For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to disappear. As a child, a little girl, I recall the desperation of wanting to make myself smaller. I was already tiny but cursed with big feelings and the harshness of intuition. I seemed to feel everything around me—and it hurt. I was too loud, too dramatic, too needy. As an adult who does not find myself along the gender binary, I am still trying to disappear. Any taste of exposure has me recoil into myself, finding new ways to punish my existence, paying some ill-defined price for taking up space. Global pandemic necessitated masks and I have found comfort with this new application. I welcomed the new way to conceal.
Throughout my adolescence and into adulthood I made great attempts to disappear, which manifested into a troubling relationship with food. Much has been written about the ways women are affected and afflicted with food-related behaviors that are labeled disordered. Our bodies and our minds are only ever seen through a lens of sickness and deficit, placing the problem squarely within our individual selves so it may be “treated” and “medicated.” My experience with anorexia is often met by professionals with a hyperfocus on the nutrition piece of the relationship (or lack thereof). But what if this relationship to food has nothing to do with food at all? Sure, the relationship with body is about control, but what if it is more than that?
In her book Aliens & Anorexia, Chris Kraus shares her own experience with starvation by weaving it throughout a larger experience of making a film, and her long distance BDSM relationship to a man in Africa. In one passage, she teases apart Sartre’s understanding of female anorexia from The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. She says:
I think emotion is like hyperspace, a second set of neural networks becoming active in the body. I think “the girl” was right. Sartre thinks that those who experience an intolerable situation through their bodies are manipulative cowards. It’s inconceivable to him that female pain can be impersonal. And so, like all the female anorexics and the mystics, “the girl” can only be a brat. She is starving for attention.
Aliens & Anorexia 133-134
Long ago I divested myself from any attempt at perfection or the perfect body type. I spent my late teens and early twenties as an unofficial sex worker, sleeping with men for drugs and safety, and by twenty-five I was dancing in clubs and escorting. The ideal body type for men was warm and responsive, or perhaps non-responsive. One that bleeds if the assailant wishes for it. It was far less about shape or curve or weight and more about what kind of emotional response a body could conjure. Sex workers and people who pay for sex know what corporate fashion refuses to acknowledge: that preference is fluid, inconsistent, and omnipresent. What one person likes, another will turn their nose at. This is all to say that my relationship with food and the desire to restrict it had nothing to do with trying to achieve some ideal body type, because that ideal changed depending on who was paying me so they could cum.
That is not to say my starvation was not about making myself smaller—it was. But that is because my goal was to disappear, to become invisible, to not exist or challenge my existence by slipping into that passive, nothing state that hunger breeds. Every time I skipped a meal, my flesh became tighter around my bones. My rib cage narrowed around my internal organs. A kind of cruel corsetry.
I was caving in on myself. Collapsing like a dying star. Sinking. As Kraus states, “[T]he longer that a person cannot eat, the harder is becomes for her to find the perfect food” (Aliens & Anorexia 155). My desire to hide has only intensified.
So long as anorexia is read exclusively in relation to the subject’s feelings towards her own body, it can never be conceived of as an active, ontological state. Because it’s mostly girls who do it, anorexia is linked irrevocably with narcissism. But girls don’t make good monsters. Their narcissistic bodily dis-ease is so fragile, shaky, so lacking in a center that their starvation can only be a garbled plea for sympathy and attention… Female acts are always subject to interpretation. We don’t say what we mean. It’s inconceivable that the female subject might ever simply try to step outside her body, because the only thing that’s irreducible, still, in the female life is gender.
Alien & Anorexia 162
Nearly fifteen years ago, just a few years younger than Francesca Woodman was when she jumped from a window and killed herself, I first engaged with her work, which evokes this same haunting desire to obscure ones’ self. It was a photo from her Space2 series taken in Providence, Rhode Island, between 1975 and 1976. Using herself as the subject, she captures her naked body concealed in torn and peeled floral wallpaper. She stands barefoot between two large windows. The wall itself is cracked. Part of it crumbles on the floor beside her. The mood is decay and camouflage. This one is titled From Space. I was taken by the haunting and ethereal moodiness of the photo and how she managed to capture a moment when she was both present and vanishing at the same time. I felt a connection to the delicate effacement of self. It felt familiar and just outside my reach. It invokes The Yellow Wallpaper. Femininity is as much imprisonment as it is trickery. It is agonizing and it is armor.
Woodman’s body of work, comprised of some 800 images, is an ode to the slipperiness of girlhood, femininity, and control. The elusiveness of her subjects (mostly her), their impermanence and uncertainty present themselves like clouds of vapor in cold air. Artistic scholars seem to speak to her age as if it somehow negates her artistic intention. Woodman ended her life by jumping from a loft window on the East Side of New York City when she was 22 years old.
I suppose we can’t ever know fully what sense she made of her visions and creations. This is particularly apparent in the way collectors and art historians speak about Woodman’s suicide. The description of her death as “untimely” is distinctly unnerving. On its face, the use of the language of “untimely” is at best subjective. As it relates to suicide, I find it frustratingly incorrect. Suicide, a death by choice, a death by one’s own hands, is the furthest from “untimely” given the decedent got to decide for themselves the timing of their death, and then took the steps to make it happen.
Referring to Woodman’s suicide as “untimely” speaks to the way her photography is critically overshadowed by her age and the way in which she died. The tension elicited in her photos is further complicated by the inability to pin her down to a particular style. Her body of work has elements of surrealism, European modernism, and traditional American modernism—just to name a few (and I am neither an art historian nor photographer). It’s this tension, the tension of forcing a fit, that is the golden thread throughout her collections. As a nonbinary femme who struggles deeply to find a form that fits, perhaps this tension is what drew me to Woodman’s photos. I think I have always wanted to disappear, to fade quietly, to evaporate. There is beauty and intention in self- annihilation. It is the tension of indirection and impermanence.
In another photo from a collection taken in Rome, Italy, Woodman hangs from the crown moulding over a doorway. Her face is obscured behind her left bicep that is covered in the scrunch of an oversized linen shirt or possibly gown (it’s hard to say). Her legs and feet are bare. In the foreground is a wood chair with cloth draped across it. To the left of the photo is the edge and one leg of a coffee table, an outlet, and a blank white wall. To the right of the photo, near the top of the doorway hangs some art. The floor is patterned with black and white six-sided shapes. Our artist hangs in front of four-panel French doors, her shadow cast against them. Light cascades across her. It is reminiscent of the crucifixion. Her body is both delicate and rigid. Her hair is down, tucked behind her shoulders. The image is stirring and angelic. It’s complicated. This image, like many others, is untitled.
Woodman’s work inspires more questions than it could ever possibly answer. Her entire body of work is filled with inconclusions. Her ability to be both the subject and object of her photography emphasizes her ability to exist in multiple ways at once. Sometimes when I revisit her photos, I feel a small sense of relief. I, too, feel limitless and fragmentary. I am also in motion and suspended frozen. I feel my bodymind is often in contradiction with itself. I am careful to not let Woodman’s death eclipse her work because I believe her photos are about survival and existence even when that existence is outside what is considered bearable. I have spent hours in front of mirrors trying to recognize myself, trying to make sense of my reflection to no veritable conclusion. Perhaps it is my Madness that makes this kind of task inconclusive. Perhaps it is Woodman’s Madness that colored her experience of existing too.
wrath of persephone is a writer and digital nomad. Their work has been published by CLOAK, Expat Press, and Hobart Pulp. Read more of their musings at wrathofpersephone.com or @hacksawplaydate.
minor literature[s] 