Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

by Melissa Febos

If using art to tell the story that we have been telling ourselves is boring, then using art to tell the story that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves is even more tedious—a redundancy of a redundancy. Historically, the art that reinforces these scripts—including but not limited to those of gender presentation, compulsory heterosexuality, and patriarchal beauty standards—is partly driven by commerce: the more we believe we ought to be something that we are not, the more money we will spend in that mission. Those who benefit from a dominant power structure want art that represents them, that reinforces the status quo, as they want sex that reinforces the status quo, and the best way to do that is to reiterate it, in literature as in life. The genius of social conditioning is that it is viral and can adapt to any situation a human might enter.