Nicole Chung - Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves

Body Language is a wide-ranging, heartrending, hope-generating collection of stories. From disordered eating to athleticism to disability, it was impossible to turn away from these intimate and astute offerings. There is nothing more ordinary than living in a body, but so much about it can remain unspoken. This book, then, is a revelation, treasured company that Ill keep with me always.

Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

A stunning collection illuminating the wisdom, love, and power we can access by knowing and caring for our bodies.

Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

Body Language imagines into the quakes of the bodyits pains, shifts, memories, wounds. The collection of voices here is expansive and explosive, insightful and powerful, touching everywhere from funeral sex to breath, football to transitioning, the embodied danger of gender and identity to dancing. A joy to read.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Body Language explores all that our bodies render possible and impossible: their care and feeding; what is done with them and what is done to them; what bodies may one day become and what they can offer now with each breath. Each essay shines in its specificity. Together, they create a constellation that illuminates the vastness of embodied life and the potential to relate in new ways.

Angela Chen, author of Ace

We talk a lot about bodies: from their right to safety and respect to how they take up space, from their sizes and shapes and shades to what each is able to do, its a conversation thats both constant and ever evolvingespecially in our new decade, as weve become hyperaware of the ways we physically navigate our world, whether in close proximity or six feet apart. To recognize and celebrate human bodies in their myriad beauties and braveries, we offer this mosaic: Body Language, a wide-ranging anthology of essays about the stories our bodies tell, and how we move within (and against) expectations of race, gender, health, and ability.

Since its founding in 2015, Catapult magazines goal has been to elevate writers who move cultural discussion forward through telling the stories that matter most to them. As a digital publication, Catapult is committed to publishing literature that fearlessly explores the areas where human identities intersect, while providing a free, welcoming space for a diverse, curious, and growing readership. This anthology is an extension of that project. Body Language features an astonishingly talented and diverse group of thirty writersincluding Black writers, Asian writers, Latinx writers, trans and nonbinary writers, disabled writers, immigrant writerswhose stories document their lived experiences, help to bridge the gaps between us, and add needed perspective and nuance to personal and political conversations around human bodies.

Bodies are beautiful: Natalie Lima documents the ways men fetishize her fat and powerful body; A. E. Osworth chronicles their transition through thirst traps. Bodies endure: Jenny Tinghui Zhang confronts her eating disorder in the harsh landscape of Wyoming; Destiny O. Birdsong tackles what she calls Karen Medicine, the broken and often biased U.S. healthcare system that Black women must navigate. Bodies need care: Melissa Hung eases her chronic headaches with swimming; Jess Zimmerman reframes what we consider pain, especially after the trauma of 2020which Gabrielle Bellot beautifully describes as our year of breath. Most importantly, bodies carry us through our one life: Bryan Washington writes about playing high school football as a Black teenager growing up in Texas; Bassey Ikpi returns to Nigeria and considers the different stories skin can tell; s. e. smith pays tribute to the small beauties of funeral sex, in defiance of griefafter all, as the late Nina Riggs writes in her essay The Crematorium, Dying isnt the end of the world.

As has been said, our bodies are wonderlands, but they can also be battlefields. And we all have onefor better or for worse. It would be impossible to include every experience, every argument, every kind of body in one anthology. Body Language is meant to be a tribute to the human bodys multitudes, as well as a conversation starter, a challenge to the ways in which many of us were taught to understand our bodies and what they can be. What these essays all have in common is that they are by writers speaking their truths for themselves, for their own bodies and individual identities, as opposed to submitting to societys expectations about what bodies should look like, what they should do, or how they must behave.

We are following two black-suited undertakers across the one-hundred-degree parking lot out to a windowless metal buildingmy dad; my brother, Charlie; his wife, Amelia; me. My husband is at work, our kids at school. It is the day before my moms memorial service. My phone is buzzing in my pocket with texts of flight arrivals and last-minute arrangements.

We are all frazzled by the heat and the events of the past week, but I think I look the most haggard. On top of my moms cancer and final days, I have been lugging the weight of my own breast cancer around with me for the past eight monthsa sneaky aggressive kind that has made everything feel deeply off-kilter since the day I was diagnosed. The hair on my head is a patchy fuzz following months of chemo. I am one-breasted from a mastectomy last month, my T-shirt sagging off my body on that side like a sheet on a windless clothesline. Im facing another three months of chemo scheduled to start the Monday after the memorial.

Dammit, my mom had said a few weeks ago, when she was still coherent. I cant believe Im going to die right when youre in the middle of all this. Its killing me. One of her wry smiles.

The bulk of me is standing here in griefin that unhinged and unpredictable way we are led toward things after a lossbut I have to admit that part of me is here for some kind of morbid test drive, death hitching a ride in my chest from my moms sickbed to this parking lot behind the funeral home.

In the far back corner, in the corrugated metal building: the crematorium. The uglification of America, my mom used to say when she would see this sort of cheap metal structure going up along some rural North Carolina highway, quickly announcing itself as a Dollar General or a liquor store. Now, inside one, her body awaits its final moments.

We know theyll have her in the hundred-dollar cardboard cremation casket wed picked out at the funeral home. What we dont expect is that it will look like a large white cake box.

The morticians seem uncertain about us for wanting to be herelike its we who are the creepy ones. Honestly, Im not sure we want to be here, either, but Charlie feels strongly that we should see this through to the end, and we have agreed to try to support each other through whatever twists and turns our mothers death takes us.

We kept vigil at her bedside until she died. We kept her body in the house for several days after she was gonetaking turns sitting with her, watching her change and become increasingly less her.