Final Project/Paper
For my final project my partner and I created a large collage piece examining how the media uses products and the demand for products to make women’s bodies marketable for the benefit of capitalist patriarchy. We looked at how all of this is connected to normativity, fragmentation of the body, the issue of agency, performativity of gender, objectification, and use of a male gaze. We used theory about the implications of these forms of representation to argue that the media creates and reifies normative femininity as a product we unconsciously internalize and consume.
In order to do this, we tried to arrange the images in a certain way that created a progression through the piece. In the beginning, there are fragments of a woman's body arranged in a grotesque manner to create a "full" body. For us, this was representative of the ways the media attempts to reduce women's bodies to fragments before they try to piece it back together in a "proper" way. In conjunction with this beginning are the images of women's heads that go along the bottom. We were exploring ways the media relies on decapitation to silence women. The next section explored images that indicate the ways the media (specificially advertising) tries to sell women products in order to make them fulfill the requirements of normative femininity. The message is literally that femininity can be bought. The following section looked at images of women's bodies being objectified and sexualized in order to sell products. Only the bodies that have consumed the proper femininity are included in these images, because they are the only bodies that are visible. The final section explored what it means for a woman to become a literal product. In the images she is being held, consumed, gazed upon. The body is an object that is no longer connected to the individual.
In conclusion, we attempted to explore the possibility of creating a new space for feminism that exists outside of the realm of capitalist patriarchy in order to create a feminist form that supports the feminist content. This idea was in part inspired by Foucault’s discussion of hetertopic spaces. My paper discussed in detail what the piece was attempting to convey and presented the theoretical support.
This project proved to be a challenge and definitely changed throughout the process. We had to scale down many of our ideas due to budgetary and time constraints. At first this seemed unfortunate, but looking back, I think those constraints helped us to focus on the core message that was important to us at the time, and kept us form getting lost in extraneous elements.
The sources from my paper are listed below:
1. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Great Britain: Routledge, 1990.
2. Currie, Dawn. Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers. Canada: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1999.
3. Doniger, Wendy, and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Off With Her Head: The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995.
4. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité. Oct. 1984.
5. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984.
6. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Is the Gaze Male?” Feminism and Film. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2000.
7. Wykes, Maggie, and Barrie Gunter. The Media and Body Image. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2005.
Some Pictures:
