Attention: People With Body Parts

Attention: People With Body Parts is a moving-movement in body positivity that started as a book of letters in 2012. Founder, Lexie Bean, collected letters her friends, classmates, and family members wrote to their body parts. All of the pieces anonymously went together in a self-published body of work that shows how different bodies are layered and connected, but far from equal and whole. Since, Attention: People With Body Parts has developed into an international movement for book-making--writing, sharing, listening, and moving to the stories that we embody--through workshops and collaborative projects.

We strive to restructure the body-positive movement as something that no longer claims what our movement towards "body-love" looks like. Rather, Attention: People With Body Parts aims for the reclamation of our bodies’ wholeness in recognizing that people, given their histories and identities, do not all fit perfectly into the spectrum of “self-hate” to “body-love.” “Body positivity,” within our framework, takes root in giving people the space to voice stories and experiences from their own bodies. Through book-making, writing, workshops, and other projects, Attention: People With Body Parts works to increase the accessibility of control, celebration, and space for connection to and from body parts.

This site is currently under construction. This summer, it will feature a more extensive list of resources on solidarity, a section focused on programming and workshops, and options for folks who do not perceive English as the language closest to their bodies.

Our Manifesto

Dear Reader,

Attention: People With Body Parts developed from my desire to tackle my own body issues. As I collected stories it became clear that many people doubted and felt detached from their bodies. Furthermore, most of these feelings seem to stem from daily interactions between bodies and socially constructed understandings of those interactions. This project is a convergence of my ongoing battle with an eating disorder, experience of womanhood, queerness, and whiteness in America, changing relationship with movement and control of my own body through roller skating, and time working with other women who have experienced sexual violence.

Our bodies are filled with histories and identities, which overflow into the spaces between us. Histories and identities that change the way we look at each other and the way we look into the mirror. Together, we self-construct and self-destruct our bodies. Together, we shape the "body postiive movement" in defining what is "positive" and what is fully "body" from the grassroots.

This site is intended as a safe-space for anyone who has been told or forced to believe safety is not something he/she/ze/they can find within the home, the body. This includes, but is not limited to: those who grapple with privilege in youth, color, and ableism, feel raveled in anxieties, hold tight to the lifelines in their palms, have histories of sexual violence and eating disorders, and those whose worlds confine their love based upon whether or not their partner has the same genitals. It is for people; people with body parts and anywhere in the transition between feeling unsafe to love.

Please use Attention: People With Body Parts as your letterbox. Reading the stories of the hands that touch yours, the rustling thighs that magazines study, and six generations of curly hair. Most importantly, write to the parts that move you.

With Love, Lexie