AUGUST PLAYLIST
Summer Bodies
Summer brings with it the excitement of long days, easy warm nights, and sun-soaked afternoons laid out at a park, or the beach, if you’re lucky and have access to a nearby coast. Along with it also comes the heat, a kind that creeps through clothes and up women’s spines, an inescapable heat that can only be treated by blasting the air conditioning into the depths of night -- nevermind the electric bill or your climate impact -- or peeling off layers to secure some better comfort. A summer body, then, becomes important. A summer body is a body that will be seen, publicized; it cannot be hidden under other layers, it must stand alone. How to create one? Go to the nearest magazine rack and grab everything you can find. Hack your abs and follow a 38-step “how to” guide on shedding for the summer. Drink only juice for three weeks. Follow a very strict walking regimen. Stretch. Track your progress. Find a gym partner and make it a social activity. Fight to become a “better you”. A hotter, more appealing you.
Right?
….. Or what does constitute a summer body? What makes a body worthy of parading at the public pool? When should one be kept safely tucked under a large, stretchy tee shirt, to go without being seen? In the sweatiest month of the year, we investigate the way summer catalyzes women to confront their bodies, both privately and in the public sphere, and we explore the feminine urge to judge, examine, display, and change their bodies. The films in this playlist bring us through girlhood and into womanhood. As the protagonists come of age and navigate their relationships to themselves, they seek to understand both what their bodies mean and what they are worth, to themselves and to others.
Solia Cates is the Editor-In-Chief of WomenDo, a graduate of Yale University’s Film and Media studies program, and a writer and actress based in Los Angeles.
