The Women’s Center and GLBT Center will host this year’s Love Your Body Day event on Oct. 13, 2021 during National Love Your Body Week also the GLBT’s Center’s Pride week.

This year’s theme, “Bodies on Display: How to Engage in Evolving Self-Love with Pride” analyzes visual mediums and artifacts representing queer and nonbinary bodies and their impact. The theme was created to open discussion about the uneven representation of queer bodies in visual mediums as well as communicate about how to use the same mediums as a way to show self-love.

The mission of this year’s Love Your Body Day is to encourage attendees to think critically about the impact of limited representation and create a space to defy the current depictions. The framework driving the theme of this year’s event and incorporated in our learning outcomes is from Lawrence Perelli’s The Rhetoric of Display.

The event will give participants the ability to think critically about the gender binary and queer bodies and how they appear in media through the identification of visual and general tropes related to queer, disabled, POC and nonbinary bodies and individuals. Alexus Smith (she/her), graduate intern in the Women’s Center, and Andy DeRoin, assistant director of the GLBT Center, will give a presentation discussing Perelli’s framework and applying it to how we view queer bodies in media. Together with student programming intern Staci Batchelor (they/she), they will also facilitate an open discussion to compare and contrast images of queer and non-binary representation, intersectional depiction of bodies in media and their accompanying rhetoric. We hope participants will:

• gain a better ability to analyze everyday media artifacts and images and their impact on the depiction and display of bodies and discourse and visual representation;
• challenge gender binary and body standards through a narrative analysis of stories told by and/or depicted by queer and non-binary individuals.

The collaboration of the Women’s Center with the GLBT Center highlights the unrecognition of queer bodies. The theme for this year’s Pride Week, “Reclaiming Our Narratives” highlights which LGBT+ identities are prominently discussed and which are not and how forward with better representation and recognition. We highlight these primary themes throughout Love Your Body Day 2021 by discussing the common visual representation of queer bodies and showcasing nonbinary lived experiences. 

This year’s speaker, Lachlan Watson (they/them), is a young non-binary actor most notably recognized as Theo Putnam from Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and several modeling and acting campaigns such as their most recent involvement in Zalando’s “Luxury on Your Terms.” Watson has also spoken at several Human Rights Campaign Pride Events. The Women’s Center and GLBT Center invited Watson to be this year’s Love Your Body Day speaker because they can discuss being a queer individual on display in visual media and also speak to the experience as a young person.

We are excited to share this collaborative event with the campus community. Consider coming out to the event and participating in community reflection and rejuvenation.

For more information and to register, see go.ncsu.edu/LYBD.

• To learn more about the Women’s Center and other upcoming events for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, visit go.ncsu.edu/DVAM.
• To learn more about the GLBT Center, see www.ncsu.edu/glbt

Staci Batchelor is a student intern in the Women’s Center.