vol. 4 / june – july 2017
commodity body
FEMME MÂCHÉ
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ABOUT FEMME MÂCHÉ
Femme Mâché is a collective of womxn & femme artists, creatives, and activists, founded by Pooja Desai and Lilian Finckel. Following the 2016 presidential election, Pooja and Lilian were committed to engaging their fellow artists in consistent and productive conversations about issues that matter to them. This zine is an archival of artistic resistance, solidarity, and self care: a visual documentation of shared resolve. We are committed to inclusivity, intersectionality, and exploring all forms of femme identity. Femme Mâché holds monthly collaborative zine workshops. All contributors produce work in the workshop that becomes part of a documentary zine centered around the critical question introduced in that gathering. To find out more, get in touch at hellofemmemâché@gmail.com or follow us on instagram @femme_mâché.
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ABOUT THIS ZINE
How do our bodies interact, take up space, and accrue value in the digital world? This volume’s origin begins somewhere in January around the height of the atthe-time-trendy “pussy hat” – we were fishing for resources for our first volume and found advertisements for them in troves, selling on Amazon, eBay, and more sites for upwards of $20. We watched as the streets filled with everyone wearing “Future is Female” shirts, pins from their movement of choice, and our socials filling with angry statuses and passionate link shares (us included). And then Pepsi happened, and then that Cheetos SNL skit that was too accurate and had us all thinking – how did an executive decide that using the example of a social movement for corporate marketing and/or benefit was a good idea? And where does this all start? Commodity Body began as we continued to observe the motions of digital bodies, how movements around claiming rights for our bodies have morphed in the public sphere of social media, and the way in which they have been commodified by companies, organizations, and ourselves. And as we observed more, we searched for an origin of the commodified body. Diving into the topic in group discussion, we proposed the following questions: How do we navigate and treat the digital public sphere in our own lives? How has commodification impacted social movements, and how would one differentiate cause-based marketing from non-profit “savior” branding techniques? How has the digital sphere detracted from or helped the progression of movements in the real world? Is posting an activist status update groundbreaking, lazy, helpful, educational, all of the above, none of the above, or something else? This issue hopes to dig into some of these questions through the personal lens of our contributors. We are forever grateful for their contributions.
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A Haiku On Attempts At Subversion if i show my tits liberated / sexual? only if i’m “hot”
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-----Hyperlink Glory Hole/ My body disintegrates in cyberspace disseminating my desire Each piece of myself with a hive mind towards satiation I awake because of an itch Something claws itself out and presents itself to me In homeopathic dilution The less of me is left The more I feel myself again --------A body is both the consumer and consumable. Taught what to consume, how to consume, when it’s time to consume and when it’s time to be consumed // to be built to consume, broken down to be consumed // formed to be both the mouth and the meat What parts of my cravings belong to me? What I have been conditioned to desire? ---------Continual electrical stimulation To re-animate miserable nerve endings Within anatomical deliverance Pleasure is simulated On a girl-shaped-form We weep together and her body turns to pulp ---------
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As someone who has never been thin or felt pretty or felt her body was a comfortable place to live, I have had a hard time claiming real ownership of my body. I have begun to run. A reclamation. Or really, a first landing. Landing within my body for the first time. I grew up dancing, feeling my muscles pulling on sinew and bone. Sweat, blood, elegance, expression. I was deeply in love. But I was acutely aware my body was not mine. I was shorter and rounder than the other girls. I listened as my dance teacher asked my mother if I could slim down. I was not an overweight child, parts of me were just still soft. Still baby soft. I suddenly felt the pressure to have a flat, hard tummy at the ripe age of nine to match the gangly girls who had no say in what they looked like either. When I was eleven, I listened patiently as another dance teacher told me to eat cotton balls soaked in sugar water. “Zero calories. Fills you up.” I went home, read a book and cried a little instead. Puberty made its appearance in a big way when I was thirteen. I suddenly had enormous breasts, and was leered at by men older than my father while I waited for the bumper cars. Girls at my Catholic school told me the way I jiggled was inappropriate. It made the boys stare. “Don’t be slutty.” When I was fifteen and a freshman in high school, I stood backstage waiting for my entrance as a ‘Hot Box Girl’ in Guys & Dolls. We all had matching sequin dresses. Two hands grabbed either of my ass cheeks from behind. I spun around to see one of the senior boys. “Of course, it’s the freshman.” He walked away annoyed that I wasn’t someone else. LAX bros at my lunch table would to try to throw their change into my polo shirt, to the cleavage they couldn’t see but knew existed. One afternoon I changed out of my uniform after school, quarters fell to the ground with a clang. My cheeks burned red. When I was nineteen I decided to get a breast reduction. I was sick of it. Sick of all of it. Like Lady Macbeth I asked the spirits to unsex me here. The spirits sent me a plastic surgeon. For the surgery to be covered by insurance, I had to prove that my breasts were too big for my body – that they would cause me significant pain as I got older. The insurance company needed pictures. We went to a back room. I took my shirt and bra off. The plastic surgeon, an old man, took a picture. I held back tears. Put my clothes back on. He told me he thought it would be covered. “Way too big, and asymmetrical…we’ll fix that.” It was covered. I got the surgery. A few weeks of intense recovery followed, and my body felt more my own. Felt just a little more under control. Then the questions rolled in. People asked how I “lost the weight” told me I “looked great.” To this day, people always wince a little when I tell them I cut my breasts off. (Not in those words exactly, but you get it.)
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While an acting major in college, I learned yoga and breath-throughbody work, and worked with my body in a constructive way. I learned how to nurture my body. It was bitter sweet. I mourned for the years I hadn’t. Sleep became a priority, stretching wasn’t a mandatory-beforedance practice - it was nourishing and productive, and I found my voice vibrated down to my toes when I let it. Now, it’s a year after graduation. I’m lost as ever, drinking plenty, weekends hazy with mary jane. I return to my body. I now have three simplistic, extremely personal tattoos and the hoop nose piercing I always wanted. But I don’t get to act as often as I did in college. I miss using my body. Stuck sitting at a day job desk five days a week, my body is screaming for movement. So, I’m starting to run. My shins splint easily, and my ankles are bad from the punishing repetition of years in dance classes, but I take care. I listen to her when my body asks me to slow down, to walk in between jogs or sprints. My run was the only thing that I looked forward to today. Afterward, my sweat covered my body, congratulating me.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Pooja Desai, editor, 17-19 Lilian Finckel, editor, designer Leila Garrison, 8-9 Jess Greenspan, 15-16 Esther Grossman, 11 Kaitlin Gu, 6 Maya Ono LeBeau, 20-21 Hanna Park, 4-5 Zoey Pressey, 7 Alex Shannon, 10, 13-14 Alida Soileau, 12
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts, Articles, Images, and more that we read, cut up, collaged, drew on, spilled on… - The Hedgehog Review 03// THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING// T.H.R. - The New Inquiry // Closing the Loop // Aria Dean - Disposable Everything // Commodification and Popular Culture // Gareth Leaman - Annual Review of Anthropology // The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts // Lesley A. Sharp - Change Vol.39 No.6 // The Commodification of the Examined Life // Christopher Nelson - The Commodification of Knowledge in the Global Information Society // Peter Fleissner - Signs Vol.33 No.4 // Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign // Josée Johnston and Judith Taylor - Huffington Post // Here’s Why That Heineken Ad Is Even Worse Than The Pepsi Ad // DiDi Delgado - AppAdvice // Instagram is even better with these 7 Apps // Joe White - The Root // Kendall and Kylie Jenner Lost Their Goddamn Minds and Used Tupac’s and Biggie’s Faces on T-Shirts // Yesha Callahan - Girlhood and the Politics of Place // Jessalynn Keller - The New York Times // Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter // Daniel Victor - New Yorker // The Image of American Hyperbole // Vinson Cunningham - NBC News // Pink ‘Pussyhat’ Creator Addresses Criticism Over Name // Julie Compton - Real Life // Poor Meme, Rich Meme // Aria Dean - Commodity Activism // Marita Sturken, Alison Trope, Melissa M. Brough, Samantha King - Images of Pussyhats Galore - Sister, Outsider // Audre Lorde - Warrior Forum // Community Thread “What’s the Best Instagram Follow/Unfollow App - TIME // Why Instagram is the Worst Social Media for Mental Health // Amanda MacMillan - The Atlantic // Why People Are So Upset About Wall Street’s ‘Fearless Girl’ // Bourree Lam - ARTFORUM // Women on the Verge // Johanna Fateman
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HELLOFEMMEMÂCHÉ@GMAIL.COM
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