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unlivable body statement
Judith Butler stated that an “unlivable
life” is one that radically deviates and proves incompatible with
gender norms. An unlivable body, therefore, is a body that
radically deviates from accepted norms of beauty.
Through photographic exploration, I seek to portray the inner workings of the emotional struggle, distortion, and confusion that go into body hatred and the subsequent negative self-perception as a woman. The bodies are shown as restricted, scarred, fragmented and distorted. Identifying facial features are masked, hidden, or left out altogether. The women in these images are exposed, naked, raw and uncovered by social conventions. There is also a sense of malleability, the sense that the body is something to be changed, something to be molded and built upon. A seemingly thin profile has fat rolls and stretch marks, and parts of the body are pulled and squeezed as if made out of man-made material such as silly putty or play-do. Fitness magazines urge their readers to “sculpt your body into a work of art,” “visualize what you want to look like…and then create that form.” Contemporary obsession with plastic surgery parallels this same ideology. I want to play with this idea that we are authors of our own bodies. I want to question the assumption that we have that kind of control or if it is merely a fantasy that keeps us imprisoned in our roles as women. In 1792, Mary Wollstencraft remarked “taught from infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptor, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Over two hundred year later, Wollstencraft’s statement still applies, and it is this sentiment that I investigate through this work -- the experiences of women feeling trapped by the imperative of physical beauty. |
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