Or like an altar for the most intimate secrets that every woman knows but rarely speaks. Either way, welcome to one woman's attempt at distilling her relationship with womanhood into discrete snippets ideal for frictionless consumption. In a way, I've packaged my experience here the same way my identity has felt packaged and performed for many of my experiences as a woman.
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If it feels a bit jaded, that's because it is. While I've come to love myself and my identity as a woman, it's become impossible for me to exist without chafing on these pressures, both intrinsic and extrinsic. These pressures, which used to exist at the periphery of my existence, have spent years growing into a gender-induced glaucoma that infringes on my daily existence.
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In that sense, I suppose this project is a reclamation of sorts, not to entirely clear this detritus from my vision, but to forge a lens through which I can examine my experience as a woman.
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On that note, I hope you'll join me in this endeavor, perhaps even become inspired to create your own lens to understand womanhood. Beyond just being for women or womanhood, this project provides a magnifying glass into womanhood to hopefully treat the latent myopia with which we have been regarded. Although these pieces are highly intimate, they are anything but individual; there are countless iterations of each which exist in the memories of countless women.
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Further exploration will yield analysis of my womanhood on my body, packaged for other people, and understood by myself. This project provides all of the things I've never spoken, either for fear or shame or difficulty recognizing and conceptualizing these patterns. Though these experiences are not exclusive to women, the way our existence becomes a constant conflict of public, private, and societal pressures is. These are the things we do not say, but we experience nonetheless.
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This is a confessional of sorts – it contains the verklempt, perverse sort of thoughts and aches best scribbled on a bathroom stall.
Maintenance of Woman
It is like any other object or machine or tool: our body has an external utility besides our existence. The external utility is projected upon implicitly and explicitly by others. Our bodies have never been our own. Instead, we are a capitalist canvas, an amalgamation of retinol creams and low carb diets and Skims underwear and pink razors. We are at once the voracious consumer and the supplicant product poised for palatable consumption.