That moment when a man drives by slowly and stares at you as you roller skate. That feeling when your classmate pets your arm hair. When a bank teller remarks that you are darker than your white mother and wistfully remarks that your non-existent babies might have blue eyes. That moment when you are forced to consider your own body as something separate from yourself.
Whether it be manifested through boba binging or hair plucking, my relationship with my body has always been frazzled, disjointed, and fraught. With ideas of self-care being both commodified and solidified within dominant culture, bodily maintenance is at the forefront of our consciousness. Using the language of cuteness and comics, I create accessible narratives that provide unexpectedly cutting observations of how one’s body is limited within institutional constraints, such as sexism and capitalism. My vignettes illustrate bodily disconnection and the subsequent and conflicting desires to both control, escape, and feel at home within the body. In my work, I refuse to embrace this bodily disconnection, but acknowledge it and its harm, as well as imagine possible avenues in which reconnection with the body is possible.
