Find that thing that weighs more than drugs

Abstract

Creating a space for bodies to count as corporeal linguistic landscapes or ‘skinscapes’ is an avenue that speaks to the growing interest of bodies-in-place and placemaking in the physical landscape. In this essay, I extend skinscapes and placemaking to that of the digital space, specifically Amiena Inspired, my YouTube channel. A frank autoethnography detailing my formative drug abuse, postnatal depression and logotherapeutic escape from the bounds of religion, motherhood and womanhood in academia serves as a disruptive narrative to the hegemonic hypermasculine prisoner narrative currently proliferated. I argue that I traded my social status and expectations of a ‘good woman/mother/Muslim/academic/wife’ for authenticity-in-place, with my gender serving as marked materiality of the growing purview of drug abuse in Cape Town.