What is Body Type?
Body Type editors - Sabrina, Ilana, and Heaven. Original illustration by Caroline Reedy / @doot_doodles
Welcome! We are Body Type, an online publication that focuses on the intersection of wellness, accessibility, and all things queer. We aim to create a safe community in the wellness world that focuses on topics that aren’t often discussed relating to gender, sexuality, race, and accessibility.
We want to create a collaborative space for open conversations. Our hope is to continuously grow and improve as a community and a collective. We strive to learn from each person who wants to contribute – everybody, every perspective, and every type. And above all - we aim to build a wellness community that is non-prescriptive. For our readers, we want to provide a plethora of ‘choose your own adventure’ paths to navigate the increasingly cluttered, muddled, and commoditized wellness space. This is a space for all to share our wellness journeys, our discoveries, and our bumps along the way - to share resources and experiences candidly and with the support of each other.
Why Body Type? The idea of a “body type,” that every individual must categorically fit into has long been a constricting and prescriptive concept. Everything from advertisements to wellness publications and health magazines have used the idea of a body type to tell us how to dress, what to eat, what to buy, or how to live, for far too long. We think it's time to reclaim this phrase, and empower ourselves to individually redefine it.
What if a "body type" wasn't a rigid construct into which we each have to conform (or a stupid comparison to a fruit, like a pear!)? But rather it constituted the idea that we each individually get to define what types of activities, communities, and self-care rituals we each want to engage ourselves and our bodies in, surround ourselves with, and derive power from? What if we could use the idea of a body type to reclaim our bodies and our ownership over them? We know wellness looks different for everyone, because each of us move through the world distinctly and uniquely. The power to understand yourself not only as an individual, but also as part of a larger community is what we think can help us build the type of wellness world we want to see.
But beyond the construct of “Body Type,” we were inspired by the varied meanings of the individual words, and we hope you use this opportunity to interpret them in the ways that serve you. The word "body" can refer to our physical body, a body of work, a body of people, while we see "type" as being anything from a category or a font to the act of writing or creating. Body is community; type is individual.
We seek to publish all forms of creative content related to our mission from long form and prose to animation and visual art. All strains and types of expression are welcome - essays, lists, poetry, etc. If you have questions, thoughts, or are interested in writing for us, send us an email.
More to come!
Sabrina, Ilana, & Heaven
