Reclaiming an Abandoned Body: A Creative Nonfiction Essay Collection

This thesis explores how a queer adolescent can abandon and reclaim her body. These creative nonfiction essays focus on my personal experiences as a bisexual girl growing up in Southern conservative suburbia. The collection’s title comes from my concept of bodily abandonment, which refers to bodily neglect and the desire to escape one’s physical body. I concentrate on the singular “abandoned body” because the specificity of personal experience is vital to the bodily reclamation process. At the same time, I do not ignore the relational aspect of bodily experiences. The body in this essay shifts in relation to the people with whom it comes in contact, illustrated in “Intermingling Dyes,” “A Conversation Overheard at a Concert,” and “Relational Bodies.” I also consider how regulated social structures influence the queer adolescent body. Keeping in mind Jacqueline Rhodes’ notion that “the discipline of our queer bodies relies on the violent enforcement of Be-ing by narrow gender codes,” this collection considers how queer adolescent bodies are regulated by societal expectations (13). In particular, the narrative persona in the essays pushes against feminine gender expectations. As an infant, she throws lacy socks and pink booties aside because her feet need freedom (“Mommy and Me”). As a child, she compares herself to her hermit crab Minnie, who gets labeled ‘female’ for choosing a feminine Minnie Mouse shell but later migrates into a masculine Batman shell (“Living in Captivity”). As a preteen, she poses as people of various genders on a social networking website (“Fluid”). The narrative persona’s actions can be read both as a resistance to societal gender codes and as a desire to escape the confines of her material body. The struggle with the physical body, then, is at the core of this collection. Above all, this collection proposes that the experiences of the physical body deserve careful attention. The collection considers whether telling stories about bodily experiences can help neglected queer bodies be reclaimed