My Eyes, Your Gaze by Darya Foroohar

Bridge serialized Darya Foroohar’s “My Eyes, Your Gaze” on social media throughout fall 2023, and in a flip-book in the Bridge Member’s Section, culminating in publication of this full graphic novella. From the theories of urbanist Georg Simmel to the bars of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, there has been no dearth of work exploring how cultural expectations of physical presentation have shaped people’s relationships to both their bodies and those around them. My Eyes, Your Gaze is a graphic essay on the cultural perception and conception of the body, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. Using her own experiences as a thread tying the piece together, Foroohar engages with both queer, anticolonial, and feminist theory in addition to modern pop culture to explore the ways in which the concept of the physical body is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism, misogyny, and queerphobia.

Darya is a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago studying creative writing and urban studies. She has self-published two graphic novels, “Somewhere Far From Here” (2022) and “I Wish I Didn't Think About This” (2021). She is the recipient of the 2022 Seidel Scholars Grant, which funded her self-directed adaptation of the Persian myth the “Shahnameh” into a graphic novel. In addition to working on this, she is working on her creative writing thesis this year, as well as personal comic projects and commissions. Outside of writing, Darya likes to make music, do the NYT crossword, and take long, long walks.