Yesterday, I started posting body-affirming photos of myself on Facebook and Instagram. I wrote this to accompany the photos:
This is the part of my religious deconstruction where I take body-affirming photos of myself. Some are sexy, some are silly, and some are sexy-silly. I'm especially fond of these pics with the Bible over my boobs ("Reading Ezekiel 16"). I'll be posting a few every day over the next week. I think these are relatively mild, but taking these and posting them on social media is a significant step for me. I love my body, but more importantly, I am my own and I want to share my body in this way. That's what this means.
I’m not doing anything new. For many (though certainly not all, nor does everyone need to do this), this is par for the course in religious deconstruction, especially those recovering from the trauma of evangelical purity culture. But as I began to reflect on why this is important to me, I remembered a passage from my (unfinished) memoir about a time when I was excelling in Christian academia, specifically in the application of my mind to puzzling out biblical texts. This excerpt made me understand a little better why I can’t just be content “exposing my brain” and not my body.
In this passage, the undergrad persona (that’s memoir-speak for the narrator, aka, the “me” of the story) starts to discover the power of her own mind as a means of self-revelation and self-assertion. But it’s a power that’s emerged as a loophole within a patriarchal power structure, and it comes with baggage:
I am in love, not with flesh and blood, but with the Bible and the deity that haunts its pages. I have found a place exploring the contours of the divine body, my fingers tracing the nail marks in his palms, my hands caressing the scar on his side.
I can navigate this divine body with a modicum of confidence now. I am no master, but I have learned the techniques, how to read this body and interpret its curves. It has many secret passages and hidden doorways; I feel my way to each orifice.
I move gingerly in the beginning. My freshman year at Bible college is an orientation to the hallowed halls of learning and how to wield unfamiliar tools. But by the start of my second year, I am gaining steam and attracting attention. I win first place in a university-wide student essay contest. My professors, almost all of them male, give me perfect grades, but more importantly, they write affirming comments on my papers.
I am a traveler arriving from a dry and weary land where there is no water. I drink in praise not caring if I vomit. Let me buy wine and milk without cost and tomorrow I will pay whatever price you ask.
Here at the university, I am a Platonic ideal. I am eager to learn and awash with impressionable innocence. I am attentive, a good writer, and ready to please.
On top of all this, I am a true and breathless believer, a devoted worshipper. I hunger and thirst for knowledge. I am ready to be drawn past the temple’s outer courts and into its holiest inner room, where the invisible god of the cosmos straddles the million-eyed cherubim as night and day they let out their euphoric screams, “Holy, holy! Holy, oh lord! God almighty!”
In this world where it is a sin for women’s bodies to be seen, I have at last found a way to get attention: the astounding spectacle of my mind. With my hand, I am tucking unruly bra straps back under my shirt and, with my writing, exposing my brain.
Here, the persona gains a modicum of power through her mind, but in this patriarchal structure, everything is still oriented around the gaze and approval of white cishet men. She’s found a way to navigate this world, and to some extent it feels good. She’s grown up getting the message that her body’s a problem because it could make the good Christian men all horny, so she’s had to stuff herself down; now, finally, there’s a part of her that’s being told to show up, not stuff herself down.
And so she uses her mind, she writes. She keeps writing. She writes her way out of evangelicalism. She writes her way out of Christianity and formal religion entirely. She writes herself into poems and short stories and new relationships.
In those relationships, in her life that is more than writing (but not less than) she starts to push boundaries and find more of her body. And she wants more of that. But all around her, haunting her body, are the ghosts that tell her that her value is still bound up in gazes not her own, that her body will decrease in value in proportion to how much she exposes or shares it.
It’s a mindfuck, really--it flies in the face of everything she’s learned about her mind, about abundance, about how things multiply the more you share them. She thinks about all the walls in her life: the theological boundaries she was never supposed to cross, the people she was never supposed to love, the way she would beat back her impulse to reach out until she couldn’t stand it any longer, and her desire burst out into the world.
And she knows this is the next step on her road to becoming more in tune with herself, her body, and her body in the world.
She’ll keep writing about bodies and expose her own body in writing. For her, there will never not be writing that is textual, but she knows these pictures, too, are writing, and that this writing is love.