My Eyes, Your Gaze

From the theories of urbanist Georg Simmel to the bars of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, there has been no dearth of work exploring how cultural expectations of physical presentation have shaped people's relationships to both their bodies and those around them. My Eyes, Your Gaze is a graphic essay on the cultural perception and conception of the body, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. Using her own experiences as a thread tying the piece together, Foroohar engages with both queer, anticolonial, and feminist theory in addition to modern pop culture to explore the ways in which the concept of the physical body is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism, misogyny, and queerphobia. The work started out as a personal project but grew more academic as I began to connect the readings in my UChicago classes to the issues of self-perception and presentation I was thinking about privately. It became the final project for my global queer and feminist aesthetics class, which pushed me to investigate non-western perspectives on the body and its cultural conception, turning the work from a pet project into something much bigger than myself. Ultimately, My Eyes, Your Gaze is an exploration not only of the societal constraints on the body, but on the in which people have taken back possession of their bodies and their sense of self.