Sexonomy, or My Body as Capital

By Katie McHugh

Meet the Author

My creative nonfiction essay, "Sexonomy, or My Body as Capital" engages with the theme of Orbit by exploring how desire, attention, and power function as gravitational forces that organize bodies and relationships. Throughout the essay, I trace how I move in and out of different orbits—first around the expectations of my peers, then within the push and pull of romantic and sexual dynamics, and most significantly, in the charged, shifting orbit of female friendship. These relationships are governed by proximity and distance, by who is seen and who is centered at any given moment. The essay also considers sex as a kind of circulating economy, where value is exchanged rather than fixed. In this sense, orbit becomes both a social and emotional system: one that is difficult to escape, even as the narrator attempts to break from it. Ultimately, the essay asks what it means to locate oneself within these forces, and whether it is possible to step outside them entirely.