EDUCATION AND FEMINISM

My project is on feminism having an impact education and schooling.Feminists believe society is male control.Feminists also think that society is based on competing between the sexes. They believe that women have been deprived in society and that men historically have had more power than women. Feminists believe this is wrong and needs changing. Many feminists believe that women are being suppressed by a male-dominated society both in education and also later in life. They argue that the curriculum is more based around traditionally male-dominated subjects. Thus it sets up men more than women for further education or more prosperous work opportunities. Coupled with this is the stereotypical view of a woman’s part in society of becoming housewives, marrying early and having children. Feminists argue that this contributes to the suppression put on women by the male-run society.

Feminism, Advertisement and Edward Bernay

                                     Feminism and Advertisement

             My semester project will be on the advancement of advertisement and propaganda and its affect on women past, present and future. I want to discuss how certain groups such as the Feminism movement with the First and Second wave, were so affected by the growth in visual media. This would involve a timeline in which I document the progression of visual advertisement as a form of propaganda and as a form of activism. Also relevant is how the movement was furthered encouraged by Edward Bernay. I especially want to bring up the pro's and con's that derived from Bernay's version of advertisement.

               My goal is to show how media has changed with the involvement of behavioral psychology and how this in turn has affected women in their psyche and physical body. Furthermore, I will use my extreme distaste for the man to show how he has partially altered the existence in which are live in currently. More so, I will give actual instances that prove that Bernay did in fact ruin my present as well as the future we seek to reach towards.

            The fact that he is related to Sigmund Freud and is his nephew, he still will remain, in my eyes, as an individual who managed to screwed up everyone's individuality by associating it with physical, materialistic things.  His involvement in the media was key in affecting the way visual images stimulate people each day. There have been books filled simply discussing his ideas and theories in regards to people as a mob mentality. As a corporation I would have loved it, as in individual I feel great disdain. This sense of disgust is perfect in further dissecting the ways Bernay is the guilty party that revolutionized the way media functions.

              However, although I may not feel inclined to praise or feel gratitude, I feel the need to point out the many activist parities did advance because the media became more focused on sending messages to a crowd. This is where propaganda comes to mind. Whether it was borrowed or not, Bernay has to be recognized as someone who drastically affected women to this day. Feminism has changed the way we perceive women and equal rights today. I feel quite keenly towards expressing just how much Bernay helped the movement.                                  
     
     

Human Trafficking

I will be writing and presenting my project on human trafficking. Human Trafficking is the illegal movement of people, typically for the purposes of forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation. Every day someone is being used for either cleaning or as a sex toy. Slave and sex traffickers are very well known in everything they do. They are using force to keep them under their wing and to keep them quiet so they don’t tell anyone. We never know when someone is under the force of traffickers. They might be right next door of us and wouldn’t even know it. The house next to a school might be a trafficking house.

Human trafficking is supposedly bringing in millions of dollars per year. It is also the first that brings in so much money, the next one is drug trafficking. It is the most crime filled from the police that they hide from. Traffickers fear law enforcement, so they like it to bring different cultures, languages, and other races into the mix.

The most used trafficking is commercial sex. They are being forced to have sex with random guys that are paying a lot of money to get what they want.  From shows that I’ve watched, shows that they make a website that looks like a shopping website. They see what girl that want to have sex with, and they message the pimp. Soon after, they set up a meeting place where the girl dresses in a coat, goes to the hotel and from there its trafficking. If their “customer” or the girl does not do what they are suppose, the customer normally gets off, because they don’t know what goes on beyond the doors. But the girl normally gets hit, or forced to something that they shouldn’t.

A sex trafficker’s survivor made a memoir about her experience, Girls Like us.  She explains on how it was on her and the family of the sex traffickers. I will be buying the book to explain this in more detail.

A story that I found online about a flight attendant learned about sex trafficking was very interesting. An unidentified woman stated that she would have never thought about human trafficking as a problem till today. She stated that her airline started giving training lessons on how to identify it. How do they identify? They see how the person reacts, if they answer for themselves. If they avoid eye contact, if they feel scared or anxious.  If they have their own movement and can go anywhere by themselves.

She also stated that the one time she was on a plane that she came across a group of young girls that did not speak English. She thought it was weird that they weren’t speaking, but she didn’t think much of human trafficking. She then went to ask for her retired mother about it, and her mother said that in her day of work, she also came across something like that.

Another story of an airline being aware of human trafficking. An airline attendant named Sandra Fiorni saw an 18-year-old girl with a newborn that came onto the plane with the umbilical cord still attached. She said in her testimony that she only had one bottle of milk and two diaper on her. At the time, she did not find anyone to put a report in on it. She then noticed that she had to do something about it.

I will also be reading more into the Girls like us book, and see if there are any interviews on the girls 

that are in the book, or the author.  Also be doing a lot more research on how the police do their job on protecting the young girls. 

„https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5CtZo6-vE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIjKa_4FWfI

Body Shaming

           For some reason, this generation is very involved in worrying what people’s bodies look like, and humiliating them if it’s something that doesn’t fit the “standards.” Body shaming is usually known as discriminating against people who are overweight, but it may also be towards women who are seen to be “too skinny”. With so many feminism issues, body shaming just adds to the hardships of trying to be a confident woman. 

 Everywhere around the world, social media and advertisements of all sorts, contribute to body shaming. An embarrassingly large number of advertisements always show intensely skinny girls. One of the world’s most popular advertisements is created by the Victoria Secret franchise. Victoria Secret is known as the company who shows off their merchandise with only the “skinniest and the prettiest” girls; guys want to have them, and girls want to be them. But who is to say that, that body is the “ideal body?” Who determines who has a better body than someone else? And why does it matter? 

Women all over the world feel as if they are compelled to live up to these standards that society has created for women. God forbid someone is overweight, because then they’re too ugly. Or, if someone is too skinny, then no one will want them. Society nowadays is all about judging others and how they look, but not many come to realize that no one’s opinion but their own matters, and they need the validation from others. While there are so many advertisements and companies contributing to body shaming, there as just as many artists and stars who fight against it.

Artist Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte, or better known as Orlan, held a strong stance against body shaming. After going through surgery for an ectopic pregnancy, she realized she enjoyed the art of surgery, and the feeling. She then went under nine different surgeries to alter her face. Each surgery intended to rewrite western art on her own body. She did not go through these surgeries because she was at risk, or to alter her self to make her look “better.” She did it because she believed  surgically changing her body could be a powerful work of art. One operation altered her mouth to imitate François Boucher's Europa, another to mimic the brow of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, and another altered her chin to look like that of Botticelli's Venus.

Orlan was asked if she was trying to make herself more beautiful. She responded with, "No, my goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. 

Is it her aim to change the idea of beauty? Orlan says, "I am not sure I can change such a thing, but I can produce images that are different from those we find in comics, video games, magazines and TV shows. There are other ways to think about one's body and one's beauty. If you were to describe me without anyone being able to see me, they would think I am a monster, that I am not fuckable. But if they see me, that could perhaps change."

           Orlan is an interesting artist because so many people use plastic surgery as a way to make themselves “better,” so they can fit other people’s standards and have bigger breast or a skinnier torso. Orlan twists this idea and makes it the complete opposite. She doesn’t care what others thinks of her, especially after she completed all here surgeries.

 

Rachel George Semester Project: Mental Illness

Rachel George 

Toby Allen is freelance illustrator who used art to create monsters as a mental illness.  Allen has 
struggled with a mental illness, anxiety. The first illness he drew was anxiety. Before he draws a mental illness, he does a lot of research. Then he begins to imagine how anxiety looks to him based on the research and his imagination.  In each mental illness, he describes what this monster does to people. Also Allen uses dark colors and the color pink because "the dark colours effect the heavy and oppressive feelings...the shock of bright pink represents the intense rush of fear or anxiety". Mental illnesses mentally and physically affect the way a person view the world which is negative. Everything does not seem to be going right. Allen wants to get people's attention to how serious mental illnesses are. Mental illnesses can have a serious affect on not only the brain , but the heart as well. 

Semester Project Proposal: Black Lives Matter Movement

     For hundreds of years the African American community in the United States has been the subject of discriminatory actions and racism. The systematic racism and discrimination led to a call for change. Throughout American history citizens fought for equal rights and treatment for Blacks, with prime examples being the Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. For this reason, the focus of this project will be on the real issue of racial discrimination against black people and the act of resistance known as the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement was first created back in 2012 after the death of Trayvon Martin. Martin’s murderer George Zimmerman was acquitted of his crime, and dead Trayvon was placed on trial for his own murder. This created a lot of protests that managed to build up action that soon leads to the creation of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatters on social media. This movement itself was a call to action and a response to what seemed to be anti-Black racism. In this project, I will provide more information about this information along with reports from the Trayvon Martin case.

Extensive research will be done on past events (slavery, the Civil Rights movement) and current events (the various shootings of Black individuals) which will serve as evidence that discrimination is occurring. I will go back to old reports that extend from slavery to the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement was a social movement in the United States whose goal was to end racial segregation and discrimination. This movement will be used as a reinforcement and a mirror image to the movement that is occurring today in order to support the message they both share. The mass media will play a big role in this project and it will be discussed as a way of raising awareness on issues. I will speak about the negative and positive impacts of the media during the movement. There is a lot of evidence that show that there are still issues involving African Americans. I will also speak about current issues, such as the reaction to results of the 2016 election.

Artist from previous class readings will be used to support the idea of this movement. One of them being from the Agitprop Exhibition, which includes artist Dread Scott and his piece titled “On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide”. Scott's piece was used to show the concept of "the struggle for freedom", which also references the Civil Rights struggle faced in Birmingham Alabama. Other artists from my own research will also be used to support the movement. One of these artists is Nate Hill, who is also an African-American man who has done pieces based on racial issues. Hill’s piece is titled "The White Ambassador", where he challenges the idea of reverse racism between Whites and Blacks. This art piece will be used to show that racism can be an issue both ways. Overall, this project will include a written essay focusing on the Black Lives Matter Movement along with a blog/website dedicated to supporting the movement.  

Project Summary ( MONEY TO BURN) -Victor and Rhoda

Money to burn is a performance that was Illustrated on Wall Street. Dred Scott started with to $250 and he burned it. While encouraging Traders and other people to join him and burn their money. Burning money is it taboo but at the same time his performance only made physical on what happens on stock markets around the globe everyday. Police intervened after 25 minutes and stop the act 15 minutes later.