#body representation

[gothgleek]

Books I Read in 2024:

Curvy Girls Can’t Date Bullies by Kelsie Stelting

His head lowered, and his eyes flicked from mine to my mouth. My stomach swooped in response, then my lips curled in disgust at him and myself.

Ryker might have been attractive, but he was ugly inside.

[jimothyhalperts]

My hot take for 2024 is that the lack of bigger bodies representation on mainstream media is so jarring that when there is a character who is middle sized people act like they are so much bigger than they actually are and describe/draw them as such. This honestly reminds me of the 2000's when people thought Jessica Simpson was fat when honestly she was middle sized at best, and for "fat" characters movies and series just casted an actor with a round face shape, and it's just as harmful for body image. Like, if we settle for this we are never having PROPER representation of actual fat people.

[saszor]

Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.

DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).

Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

edit: apparently tum "queerest place on the internet" blr hates disabled people so much that this post got automatically filtered. cool!

second way more important edit: How are people seeing this post where I specifically talk about burn survivors being normal, real people, and still tag this as "TW body horror"? Not a single one of these drawings or pictures is a fresh injury. All of them are healed. How the hell would you feel if someone tagged a photo of you as "trigger warning: gore"?

Disabled people are not your fucking body horror. Grow up.

[gifsbysimplysonia]

@fatphobiabusters

@fuckyeahfatpositive

💜

[ham-strokers-ejacula]

Love that they embraced sexy big-people styles.

Hate that the loading screen tips are too long to fully read by the time the loading is thru.

[papenathys]

People need Jennifer's Body (2009) and Love Lies Bleeding (2024) to be lesbian films even if they are two of the queerest, messiest and most openly bisexual films of our times, simply because there is a certain subset of queer folks who see bisexuality as inherently less queer and more falling into the paradigm of heterosexual titillation for the male gaze. It is pretty much the same theory that governs the criticism of media like The Secret History (1992), Saltburn (2023) or Hannibal NBC (2013-2015) for queerbaiting or for "being cowards" about the depiction of same sex love stories between two men who are clearly bisexual or attracted to multiple genders in canon.

The onus of the blame for heteronormativity in contemporary publishing and media often falls upon bisexual women. I'm thinking of that God awful YouTube video by that Lavender Menace person who started speaking of how sapphic literature these days is so normative (I personally agree) before veering way™ off course to spew vitriol about how this was because every popular sapphic book nowadays is bisexual and not performing the acceptable model of lesbianism or sapphic desire.

When films like Bound get talked about in terms of being a lesbian classic, nobody mentions the fact that Corky, the butch from the film demonstrates biphobic (and by extension lesbiphobic) feelings towards Violet, the femme, and considers her to be "lying" for the male gaze and performing queerness. The film ends positively, with Corky overcoming her biases and acknowledging that Violet is just as queer as she is. It's irrelevant if Violet is bisexual or a closeted lesbian (I lean towards the latter with reference to her character), what's relevant is the policing of certain kinds of identities as being "less" queer and the refusal to accept or show empathy towards bisexual women, as we are considered beings incapable of authentic self presentation or autonomous desire. Instead, we are all just a gaslit hivemind of people operating under comp het.

Bisexual women cannot have peace when it comes to representation; people took that one sentence about Poison Ivy wildly out of context, retconned decades of her representation as a bisexual icon in popular culture in love with another bisexual woman and then gaslit bisexual folks for being "annoying" about it on social media. When Love Lies Bleeding released, on Twitter, bisexual women were told to stfu because this is a film about "REAL butch4butch dykes" (and then you see the film made by a bisexual director and the muscle mommy you love to gatekeep is a) not a butch and b) an open and proud bisexual).

Villanelle, who was openly bisexual in the Killing Eve books, was retconned by fandom into a man hating lesbian and that apparently made her more authentically queer than Eve, who remained bisexual in both TV and source material. Of course, it is easier to see the more "visibly queer" Villanelle as a lesbian, while Eve, whose relationships centre men more, and who has to have her eyes opened by the sexy assassin hunting her down, can be bisexual.

I find this a really weird pattern. The whole subgenre of "bisexual woman having a reckoning and leaving her husband for a lesbian" is corny at best and poorly equates bisexuality with heteronormativity at worst, especially because the same formula is almost never applied to show a bi woman leaving her husband for another bi woman, or a lesbian leaving behind a comp het marriage or having a mid-life awakening in popular sapphic tradpub literature; the closest to this I can find is the novel Cash Delgado is Living the Dream (2024) by Taylor Kay Mejia.

It's silly, and vapid and frankly very condescending to assume that every bisexual women in popular media is actually a lesbian facing comphet. You need to unshackle your points from separatist biphobic rhetoric on social media, even if it is dressed in shallow feminist terminology. It's literally okay to let a film or book be bisexual, and I can promise you it doesn't make the narrative less queer or feminist or subversive.

I know some nasty people will be rbing this post and talking about how bisexuals are the privileged white people of the lgbtq community etc etc, and honestly I don't know how to articulate about this issue without coming off bitter, so here is an essay by Carmen Maria Machado, whose writing on bisexuality, queerness in horror/dark fiction and on sapphic literature & culture in general I highly recommend:

NON BISEXUALS DON'T DERAIL 💗💜💙

[creation-help]

Hey

- Make characters OTHER THAN VILLAINS fat too

- No not just the greedy or food loving ones

- Not just older people or moms

- Make more characters fat

- Like actually fat

- With double chins, bellies, thick arms, fat necks, rolls

- And let them be love interests or protagonists or in respected positions.

- Let them be portrayed as hot. While being fat yes

- Make more characters fat

[bumblebeans]

Absolutely obsessed with this new lady on display in the renovated MET museum's European collection (my photo)

Duplessis, Joseph Siffred. Madame de Saint-Morys (Eléonore Elisabeth Angélique de Beauterne, 1742–1824). 1776. MET Museum, New York.

[buqbite]

My thoughts here mainly revolve around YSA as the mary sue/female lead type character:

She goes from being this perfect woman to. just being a woman. And my idea is that the weight gain isn't there to make her "unconventionally attractive," or whatever other dumb phrase you wanna use to avoid calling someone ugly, but to make her conventionally attractive, yet realistic.

Instead of looking like a skinny waifu character, she looks like a skinny human woman. Her hair swaying in the nonexistent wind isn't as perfect, her magic blush is missing and she has eyebags. She's still hot, just more human.

[thatchickmaya]

More grey women this Thursday!

[not-your-asian-fantasy]

PLUS SIZE ASIANS EXIST

Michelle Elman

As you all know I’ve been talking about the absence of Asians in adverts, campaigns and fashion in general so @lindablacker and I decided to team up on a little passion project. Look at how incredible these women look!

Here’s to showing them what they are missing 💪🏽

Despite the absence in the media, asian is actually the largest ethnic minority in the U.K.

Asians deserve to be represented.

Asians deserve to be seen.

And all Asians aren’t the stereotype of being small and petite.

Being Asian is not one look.

Being Asian is not one culture.

Whilst even this shoot isn’t perfect representation, it shows just a small sample of the diversity within Asia. #AsianRepresentation

Thank you to all the wonderful women taking part and being my stunning models @nesslala @bishamberdas @saalene @kat_v_henry @minakumari.uk @simksandhu95

This was such a personal project and I couldn’t have done it without @lindablacker. She came up with the idea when I was talking about asian representation earlier in the year and I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it. She has always placed diversity at the forefront of her shoots and her talent is remarkable. This entire concept was her doing and I’m so grateful for everything you did to make this a reality! Thank you also to @umberghauri and @hannah.shaikhup for the incredible makeup! It felt so complete to have the makeup artists also be Asian. We need just as much diversity behind the scenes on shoots as well! x

[saszor]

Happy Face Equality Week :-D

(short ID in alt text, longer below)

I really wanted to draw some happy people with facial differences for this week so:)

if you tag this as "tw scars" or some other "body horror" I'm killing u btw:D!!!

[Image description: digital drawing of 7 character with facial differences against a patterned background. The left side shows a gay couple sitting and hugging; one from them has a large bump on his forehead and widespread eyes, while the other has paralysis on one side of his face. In the middle is a teen girl cuddling with a cat, both of which are missing their left eye. Below her is a nonbinary person smoking a cigarette with heart-shaped smoke surrounding them; they have facial atrophy on one side of their face. The right side is split into three small panels; top one shows a Black girl with a cystic hygroma on her jaw on a pastel pink background, middle shows an Indian man with Crouzon syndrome from the side smiling, bottom is a zoom on the side of the head of a person with microtia; they're wearing a bone-anchored hearing aid and have a buzz cut with stars patterned in it. At the bottom, "Happy Face Equality Week" is written. End image description.]

[nattikay]

Ayhapxì tokxä! Parts of the body!

Small note on kuru vs. tswin: Both terms are listed as "neural queue" in the dictionary. However, the definition for tswin also includes the word "braid" while the definition for kuru does not. This has led some to speculate that kuru refers to the actual flesh-and-nerves organ while tswin refers to the braid of hair that encompasses it—so all Pandoran fauna, including Na'vi, have kuru, but only Na'vi have tswin. I like this theory and chose to reflect it on this chart; however, keep in mind that (as of the time of this post) this distinction is merely speculation/headcanon; it's very possible that the words are actually completely synonymous and interchangeable.

.

A few terms that didn't make it onto the chart for various reasons:

ta'leng - skin (wasn't sure how to label something that encompasses the entire body) snatxärem - skeleton (same reason as above) seyri - lip (wasn't enough space left on the face image) reypay - blood (wasn't sure how to represent it in the illustration)

.

Versions with English translations available under the cut

[bixels]

As cameras becomes more normalized (Sarah Bernhardt encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use cameras because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by manufacturing companies. I paint not because I want a painting but because I love the process of painting. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

if i have to explain to you that using a camera to take a picture is not the same as using generative ai to generate an image then you are a fucking moron.

[goddessofbees]

Alright, ask #3: Joker. I 100% believe he would try to steal the kids for some evil shit like "choose one twin to live and one to die" nonsense. How would that scenario go down?

How protective is Auntie Gotham(Lady gotham) over the babies. Oh, what about Nona Death(is Madam Death married or friends with Clockwork in this au?)

Mhahahahahhaha! I've been thinking how I would get rid of the Joker in this, thanks!

I'd imagine he wouldn't get very far after threatening Dan and Jason's kids, but one wrong person saw Red Hood with the twins while he was going to his meeting with his goons and informed the Joker, then of course the elaborate plan of stealing the kiddos, which would be a very hard thing to do but let's say it was one of the times Bruce was babysitting (sorry to anyone who likes Bruce/batman he not my favorite). he's not babysitting ever after that.

Then of course the joker then broadcasts all over asking Red Hood to pick one of his twins, well let's just say Dan watching that would in fact make him go as Murderous as when Jazz died and with being the ghost king.... Well the joker certainly isn't making it out of that one alive....

(WARNING BLOOD AND SLIGHT GORE) not much but just in case you know

[braceletofteeth]

Stop crying, he's not worth it.