If you’re a Marvel fan – be it comics, movies, or television shows – and you’ve been active on the internet in the past few months, you may have noticed a new feminist phenomenon sweeping through your newsfeeds and dashboards. As you may have already read in this post about comic book women, breasts and bums are often the focus of entire panels and covers. The Hawkeye Initiative takes offense at that, and is fighting back, one illustration at a time.
(tw: racial slurs, street harassment/assault[?])
And so, I’m driving West on Route 40, feeling like I belong in Baltimore. It’s maybe ten on a Friday night, and about two hundred yards before I am to pass them, I see maybe a dozen kids of color on the median strip. Teenagers. My body tensed, as it’d learned to.
Many of us have had some kind of piercing or another. One of the most common types of body modification out there is the lobe piercing, it can been seen as a practice that happens all over the globe. The question I want to look at is not where the piercing takes place, but when, and to whom Continue reading
As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been some version of overweight. I was my mom’s biggest baby. There was the “baby fat” phase (which I tried to ride to middle school, much to my embarrassment); the “I’m gaining weight because of puberty but it hasn’t decided where to live yet” phase of middle and early high school; the “I may not actually be overweight but I’m so disgusted with that tiny bit of belly fat that I’m pretty sure I’m obese” phase that seems pretty rampant in American high schools; the “shit, now I really AM overweight because I decided to take birth control and I put on 50 pounds in 3 months” phase of panic, terror and depression; the “I’ve stopped trying to stop gaining weight” phase where I saw numbers over 200; the “I had a baby and despite gaining hardly any weight with pregnancy I’ve managed to get even bigger postpartum” phase that’s pretty popular with new moms; and my personal favorite, the “oh my god, this is the biggest I’ve ever been ever in my life and I’m completely freaking out” phase of morbid obesity that has consumed my adult life.
Basically. Though my scale isn’t this clever. And I have better toes.
Sensing a trend? Continue reading
Another year, another turkey leg at the annual Renaissance festival. These types of festivals have always been dear to me- it’s served as a great source of entertainment and escape. For those of you that don’t already know, Renaissance festivals are a unique gateway to another realm- a portal that transports its participants to a time period complete with medieval costumes, games, merchandise and food (lots of food). Customers are encouraged to be themselves and dress up according to the time period-it’s a day to shed whatever rules and regulations the outside world requires and to eat, drink and be merry in a safe atmosphere void of judgment. I know this world well, this is my thirteenth year attending. Continue reading
Scarification, the process of creating raised designs on the body by cutting, branding, burning, or freezing the skin, is a body modification practice widely unheard of (compared to the more popular practices such as piercing and tattooing) in the Western world. Its practice in the U.S., originally adopted by the gay and lesbian subcultures of mid-1980s San Francisco, was revived by the neotribal movement of the early 1990s in an attempt to create a more “authentic” aesthetic while also romanticizing exoticism.
TW: blood, mildly graphic description of scarification process
Most of the time when I hear discussions about body anxiety, it’s about how the body looks. My problem is with how mine sounds. Continue reading
I recently ran across an article, and a comic describing an experiment that redefines how we think about addiction. The basic gist is that it isn’t a personal flaw, that addiction is more about environment than anything else. It was really eye-opening and I invite you to check it out.
But it got me thinking…
(TRIGGER WARNING: drugs, addiction, incarceration)
I have a confession to make. I do not shave my arm pits. Hell, I only shave my legs if I’m feeling saucy and have clean sheets because nothing is better than smooth legs in clean sheets. (That’s a lie, a lot of things are better than that.)
While I like to think of myself as a badass feminist who says fuck you to anyone and everyone who tries to tell me what to do with my body – especially in regards to body hair—I am not. That’s my second confession. I wish it was that simple.
I don’t think it’s ever that simple.
Cecil by lily-fox of deviantart.
Others’ bodies are things we usually experience sensorily — whether visually or through touch, taste, smell, or sound. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the bodies we can’t see, and what the assumptions and expectations we impose on the unseen body mean. Continue reading
Unruly Bodies 