For my creative work that is not a text, I built a body made of the words others used to define people’s bodies. I took scraps from newspapers and cut out every phrase or word the journalists used to describe their subjects. The variance of the words surprised me. Someone who an article referred to as an “amazing mentor” or “essential worker” could have easily been one of the individuals labelled “dangerous” or a “troublemaker” in another article.
I left the body unnamed, but it feels defined and categorized to me based on the words that build the body.
I created this to remind people (including myself) of how we judge others and label them based on arbitrary characteristics.
