One Body, Five Frameworks
A young man from Darwin wrote to me. He was twenty-nine. He was Indigenous Australian. He wrote in the language of his generation—the compressed, horizontal vernacular of someone who has spent more years thinking in images and brief text than in sustained paragraphs, and who assumes you can follow the associative logic without every link being spelled out.
He was, at the time of writing, living inside five different accounts of what his body was.
In traditional ceremonies with his extended community, he participated in body painting—the application of ochre and other pigments in patterns with specific ancestral significance, the body becoming, in those contexts, both more visible and more charged with meaning than it would be in any other setting. He described this not as a performance or a recreation but as continuous with something that had been happening in that country for longer than he could put a number to. The body in that context was not his personal body. It was a body in relation—to country, to kin, to the time before him that the ceremony held and transmitted. The painting marked the body as belonging to something larger than the individual.
On Instagram, he posted shirtless gym selfies. He had been lifting for two years, was making visible progress, and the platform offered the usual structure: a following, a metric of approval, the feedback loop of the image performing itself to an audience and the audience responding. He was aware of the irony—though he used a different word for it, a word his generation uses for the recognition of contradiction without resolution—of presenting the same body through these two very different framings. In one, the body was marked and collectivised, belonging to country. In the other, it was individual, cultivated, performing itself to a global audience of people who would never know anything about the ceremony.
The law was the third framework, and it was the one he named with the clearest edge. If he went to a public beach in the Northern Territory and removed his clothes, he would be subject to Australian indecent exposure laws—the colonial legal inheritance that has persisted, in various forms, through federation and into the present. He had read enough to know the history I have been tracing in these essays: that those laws had not been generated by his ancestors’ practices but imposed on them, and that the imposition had involved criminalising precisely the kind of bodily presence that his ceremonial life still practised. He was not naive about this. He named it flatly, without drama, as one of the conditions he lived inside.
The supplements were the fourth framework. He was purchasing them online—the creatine, the protein powder, the specific stack that his gym community recommended—from the globalised consumer market that had decided what a body in the process of being improved required. The supplements connected him to a worldwide network of men doing something similar: tracking macros, running programmes, comparing results. The body as a project, managed through inputs and outputs, its progress documented and optimised. He did not seem to find this incompatible with the other frameworks. He was doing all of it simultaneously.
And the church. He attended church, or attended sometimes—the account he gave was of a relationship to Christian observance that was more cultural than doctrinal, more about family and community than about any settled theology, but one in which the expectations around the body were nonetheless present. Modesty was expected. A certain presentation was expected. The body in church carried the inheritance that the missionaries had brought and that had been absorbed, over generations, into the family and community culture in ways that were no longer experienced as external imposition. The church expectation and the ceremonial body painting and the shirtless Instagram post were not, in his account, contradictions he needed to resolve. They were simply different contexts with different requirements, and he moved between them.
What I notice, reading his account and sitting with it, is the phrase he used to end it. One body, five frameworks. No resolution. Just living.
I have been writing about the way traditions impose themselves on bodies—the Augustinian inheritance, the Victorian regulation, the colonial export of modesty norms, the narrowing visual vocabulary of contemporary media. I have traced these as forces that arrived from outside and were absorbed over time, generating in the men I worked with a specific quality of uncertainty or apology or monitoring in relation to their own physical existence. What this young man’s account does is place all of those forces simultaneously on a single twenty-nine-year-old body in Darwin, and observe that the body is simply navigating them. Not resolving them. Not choosing between them. Navigating.
This is not the same as what I wrote about in a previous essay—the older men who had been formed deeply in a single tradition, whose habits of conduct carried that formation as something settled and no longer quite conscious. The young man from Darwin was not settled. He was actively in the middle of a negotiation that had no obvious resolution. The frameworks were live and simultaneous, each making its own claim on the same body, and he was the person doing the navigating in real time.
I find myself returning to the question of what this requires. The managing of five simultaneous frameworks—without choosing, without resolving, without the luxury of the single tradition that at least provides a settled account even if that account is wrong—seems to me to require a particular kind of flexibility in one’s relationship to one’s own body. The body cannot be one thing when it is being asked to be five things. The body in the ceremony is marked and collectivised. The body on Instagram is individualised and performed. The body in the church is modest and presentable. The body at the gym is a project under construction. The body in relation to the law is a potentially criminal fact that must be kept within certain spatial boundaries.
None of these accounts of the body is untrue. Each of them describes something real about what the body is and what it does in a specific context. What they cannot do is coexist as a single settled account. The young man from Darwin does not have a settled account of his body. He has five, and he moves between them depending on where he is.
I have been thinking about how this compares to what I observed in the room over thirty years. The men who came to me were also, most of them, carrying multiple frameworks—the Augustinian residue and the advertising ideal and the legal inheritance and whatever specific bodily conventions their family or religious tradition had added. But they were carrying these mostly below the level of articulation. The frameworks operated as unexamined assumptions rather than as named and acknowledged simultaneous accounts. When a man arrived with a quality of apology about his body, he was not usually thinking: I am expressing the Victorian regulatory tradition’s understanding of the male body as inherently improper in public space. He was simply apologising, because that is what the body did in this situation, as it had always done.
The young man from Darwin was doing something different. He could name the frameworks, at least partially, and he could hold them simultaneously in consciousness rather than letting any single one operate unconsciously as the background truth. Whether this naming and holding was easier or harder than the unexamined version I was used to encountering, I cannot say with any confidence. The naming makes the contradiction visible, which might make it more manageable or might make it more exhausting.
What it does, beyond question, is make the situation honest. One body, five frameworks. No resolution. Just living. That is an accurate description of the situation of most men I have worked with, across three decades, though most of them did not have the words for it and arrived carrying the frameworks as a weight rather than as a named set of conditions they were navigating. The young man from Darwin had the words—the compressed, horizontal, associative words of his generation—and had used them to produce a description that was, in its way, more precise than anything the accumulated tradition had given most of the older men I knew.
I have been writing about men and bodies for a long time now, and what I notice at this point in the project is that the most useful accounts are not the ones that resolve the contradictions but the ones that accurately describe them. The essay series has been, in its way, a version of what the young man from Darwin did in his message: an attempt to name the frameworks, to hold them simultaneously in view, to resist the pressure to resolve them into a single account, and to end with the observation still alive.
One body, five frameworks. The phrase has stayed with me.
I notice it could describe almost every man I have worked with, if you counted the frameworks carefully enough. The number varies. The condition is the same.
No resolution. Just living. And the body carrying all of it, as bodies do, whether or not the person inside the body has found the words for what it is carrying.
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