Every Thursday throughout our Fall 2023 (Sept - Dec) and Spring 2024 seasons, Bridge is serializing Darya Foroohar’s "My Eyes, Your Gaze" here, and in a flip-book in the Bridge Member’s Section at bridge-chicago.org, culminating in publication of the full graphic novel in summer 2024. From the theories of urbanist Georg Simmel to the bars of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, there has been no dearth of work exploring how cultural expectations of physical presentation have shaped people’s relationships to both their bodies and those around them. My Eyes, Your Gaze is a graphic essay on the cultural perception and conception of the body, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. Using her own experiences as a thread tying the piece together, Foroohar engages with both queer, anticolonial, and feminist theory in addition to modern pop culture to explore the ways in which the concept of the physical body is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism, misogyny, and queerphobia.
