Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

I am embarrassed by the curve of my shoulders. I have started to notice them more in photographs, how my neck is pushed forward and there is a bit of a hunch. My sister, in her fifth year of school for physical therapy, comments on it every time she sees me. There are ways to fix it, I have started to go to yoga, but for now, it is there, the evidence of my life as a reader. 

I have never felt close to my body. I lack the innate awareness I’ve seen in my peers. When I turn corners, my hip usually hits the side of the wall. I have never been great at catching things. In college I started saying that I would prefer to be perceived as an amorphous blob. I am not naturally athletic, although I enjoy moving my body and being outside. Every team sport in elementary school felt like a lesson in dissociation. I could never figure out how my body connected to my brain, never mind trying to successfully coordinate plays with teammates. 

Recently, I listened to an interview with an author who said that if she ever wanted to write a particularly vulnerable thought of her own, she gave it to a male character. She had discovered over the course of her writing career that if she did not want something attributed to herself, she could just give the opinion or trait to a man. No reader would assume that it was a genuine reflection of the author. 

This interview struck me, because I was doing the same thing in high school. During a creative writing summer camp, I spent the whole week developing a male main character. A key aspect of his identity was his own relationship with his body. I found it easier, to explore my fragile relationship with the sack of skin I called home, by giving it to a body I did not know intimately. I have never lived inside a boy’s body, and I am not familiar with its particular successes and failures. 

I have seen how women’s bodies are portrayed online, in novels, and on television. I had no interest in putting a lens on the female body, because I had already spent all my years exhausted by its nuance. 

In college I read a lot of gender theory. Once I learned to frame gender as a performance, my relationship with the body (abstract), became more complex. We choose how to dress and move our bodies to be perceived and consumed by others in a particular way. As humans, we make choices about our presentation daily. 

That fictional character that I was writing in high school was obsessed with celebrity culture. It feels easy to make the leap between body dysmorphia and American pop culture, because the word consumption encapsulates both. Every celebrity is performing gender on the main stage, and the non-famous gorge ourselves on analysis of what each presentation means for their career. Often these conversations are not happening in as explicit terms, but in casual conversations about song lyrics, music videos, and casting choices. In a society where lookism impacts achievement, gender presentation and participation is part of understanding it from an intersectional lens. 

Yesterday, the MET Gala swept social media into a storm. It does every year. However, this year, I perceived the display from the context of having worked in underfunded art spaces. I found myself; amidst the sea of layoffs, budget cuts, and remaining staff stretched too thin, envious of the MET and its money. Simultaneously, I know that the bulk of their staff are not being paid living wages. I want to go on a rant about billionaires and capitalism and the failures of the MET Gala, but for the purpose of this short essay, I will assume you are all well-aware of these details. For now, I want to talk about bodies. 

The theme of the MET Gala was “Costume Art” or “Fashion is Art”. It could also be conceptualized as, “the body is art.” A number of the pieces were inspired by famous paintings and statues. Most of the looks included neat, tight tailoring. Some were anatomically inspired. It was a theme that dabbled lightly in body horror. It got me thinking of Finnick Odair and my career. 

As a museum professional, I deal in objects. I document them and care for them. I teach others about them. These objects, art pieces and historic materials, have been deemed museum worthy. Hundred of people come to look at them in galleries and researchers travel across the globe to touch them in the archives. At the MET Gala, as celebrities dressed as art, and the world gawked, these people felt a lot like objects. 

I guess it's in the word. “Objectifying” is what a lot of celebrity culture involves. As a society we buy bodies in the context of art. They are the people who fill our screens and make noise in our headphones. It makes me wonder if all art is a body. Literally, in depictions of the human form, but also abstractly as I think about the labor of creativity and the physicality of making art. 

When I engage with my body, when I make it walk down the street or hold a loved one close, I take for granted and want more of its fluidity. I also mourn the body, how fragile it is, how capable of being hurt, of ceasing to live.

There is a lot of death right now, mostly at the fault of other humans. How capable of cruelty our bodies are. How horrified it leaves me. I keep being reminded of the Hunger Games and the Capitol, and how beauty is mixed with death and both are being projected onto screens. In fact, each new Hunger Games movie released feels like another example of how we are all participants, analyzing every single detail of every casting decision. There is something to say here about the phrase “sex sells” and Hollywood and what bodies are allowed to get away with what. For now, I exist in my body, surrounded by art and concern for the world, feeling very existential about it all.