Cooper Jones wanted to change how she met the world. But on a trip to Italy, after enduring a stranger’s unwanted comments while she wandered around the classically proportioned sculptures of the Galleria Borghese, she reached the limit of her desire for normalcy.
She got a job teaching philosophy and began to write for magazines, including covering tennis for GQ. Through two Ph.D.s, friendships, relationships, a marriage, and the birth of her child, Cooper Jones attempted to be as “normal” as possible. “But also about the ways that I was complicit - by not learning enough about myself and my community and my history, all the things that can give you a very strong sense of where you belong in the world.” “I had no real critical thought about it because that would require me to actually think about myself and my body and the way that I interacted with the way people saw me,” she says.
She was born with a rare congenital condition that shaped her physical self and often left her in acute physical pain. Growing up in Kansas, she learned to manage this pain and evade strangers’ occasionally cruel comments - about her short stature, or the way she walked - by closing herself into a “neutral room” in her mind, where she distracted herself until the physical and mental discomfort passed. Chloé Cooper Jones and her son, Wolfgang, at the Whitney Museum.įor many years, Chloé Cooper Jones tried to ignore her body.
0 kommentar(er)
