I can say that I am not as proud of this week's project as I have been of others....
I believe much of it is because I still lack tact and subtly.  When I want to raise awareness or discuss an issue, I usually find my best medium is actually talking about it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk. I find the spoken word to be the best way to get to the heart of the subject I want to discuss-- I think that is what Adichie achieved. I have been trying to stretch myself but I can see I'm still not there yet. I'm sure that if I revamped things enough times I could get somewhere closer.

I chose to create a poster about the representation of women in media. In history, women have been portrayed as a tool to be used for a purpose, a commodity to be won, traded, or bet with, creatures that need to be protected and taught by men, etc. Even the kinder representations still make us look shallow, timid, and naive about the world. In recent decades, the representations have become more and more sexualized-- including the ones that are supposed to be supporting a "better" representation of women.

Women who are super heroes or tv stars are still dressed in the tightest/most revealing costumes and comments are still always made about their sexuality. Female characters who are not supposed to be sexual are often dressed in a more "masculine" way, unfitting suits etc. in order to give them a air of being more serious. The dialogue of all these women (sexual or not) also often follow a pattern more similar to male dialogue than female dialogue [defined by studies, not defined by stereotyped speech or subject matters]. This likely happens because we still as a society believe, consciously or subconsciously, that men are more powerful and can be taken more seriously and that a woman gains power through flirting and manipulation.

In my poster, I tried to show the wide variety of how women have been represented, so I chose a modern, sexualized and emasculated character-- Black Widow-- as well as a shot from an old John Wayne western. I chose a Western because it shows the history of the representation but is still applicable today-- just a few weeks ago a man in the program told me the reason women don't like Westerns is because they don't understand doing something for the greater good, they just want everything to end happily.

I chose to have a group of real women standing in the middle of the images but in front of an empty screen. There is potential for these women to be represented, but it isn't there yet. (Really, I couldn't think of any examples of a female character who wasn't a caricature or the object of competitive romance.)

I used words from a short essay I read that I thought well concluded why our shift in how women are represented still didn't bring the answer we were hoping for. In looking for strong female characters we created woman who can fight hard core, fix cars, etc. but are still hollow characters without enough substance underneath. We don't need strong women, characters. We need strong, well-rounded characters, that are female.