Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Hi, friends! My name is Vanessa, and my last name means, "benefactor" in Italian. Which directly translates to, "I would be a great benefactor to your progress in the course of your winter studies!"

Ho, ho, ho!

But, really folks, I am a SWF seeking long walks on the beach with summer-stirred pina coladas and dancing pineapple mannequins and second star to your right, straight on til morning. Which brings us to the point that I am a night person-- a moonlight majestic; a midnight rider. I prefer late-night jaunts when possible, much more than I favor champagne sunrises...

Sunrises? Oh, right. My project. Back on track. Which brings us to another essential element... Personality speaking-wise and such, I am A.D.D. as they come. I am not devoid of concentration, but in fact, in excess of it. Depending on when you catch me, it can be channeled in either (or all. or any.) way. To the whole room or to a singular point of my stealthily-piercing laser beam focus.

I do not treat academics with serious decorum. At least, not in a rigid and proper kind of way. I believe academics should be pursued with a sense of freedom and genuinity. None of this false pretenses crap! C'mon.

My winter project? Here. But, be warned: It's quite personal. A little graphic, even. And disturbing... (Mostly to me, who is airing my deepest shit to the whole class. But I'm aiming at catharsis, so it's all in the bag! We'll see...)

My independent project for winter quarter will be comprised of one or several creative essays concerning my misadventures in the world of man; whereupon, one day, out of nowhere, I find myself awakened from a nothingness to discover that, somehow, I have come to embody a human form—and a female one, to boot! From the initial rude awakening on forth, I do nothing but grapple with my unexpected acquisition in seemingly endless forms— struggling with how this strange mechanism feels, struggling with how others feel about it, and struggling with the vast and disorienting jumble of everything-in-between that occurs in, on, and around my poor, solicitous human body. The deflating fact of my physical existence reaches a new low as I grow older and begin to fill out. And suddenly... Acne! Leg hair! Stomach cramps! Breasts! Lucky me. Mine happen not to look quite like the others-- the ones I have seen in pictures. In nudie magazines and late-night cable. Mine, as it would seem, are... well, different. The horror! No matter how I look at them, they are ugly. Lop-sided. Asymmetrical. Bad. Not like the rest. In other words-- ugly. There are other things, too. Thighs too jiggly. Neck too thick. Too masculine. Too tall. No chin. No beauty-- Or really?

The rest of my meandering, unasked-for existence up until this point, will be chronicled between the pages of my hopefully-approved winter quarter essays, detailing the many ways in which I come to terms with, and fall out of terms, with the unacceptable fact of my malformed femininity-- and the perpetual battle a happenstance-born individual must wage when she finds herself suddenly struck by an existence wrought by borders-- borders formed by definitions and by judgments; judgments formed by definitions and based in histories. Histories lost among time and only so traceable, and yet I will triumph. Flying past the pressures and the disapprovals and the occasional sideways glances that stifle the soul with the silent and the spoken; courtesy of the self and the “other;” sponsored by ignorance and fate. Societal curiosities, all-- derived from manifold sources. Phantoms. I will murder my phantoms with the last-legs realizationof the futility of everything-- with the acceptance of sadness caught in a laugh. I will fluctuate. Between the pursuit of reason, the belief in my irregardless beauty (we'll explain later how I got to that point) and the self-regenerating schema of anxieties, neuroses, and internal disquietings supported by the billboards and trash mags of my external reality. My essays will be accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations demonstrateing the themes of alienation, absurdity, grotesquery and so forth within my work through the context of a different artistic medium, supplying an alternate, but essential venue for understanding my explorations into this complex and often frightening outer space of the inner world.