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Body Haven January Newsletter - Welcome Back!

- Thursday, January 26, 2023

Events

ÔØä´©Å January Newsletter '23 ÔØä´©Å

Happy New Year from Body Haven!

It's 2023! Welcome back, everybody! We hope your winter break was restful and cozy, and proffered many a warm beverage. Hope everyone's first week of classes is going smoothly! We'd also like to welcome our incoming members this semester! We are so glad to have you join us this year! We have some very exciting things brewing this semester, including our SP23 Filmed In Cinemascope runway show!

What's this about a runway show, you ask? Body Haven holds an annual fashion show with a theme concerning spaces dominated by eurocentric and thin beauty standards. This year's theme is Old Hollywood, an industry that traditionally has been exclusive of fat people, trans & queer people, BIPOC, and disabled people. We invite you to join us as we reclaim our stardom and glamour on the runway! Cheer your fellow students on as they model the work of Columbia's very own fashion designers!

If you're interested in attending the runway show, we are holding an informational meeting tomorrow evening, Fri Jan. 27th, in The Loft, from 5pm to 6pm. Be sure to drop by to get in on the details!

Hope to see you there!

-The board

Body Positive New Year’s Resolutions: The Complete Resource Guide

Compiled by Lindley Ashline

Forget resolutions. We need a revolution
Forget discipline. We need dismantling
Forget moderation. We need liberation

@drrachelmiller

Whatever this year transition might mean to you, may you offer yourself kindness.
May you remember the ways in which you’ve grown.
May you honor the passing of time.
May you thank yourself for being your own home.
May you hold space for all you’ve carried yourself through.
May you let go of societal expectations and live proudly.
May you recognize how far you’ve already come.
May you be your own compass.
May you keep showing up, even when it’s hard.
May you hold space for all the places you have yet to go,
and may you hold trust that you will get there.

Lisa Olivera

Artist Spotlight: Anna Guyton

"My weaving technique is a process primarily concerned with materiality, negotiating how space is distributed and policed. By weaving two prints together, I am imitating the physical discomfort of forcing a fat queer body into a space designed without us in mind (i.e. school desks, plane seats, church pews). These spaces both highlight and erase bodies that do not conform; similarly, the woven images obscure one another's legibility while simultaneously creating new meanings. The process of weaving gives a literal weight to the print, its physical presence heightened as it becomes heavier. The depth created through this technique resists the presumption of an image as something flat or static, which is reflective of fat queer bodies transcending an idealized flat or fixed physique." Anna Guyton

Recommended Reading: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun Harrison

Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing. To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma. Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.