history of gothic signifiers. Her aesthetic—dramatic black, sheer lace, sculptural gowns, vintage veils—not only nods to mourning and resistance but also refuses the constrained roles historically assigned to Latinas in media: the hypersexualized bombshell, the docile immigrant, the sanitized role model. Instead, Ortega aligns herself with the writerly gothic of her on-screen persona, cultivating an aura of intellect, mystery, and refusal. Drawing from the cultural archive traced by Rodríguez, she rejects commercialized goth trends in favor of a more literary mode—one in which the Latina is both the subject and the narrator. This gothic authorship does more than rework a single character or fashion aesthetic—it signals a shift in the cultural imagination. Ortega challenges who gets to be a writer, a spectacle, a symbol. Her presence models what it means to author oneself across platforms and genres, carving out a future where Latinas are not merely represented, but are the ones doing the representing—styling, scripting, and shaping cultural narratives on their own terms.

She is not simply a muse—she is an author. Not just an icon but a critic.

Such symbolism is especially potent in a media era where visibility is often mistaken for justice. In a time marked by intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment—where deportations and border policing escalate, DACA protections remain unstable, and Latinx communities are regularly scapegoated in media narratives—mere representation offers little protection. Ortega’s fashion and performance challenge this logic. What matters, her public persona insists, more so than just being seen, is shaping the frame: deciding what gets printed, who gets quoted, and how the narrative unfolds. She is not simply a muse—she is an author. Not just an icon but a critic. Her gothic is not escapist fantasy. It is an embodied methodology of authorship, one that asserts cultural and narrative power in a landscape still structured by exclusion and surveillance.

This self-styling becomes a serialized fiction of its own: a performance that travels across red carpets, editorials, and digital platforms. When Ortega walks a carpet in a dress made of print—newspaper print—she stages her body as both medium and message. Never simply gothic for gothic’s sake, gothic glamour evokes a visual and political storytelling, a way of occupying public space while maintaining narrative agency. The Latina figure exceeds decoration and becomes declaration.