The Queer Body
This collection is ongoing, and will be updated regularly through May 2025
Put yourself in the context of a queer family in rural Pennsylvania in the early 2000’s. I grew up in the Poconos with two moms. There’s something inherit about your visibility as a queer person. It feels like you are always performing. You’re always being watched. The queer body is always being seen by the public. Sometimes you’re seen as ephemeral, sometimes as sexual, sometimes as free. The presence of queer families in the media are few and far between and to be honest most of them don’t hold a candle to real life. Without knowing it, people look at you to make the decision and to be the just representative for your community. All eyes are on you to make the right decision. This vulnerability that you have makes you feel naked to the world. This was the old thinking. The new mentality is that as queer people, we are retaking and reclaiming this nudity, twisting it around until it is empowering to us and our community.
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The eye motif acts as a reflection. It tells the audience that you know that they are looking at you. Imagine that you are a mirror, you are being watched at all times, and you are being looked at to be the representation for your community. The eye reflects the watchful gaze back at the audience. It acknowledges that we are being watched, but it reclaims this watchfulness and turns it outward. The eye represents your audience and their longing or judgmental gazes,. We are now watching you, we are aware of your gaze, and we reciprocate two-fold.
The plan with this collection is to lean into the frivolity, the seedy, and the gritty. By taking femininity and turning it on its head, this collection aims to express the queer body, queer sexuality, and the queer experience. How does the queer body smell, look, touch, taste? Sweat, ephemeral, absurd. The concept of normal versus weird and dismantling these words. Breaking down and demolishing the binary. Everybody is weird. The death of the nuclear family ideology, it never existed.
