Happy 2017! Here is Some Great Feminist Art to Start the Year Right

Happy New Year, everyone! New year, new you, new — okay, it’s two weeks til the inauguration, the future is uncertain, the past is a bloodbath and everything is scary. So it’s a good time to look at some cool feminist art on Instagram!

Because what else do we have ultimately but our tenuous consciousness, vibrant creativities, mortal flesh, etc? Super cool feminist artist of the week: Sarah Naqvi, textile student at India’s National Institute of Design and Instagram goddess extraordinaire (account here; look at it). Her work, a mix of textile, embroidery, and illustration, represents female bodies in all their unruliness, fabulousness, and flab. Her embroidered tampon, bloody panties, and cactus bra (the struggle is real) are particular favorites of mine.

As Scroll.com writer Shweta D’Souza summarizes from a recent interview with Naqvi,

Naqvi wants to feed those who follow her work a positive “visual diet” to normalise aspects of femaleness that are looked down upon by the Indian community. She believes that every stretch mark, scar or flab on the body is a witness to all the ups and downs in a person’s life. To cringe over those is to deny your own history – something that leads to self-hate.

Cool. Also, has anyone else noticed that South Asian feminists are killing it with the menstrual art these days? Fitting inspiration as the nation’s vaginas prepare ourselves for the imminent presidential reign of an animated Cheetoh who believes we challenge him because we have “blood coming out of [our] whatevers” (or whatever) and not because he is a dingbat. Anyone want to mail used tampons to the White House? Is that a biohazard? (Oh, Naqvi has a Trump face, too! WOOT.)

Check out Scroll’s interview with Naqvi here—and of course Naqvi’s own work, on her Instagram here.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons. Not Sarah Naqvi. You can see Sarah Naqvi’s much more interesting, ornate images at her Instagram.