“Antepartum: An Exploration of Pregnancy, Ownership, and Disembodiment” (2024-2025)
I started writing this essay in September of my freshman year—which is to say I started writing this essay terrified, displaced, and uncertain. These feelings were not only a result of the natural, transitional horror that comes with beginning college, but they were also the result of moving to New York in what can only be described as a state of existential crisis, as dramatic as that may sound.
I didn’t know how to write about this in a way that’s particularly academic or beautiful. I only knew how to write about this in a way that’s honest.
I was sexually assaulted at the end of my senior year of high school. Most people in my life will only learn this about me as they read this reflection, considering that I didn’t tell anyone. I just left—and coming from an all-girl’s school, leaving meant plunging into a world that felt dangerous and unfamiliar: a world full of men. That’s how this essay found me: alone, and culture-shocked, and needing to find my place in the world when I didn’t even know how to find my place in my body.
I don’t want to say that this essay is about rape, because in so many ways it isn’t. But it answers a question that exists only in the aftermath of that trauma, a question that echoes inside of me even now: who does this body belong to?
Whenever I struggle to understand something, I turn to writing. From diary entries to poems—and now, to essays—I write to discover, to cope, and to heal. So, when my professors ask me, “Are you sure you want to write about rape?” My answer is simple: what else is there to write about? At the risk of sounding dismal, it is impossible to write about the female condition without also writing about violence—just as it is impossible to write about pregnancy without also writing about my mother and her mother and the mother of her mother’s mother, and the lineage of violences that I now carry in their absence.
I had no conclusive argument when I began this writing process—I only had questions and asking them only gave way to more questions. There came a point where I simply had to choose an answer, rather than find one. I had to create my own truth, and declare it: in spite of everything, my body is mine.
Ace Harvest is an interdisciplinary artist based just outside of Philadelphia, PA, currently pursuing a Collaborative Arts degree at the Tisch School of the Arts. Developed over their first year at NYU, Ace’s body of work largely explores themes of gender, vulnerability, and the body, through various modes of autobiographical storytelling. Their essay is an extension of this exploration: what does it mean to exist within a female body—and how does one cope with it?
Beyond Collaborative Arts, Ace is a proud member of the MLK Scholars Program, and hopes to research the relationship between arts education and social justice during their undergraduate career.