Liberal Jane Makes Freedom Shareable

By Kristine Schomaker I keep seeing Liberal Jane's work pop up across different platforms - Instagram, obviously, but also sliding through Facebook, saved in Pinterest boards, shared in group chats. This immersion matters more than I think we acknowledge. These aren't gallery pieces waiting for the right audience to find them. They're already embedded in the actual digital infrastructure where people are trying to survive right now.

Caitlin Blunnie has been making this work for seven years, which means she's been holding space through multiple waves of backsliding. Roe falling. Trans healthcare bans spreading state by state. Book bans. Don't Say Gay laws. The systematic dismantling of bodily autonomy dressed up as protection. And through all of it, these images keep showing up - not as documentation of loss, but as insistence that liberation is still possible, still worth fighting for, still happening in small ways every day.

The illustrative approach does something that's easy to underestimate until you think about how information actually moves now. Academic writing about reproductive justice reaches people already in those conversations. Documentary photography can feel extractive, like someone else's trauma on display. But illustration - especially Liberal Jane's approach with its immediate readability, bold text, saturated colors, figures that could be anyone - it moves differently. It's shareable in a way that doesn't require you to out yourself or explain yourself or prove you deserve care.

Someone scrolling through their feed at 2am having a terrible night with their body can see themselves reflected back without it feeling like they're being studied or documented or made into a case study for someone else's argument. That matters in a culture that's constantly demanding marginalized people perform their pain to justify their existence.

The work refuses to separate struggles that the dominant culture keeps trying to silo. Reproductive justice, labor rights, neurodivergent and disability liberation, body autonomy, queer existence - they're all talking to each other in these images because they're all part of the same system of control. You can't actually separate bodily autonomy from economic justice from accessibility from queer liberation. They're the same fight, just different pressure points on the same structure.

And that intersectional approach isn't theoretical. It's deeply practical. A person trying to access abortion care is also navigating economic barriers, transportation access, disability accommodation, potential violence. A fat person existing in public space is dealing with medical discrimination, employment bias, literal architectural exclusion. A neurodivergent person masking all day at a minimum wage job that's being called "unskilled labor" is living at the intersection of ableism and capitalism. Liberal Jane's work shows how these systems compound, how they're designed to compound.

Equal rights work can get so legislative, so defensive, so focused on what we're losing that it forgets to show what we're actually fighting for. Liberal Jane's work keeps the vision clear. Not someday in some theoretical future, but right now, in your body, as it is, you deserve safety and pleasure and autonomy and rest. That's a radical message in a culture built on the idea that you have to earn your humanity through productivity and compliance and making yourself smaller.

The images are reaching people who desperately need to see them. People who feel completely alone in their fat body in a culture that treats thinness as moral achievement. People who are exhausted from masking their neurodivergence just to be treated as competent. People working multiple jobs being told their labor doesn't matter while corporations post record profits. People trying to access abortion care in states that have criminalized it. People just trying to exist safely in public space while politicians debate whether they should be allowed to.

I've been thinking about how activist art functions differently now than it did even a generation ago. It's not just about making a poster for a rally anymore, though that still matters. It's about creating images that can live in someone's camera roll, that they can send to a friend who's struggling without having to find the words themselves, that can show up in their feed when they're spiraling and remind them they're not crazy, the systems are broken, they deserve better.

Liberal Jane's work does that. It travels. It finds people in their loneliest moments and says: you're not alone, this isn't your fault, you deserve care. That's not just art. That's infrastructure. That's the actual work of building the world we're trying to create.

Seven years of showing up consistently means Caitlin's built trust. People know these images are going to be there. Know they're going to keep being clear and direct and uncompromising about what liberation looks like. In a media landscape where everything is constantly pivoting to whatever's trending, where brands co-opt social justice language while funding the politicians dismantling rights, that consistency is its own form of resistance.

The political landscape has shifted so dramatically in those seven years. We're living through the active destruction of rights people thought were settled. And these images just keep insisting otherwise. Keep showing bodies that deserve safety, labor that deserves dignity, people who deserve autonomy. Keep making liberation look possible and desirable and worth fighting for.

There's something about the illustrative medium that makes these ideas more accessible without diluting them. The messages aren't softened. "Your body may change, but your worth does not" isn't a gentle suggestion - it's a direct challenge to diet culture, medical fatphobia, the entire beauty industrial complex.

"There's no such thing as unskilled labor" is a fundamental rejection of how capitalism assigns value to human beings. "Protect abortion access" isn't asking permission. "Increased accessibility benefits everyone" is stating a fact that ableist systems refuse to acknowledge.

But the visual language - the bright colors, the relatable scenarios, the diversity of bodies represented - makes these challenges feel approachable. Not easier to dismiss, but easier to receive. Especially for people who are just starting to question the systems they've been taught are natural and inevitable.

I think about the teenager seeing one of these images for the first time and recognizing that the shame they carry about their body isn't theirs - it was put there. The person working retail finally seeing someone say their labor has value and expertise. The newly diagnosed autistic adult realizing that they're not broken, the world is just designed wrong. These are the moments that shift everything.

Liberal Jane's work exists in this crucial space between personal liberation and collective action. The images speak to individual experience - your body, your worth, your exhaustion, your right to safety - while making it clear that these aren't individual problems requiring individual solutions. They're systemic. They require all of us fighting for all of us.

That's what makes this work so vital right now. We're living through a moment where people are being systematically isolated, told their struggles are personal failures, convinced that liberation is impossible. And here's this body of work that just keeps showing up saying: no, actually, you deserve care, this system is designed to harm you, you're not alone, keep going, we're building something different.

You can find more of Liberal Jane's work at liberaljane.com and across social platforms where these messages are already moving through the world, doing the quiet essential work of helping people survive and imagine something better.

Images courtesy Liberal Jane