Two Great Essays from Guernica

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to sasha_feather for the tip

Guernica is an online magazine of art and politics.

guernicamag.com

It's currently featuring two excellent essays about embodiment:

A sporty, athletic lesbian becomes a high quadriplegic at fifty. Her meditation on the endless nature of grief is instructive, as well as totally anti inspo-porn.

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The radical claim of militancy and mourning is that you are not required to set aside the messy, dark, grieving, perverse, incapacitated, angry, or shameful parts of yourself to be admitted to the public world. Even if universal design should magically appear everywhere and signal a sea change in public understanding of what it means to be disabled, that fact would not touch the neurological pain lighting up my body, or my balky bowels that move only when highly disciplined with laxatives and enemas, or counteract the loss of endless bodily pleasures. Not even that truly radical transformation would assuage my grief for the bodymind I was, thinking about my cadence as I crested that hill. Remember how that felt.
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https://www.guernicamag.com/my-lost-body/

The prolific reviewer declares her love for her "mountain of an aunt" and eventually, for her own self when she's the same size.

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Her body was a marvel to me, a form unbound and soothing as a Buddha. Sometimes, I would sit in her lap and peek down her shirt, to see her mysteries. She was the biggest woman I knew.

[...snip...]

Unapologetic fat women embrace the philosophy of displacement. They manifest the audacity of space-taking. They cleave the very air. This is not just fatness of the body, it is fatness of the mind. If you have a fat body, you take up room by default. If you have a fat mind, you choose to take up room.
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Comments

[alatefeline]

Thank you. Definitely reading these.