The Body Unmatched

Engulfed by gender dysphoria? A feeling as if your body is other, wrong, mismatched, misconstructed, or visibly queer in the therapeutic milieu. Why does it feel overwhelming as a practicing queer art therapist to explore my own experience with gender even alongside gender-diverse clients? I find myself combing through those ruminating thoughts as depicted in my comic with the overwhelming amounts of slime taking over the composition–can the client tell? Can they see my dysphoria? The eating disorder that led to my experiences of this oozing effect of dysphoria? The restricting of calories to punish my body? How can I, the art therapist, be an expert on eating? “Eating healthy?” Body image? Exercise? Gender? Dysphoria? Euphoria? Will they still trust me if they knew? What if I can’t even accept my own body? Sharing similar experiences of living in a body that feels queer in the most literal sense – strange, odd, different – a struggle that might be a point of connection even across differences…I wonder: Should I disclose? Is that crossing a line? How can I navigate this ethical dilemma when the literature and professional discourse neglect to attend to these queer concerns? In an attempt to depict this idea of gender dysphoria impacted by an eating disorder, I leaned into my artist identity as an art therapist by creating a comic using an oozing slime texture to engulf the disengaged figure in the comic. This slime, sticky and elastic in texture, represents the overwhelming thoughts of living in a body that sometimes feels and looks otherworldly to cis-normative bodies and ideals that conform to society. Slime captures the experience of a body feeling malleable, genderless, organic, and otherworldly. Slime often gets tied to language such as gross, weird, and strange, which historically gets tied to queer bodies. However, as a queer artist growing up in the nineties, the images of slime feel nostalgic, safe, and a recurring theme in my other artworks.  The comic intends to bring up, for the viewer, thoughts about how an artist and therapist experience their body both physically and mentally in the therapeutic space. In what ways do they perform gender? Succumb to gender norms? It invites queer therapists to give themselves grace in the therapy space and continue expressing their gender authentically while asking why it also often feels like an endless pursuit.  Body Unmatched shows the painful turmoil one can go through to come to a space of accepting one's body and the disordered eating through the repetitive line work in the comic. It brings to light the constant battle or discussion in one's mind about the gendered expectations of others, and self-reflection.