Waist Lists
Outside the Waist
A method of Chinese wrestling to bring an opponent down:
X wraps both arms tightly around Y’s waist. X grabs her left wrist with her right hand, or right wrist by her left hand.
X extends her right leg behind Y’s left leg, blocking Y’s leg from the rear. X pushes forward and presses her chin down, on the front of Y’s chest. X uses force, downwards with the chin, and pulls Y’s WAIST in tightly with her hands.
Y falls backwards.
—The Method of Chinese Wrestling by Tong Zhongyi
Inside the Waist
Hidden in the walls of our system of digestion is what scientists call our ‘second brain’. This brain speaks to us too. It couriers and collects secret messages to and from the one in our head, allowing an internal dialogue to guide our primal moves from within our WAIST. It calls to us through the butterflies flapping wildly in our stomachs, and the metronome marking the tempo of our appetites and stresses. It directs us from the centre of our beings, through the only organ that requires its own intellect and an instinct that we call ‘gut’.
—Inspired by “Gut Feelings–the ‘Second Brain’ in Our Gastrointestinal Systems” from the Scientific American.
R O B U S T N E S S
Outside the Waist
Emerging from the dense swirl of Victorian era literature, is the heaving breasted figure of its heroine. Entrapped in corset, prescribed to her for its wasp-waist ideal, she is made more demure with the tightening of each of its laces and each inky line male writers scrawl to depict her.
And yet, this was also a time when women were gasping with new breath; their freedoms were broadening, their rights were enlarging, and as writers, they were recasting their gender with the scratch of their own pen. Their plot lines that would not flush any cheek today, were as erotic as allowed while adhering to the act of Obscene Publication.
Thus the corset itself is a fitting symbol in a time so contrary to its women. As much as it endorsed the ‘virginal female’ with her diminutive waist, made precious by the gaze of men, it also heightened her exposed erogenous zones and thus her sexuality. As much as it restricted her, it allowed her to bare, yet always as an object of fetish for her male counterpart.
—Inspired by“The Fetishization and Objectification of the Female Body in Victorian Culture” by Hannah Aspinall
Inside the Waist
When a womb begins to nurture new life, disruption occurs.
Over nine months, the uterus balloons from a fist to a watermelon.
Beginning at the cradle of the pelvis it launches out of its cavity, baby encased, until it pushes against the rib cage.
The surrounding organs are jump-started into action too - the stomach, liver and intestines all rearrange, dutifully compromising their space for the creation that has come.
—Inspired by the Museum of Science & Industry of Chicago Interactive - ‘Make room for the baby’
P E R C U S S I O N
Outside the Waist
Dancing in most cultures is all about the hips. The way they sway, buck, twerk, bounce or gyrate. The WAIST as a site of expression through movement is often overlooked. But in classical Indian dance forms where even the movement of the eyes relays meaning, the waist too has its own vocabulary. Contracted, it suggests pride, arrogance and anger. Folded in, in deep crease it expresses a woman’s shyness. And when rolling in undulation, it is said to denote “seductiveness, the gait of the peacock and grace in dance.”
—Inspired by Dance Dialects of India by Ragini Devi
Inside the Waist
Rumblings of the belly sound like stretched out vowel sounds. The official term for such happenings is called borborygmi. A fitting sounding name of for the monster in your gut.
What causes this resonance is our intestines rhythmically moving. The walls condense and amplify to mix juices and food, pushing it along and allowing it to digest. Although such vibrations can happen when our stomach is full, they are loudest to our ears when our stomach is empty. Which is why we accomplice the growlings of our stomach to the neediness of our hunger.