PROJECT CONSENT: AUBREY SCHURING

Several months ago, I was surprised to read what an old high school friend, Aubrey Schuring, had posted about her last four years. She’d been in a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship all that time, and now, out of it and trying to heal, was speaking out against sexual assault, abuse, and rape culture, “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused” (Marshall University).

Since the first post I read, Schuring has posted and talked tirelessly, trying to stimulate discussion about these issues. She volunteers with the Center for Women and Children in Crisis as a Rape Crisis Team member, answering phone calls from and making hospital visits to rape victims.  A few months ago, she got a volunteer position as Staff Photographer for Project Consent, “a non-profit, volunteer-based campaign that aims to combat and deconstruct rape culture by raising awareness of the harmful way with which it is regarded in society, educating our audience about the disparity of discussion of sexual assault, and promoting positive dialogue about the importance of consent.”

Schuring has created two photography series for the campaign, Face Value and The Very Best We Can. In the first, she documented the emotions of herself and three other volunteers talking about their experiences with consent. In the second, she created an anonymous survey about consent and photographed models acting out the emotions and stories shared. That’s two stories in four months. But ideally, she said, “I would be doing a project every week or two. But it’s been kind of put on the backburner because people are scared to share.” It’s understandable, she clarified. Rape and sexual assault are hard things to talk about. But if we try to talk about assault, abuse, and rape culture without attaching personal stories, people aren’t going to listen.

Even when she does share stories like her own, Schuring says people aren’t always supportive. Opposition has come from all directions, even family, although she attributes a lot of that to “a generational gap”. The conservative culture in which she is based - Schuring’s a Utah native - balks at the uncensored language and stories often used and shared when discussing rape and sexual assault, and she says people “shut down and they don’t want to listen.” So as passionate as she is about how she wants to communicate the few stories people are willing to share, she’s juggling between telling censored, dehumanized stories that people won’t listen to and the more realistic, more painful stories she wants to tell that people won’t listen to, either.
As Goldbard said in Human Rights and Culture: From Datasan to Storyland, “anyone who wishes to make significant headway on a social problem or opportunity must engage with people’s feelings and attitudes about it.” She acknowledges the importance of telling these stories in a way that even - and maybe especially - her conservative peers, family, and community can understand and relate to. “Right now,” she said, “I’m trying to find a balance.”

Face Value

The Very Best We Can

Project Consent

The Center For Women And Children in Crisis

Ragdolled

Let's get elemental.
(A new original.)
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Remixing Rubens: Big Girls

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

-          George Orwell, 1984

I never identified as a “big girl”. I knew “big girls”, and just didn’t see myself in them. However, by 13, I was already heavier and curvier than the majority of the girls in my grade. And these days, at a size 14-16, bra size 36DD, and a weight that I wouldn’t fib about but wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming with, either, I realize I am probably seen as one.

Is that my identifier? Because the things that I see as a key part of my identity are not so obvious. But how do I tell you about being the child of deaf, divorced parents, or about being happily raised in a non-traditional family, or about being 22 and never having had a guy tell me I was pretty? I started following a different train of thought, thinking instead about facets of my identity that are not important to me but are obvious. The clearest was this idea of being a “big girl.”

Rubens came quite immediately to mind. Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque painter in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, is known for painting beautiful, full-figured women. In his milieu, they were considered “the apogee of beauty” (Alastair Sooke, BBC Culture). And where I have never identified as a “big girl”, I am quick to identify with Rubens’ women.

In our culture, “big girls” can be cute or even pretty, but they are not and cannot be beautiful. Perhaps that is the reason I balk at the label. In the shower, on the beach in a favorite swimsuit, in bed wearing a rom-com-esque men’s button-down, I feel beautiful. My thighs more than touch, my stomach has rolls when I sit on the beach, that men’s button-down fits. But I don’t feel just cute or pretty; I feel beautiful.

Ruben’s depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, sex, and desire, has rolls when she sits. She has cellulite. She has cankles! The goddess Diana barely has a jawline. Rubens’ own wife is painted with a slight double chin. But his women are beautiful.

In Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real”, he speaks of placing materials in “the context of lived experience. [They] assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked.” I fragmented Rubens’ art and milieu, pulling just his women, then considered beautiful, into today’s fashion editorials. I wanted to prove that beauty then can be beauty now. Because perhaps if you see Venus on a modern beach, her stomach folded as she sits, and still think her beautiful, you might reconsider. Rubens’ women, “big girls”, plus-size, curvy, call us what you will - don’t need to be the “apogee of beauty” anymore. Just let us be beautiful.