The Archive is in My Skin: Aesthetic Labor, Embodied Knowledge & the Politics of Black Care

The Archive is in My Skin: Aesthetic Labor, Embodied Knowledge & the Politics of Black Care explores the body as a living archive, asking how Black women’s aesthetic and care practices function as sites of knowledge, memory, and political meaning. The project brings Black feminist theory into conversation with embodied labor, beauty culture, and everyday rituals of care to examine how skin, touch, and adornment preserve histories often excluded from formal institutions. In doing so, it positions aesthetic labor not as superficial work, but as a vital intellectual and relational practice through which Black women theorize, survive, remember, and create more livable worlds.

On Friday, April 11th 2025 Shapel Monique LaBorde presented at the Pan-Africanism & Education Interdisciplinary & Critical Approaches for the 21st Century Mini-Conference.

Shapel Monique LaBorde is a licensed esthetician, educator, mother, and Black feminist scholar. Her work resists Cartesian frameworks that separate mind from body, theory from touch, intellect from intuition. She centers the body, especially Black women’s bodies as sites of knowledge, memory, and sacred instruction.

Through Blyssom by Shapel, she creates ritualized care spaces where stretch marks become scripture, facials become acts of sovereignty, and adornment becomes a pedagogy of presence. This is beauty as syllabus, survival as study.

In a world that disembodies us and rewards abstraction, her work insists: the body thinks, the skin remembers, and softness is intellectual labor. She asks: What if our first teacher wasn’t a textbook but a touch?

Her praxis lives at the intersection of aesthetic labor, Black feminist thought, and anti-colonial education. In this moment of global fracture, disconnection, and AI ascension, returning to the body is not just radical; it’s necessary.