Tag Archives: Body Image

Voices

Where Beauty Lies

by Shin Yu Pai

I thought the show should be called Hey, Good Looking, but the marketing team for the the Wing Luke Museum voted in favor of the more lyric Where Beauty Lies. I’d been hired to write the narrative panels and introductory text for an exhibition organized around decolonizing beauty. Counting up the number of cosmetic and elective procedures I’ve undergone over the years, I felt at least some mild sense of disingenuousness. But part of why I signed up to help with the show was to make myself look more closely at some of my half-examined beliefs about beauty.

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Voices

POETRY: Incidentally—I Don’t Just Write About Bodies, I Have a Body Too.

by Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco

You want my words? You want my body. They come from in here. 

I have been penning my brain thoughts and dancing my body thoughts and singing my soul thoughts since I was 6 years old. When I was four or so, I performed my own version of Swan Lake for my audience of one, my mama, three if you count the cats. My costar was a stuffed swan, my ballet bar and movement scaffolding my walker. 

People love overzealousness. Precociousness. It is shocking and interesting that I could presume that my body is something you would want to look at or see move. Amazing that I wanted to be a dancer, born like I was. I didn’t begin dancing as a symmetrical flower hacked down by a storm, scattered, scattered, replanted and learning to grow into dancing again. I always was this way. And I become more and more this way. 

It’s almost like, you consider the unlikely possibility of my seamless inclusion more when I say it’s a good idea. Because I was given the gift of convincing speech. For whatever reason. You believe me. 

But how much do you believe me? How much do you listen? 

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