what remains washes away

The body’s history is a labyrinth of stories about shaping and subjecting it to and through ideological regimes. As ideological emplacements, bodies fall and unfold into aesthetic norms, gendering, and the racialization of flesh. A legacy of Western philosophy to the present day creates an uncanny antagonism for the female* body: Already throughout the dark decades of Enlightenment, women* have been equated with nature, with “the body”; whereas men associated themselves with “the mind”. At the same time, “purity”, a conflation of physical cleanliness and moral virtue, was idealized and formed a neat and clean corset of expectations upon the female* body. And hence, those bodies were never supposed to be bodies.