Jacquette's Influence On Women

Images of the “housewives” are excessively pictured on the internet. Bravotv.com has pages full of group photographs of the women in their exotic southern outfits, sparking smiles and diva personas. Pictured on the first page is a photograph from Bravotv.com, featuring the cast of The Housewives of Atlanta. It is intriguing to note that this portrait has been cropped together as one unit. In reality, however, each woman is a picture in its self that the producers of the show pushed together to appear as one photograph. Each woman is given certain characteristics to make them, in turn, an actual character on a show. Characters are needed so that the viewer’s cans stereotype each woman, thus providing a cast of characters. This provides an array of misconceptions of who these women

Feminists that approach analyzing popular culture proceed from a variety of theoretical positions that carry with them a deeper social analysis and political agenda. Popular culture has been a critical part of feminist analysis. “Cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they involve struggles over meaning” (Storey, Intro 136). Analyzing a piece of pop culture through a feminist viewpoint, whether it be a music video or any sort of media, opens up a broader discussion about the structure of our patriarchal society and the ways in which politics are constantly portrayed and

RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) is a reality competition television series that main goal lies in finding America’s Next Drag Superstar (ANDS) by challenging drag queens with various tasks that include creating a couture ensembles, presenting oneself tactfully on camera, and acting in parodic challenges mocking pop culture and social norms. Each episode consists of a mini-challenge, where a queen has the chance of winning an advantage or title of team leader, a main challenge, where queens are judged on various skills of performance, and then a runway, where queens model costumes or clothes based off of a certain theme and then judged on their performance as a whole. Each form of expression represented on the show exemplifies Judith Butler’s queer theory by blurring the gender binary while also rejecting criticisms of being impediments to feminist movements. These actions that disavow the prominent gender binary system in America reveal that drag can be used as a tool to combat heteronormativity and promote a more progressive outlook on gender identity.

As explained in Judith Lorber’s excerpt from “‘Night To His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender”, gender is a socially constructed concept that everyone unconsciously adheres to (Lorber). As a socially constructed concept, representations of gender roles can reinforce or challenge the stereotypical images. In Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilbourne analyzed the advertisement industry’s representation of women and argued that the media plays a huge role in shaping gender formations (Kilbourne). Although objectification of women is still a prevalent issue, Kilbourne acknowledged that there are efforts nowadays that challenges the unrealistic representations of women and femininity (Kilbourne). Inspired partly by Killing Us Softly 4, the project is my way to reflect on how the Disney movies I had watched as I grow up represented gender.

Objectification includes the perception that individuals can be treated as objects or tools. For instance, social media like the different social networking sites and other forms of media like commercials, and reality television treat women as objects to be used, for example to sell cars, to advertise different merchandise, even food. In Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played with Fire”, Erdely explains the drawbacks of creating an online image by focusing on the tough and harsh treatment that Kiki faced over the internet. In Rachel Kadish’s article “Who Is This Man, and Why Is He Screaming?” she states her concern in that “there is something dehumanizing in the spectacle of a young man’s face being carried on the wind like dust” as she debates the uncontainable spread of her cousin’s image. Finally, in her article “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas”, Jennifer Pozner reveals the ways in which she thinks reality television stars are manipulated and edited into extremely typecast images in a way that

The visual analysis I chose is of Rosie the Riveter, the “We Can Do It!” poster. This poster went around during the World War II to encourage all women to fill the jobs located in a factory named Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. An artist by the name of J. Howard Miller first created this in 1942. His reason was to build confidence by others who misunderstood women’s rights. Representing women in early 1940’s wartime workforce produced Rosie’s character that served as a cultural icon during this time. Today it serves as a feminist icon by exalting women in various contexts in which experience inequality.

These racialized images and visual codes continue to produce a meaning placed by the gaze from the White American colonizers created for viewers to take part of the convoluted discussions comprised of the social process and practices of interpretation (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009). I theorize these fabrications of Black women only heighten stereotypes that depend on historical myths and the viewers’ cultural knowledge. The White gaze reproduces racial codes that have transformed into the classroom and school’s climate. I incorporate Jennifer Martin’s (2015) discussion of racial battle fatigue (RBF) of dealing with the daily environment of microaggressions whether intentional or not and its effects on Black female art educators’ identity. I plan to include Berry’s (2010) Critical Race Feminism (CRF) to explore my story as a teacher and artist to counter the master narrative of domination. I share Thorton Dill and Zambrana’s (2017) intersectional scholarship, examining the exclusion and constraints exhibited in the lives and experiences of Black women. I will explore the gap in feminist art education in the secondary education environment that excludes the Black female artists. I realize the importance of how graphic narratives can illustrate stories visually that may not communicate clearly through words. The significance of the study is to provide a critical feminist lens to interrogate the visual narrative of race, class, and gender disparities of Black female art educators in secondary

It is not the production of food in and of itself that is Rosler’s target but the taken for granted role of a happy housewife and selfless producer that the tape intends to spotlight. Her work deals as much with the role of women as with the role of representations. In her video we also see the invisible and visible labour through her actions of using kitchen utensils in the video and behind the video in reality and the way in which her body is inscribed by domestic arts. The frustration that is seen in her actions is because a woman does not become a woman because of her sex but because of the domestic work that is labelled on her

Jeanne Dunning is an artist that studied at Oberlin College in Ohio and has exhibited the majority of her art in Chicago. Dunning works primarily with photography and is heavily inspired by the Surrealism movement, shifting reality in the way she portrays human body parts to convey strong themes of sexuality and feminism through a bizarre sense of humor. Dunning has a long history of creating images revolving around female sexuality, including a series she named “Untitled Landscapes,” which consisted of extreme close-ups of human body parts, as well as a series of photographs incorporating close-ups of fruit that strongly resemble female genitalia. Dunning also draws upon classic art categories such as portraits, landscapes, and the nude, playing on the expectations of these categories to reveal sexual implications. Her unique use of sexually charged images that play with the expectations of her viewers allows Dunning’s art to “[fit] within Postmodern concepts of sexual politics.”

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

The two women captured side by side represent importance in the roles they play. However, this piece is a form of reinforcement of today's issues among cultural appropriation.

The Dinner Party is one of the feminist artwork exhibited in the gallery, celebrating forgotten achievements in the female history. Chicago’s use of subject matter explores the feminist principle inequality; such as the elaborated and organized arrangement in which this artwork was developed. She describes it as, “a reinterpretation of The Last Supper from the point of view of women, who throughout history, have prepared the meals and set the table.” This portrayal of woman is used throughout the history of American Revolution. Also featuring different eras; like the classical Rome and the reformation of Christianity. Chicago’s piece is an icon of feminist art which represents 1,038 women in history and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor in which the table rests. The multi-media work comprises of pottery, china painting, sewing, embroidery, weaving and other mediums that is customarily connected with ‘women’s work’, and as such, not generally considered “high-art” by the art world. Chicago’s aims was to commemorate traditional female accomplishments which have historically been framed as craft or domestic art. Some of the materials used in this work highlights the bold, sensual imagery suggestive of flowers, female genitalia, and butterflies, about which the artist once explained, “My images are about struggling out of containment, reaching out and opening up as opposed to masking or veiling.” This emphasizes that although Chicago is the theorist behind of

Orange Is the New Black has started to redefine various gender and sexuality expectations that have been concreted in to media for many years. Women are not always portrayed genuinely in mainstream media, many television shows place women on a sexualized pedestal, where they are subject to male gaze due to hegemonic femininity representation. Diane Ponterotto (2016) describes how male gaze can affect media, and social notions, “Through the male gaze, the female body becomes territory, a valuable resource to be acquired,” (p. 147.) Ponterotto continues, mentioning that many women have

The roles of males and females in society have significantly changed, as opposed to the predominant roles in our history. In the modern culture of today, women have begun to break out of the mold that which society has placed her in. This much can’t be said when it comes to modern gender representation in mass media advertising. It can be safe to state that woman are seen as sexual, fragile, exotic—whereas men are portrayed as tough, in control, and aggressive. This trend can be one seen as an inhibitor to the advancement of our culture, because especially for women, it is hard to pull away from the stereotypes that are continuously represented. As examples of the given trend, the following