Gender Roles

The pieces included in this section address gender stereotypes and gender "climates" in media and physical space. In Pursuit of Comfortable Spaces was a collaborative project that investigated heteronormative space through a multimedia installation, trading cards and brochure. Cyber Ho: Scouting Feminist Spaces is an essay that begins to look at re-inscribed stereotypes on the internet. Advocating Non-Violence and Awareness of Domestic Violence in the United States and Gendered Pronoun & Image Use: Parents and Children in Parents Magazine from 1935-2004 both look at gender in advertising and promotion. The Gendered Pronoun study led to the creation of Do You Know Her? an installation that projects advertisements onto the bare body of a white mannequin, and challenges the audience to think about the archetypes and assumptions made in these advertisements. Like the Comfortable Spaces project, trading cards are used to stimulate discussion during the exhibition and after the viewer leaves. Selling Madonna also developed out of observations made during the Gendered Pronoun Study and visualizes the relationship between representations of motherhood during the renaissance and in our contemporary media.

Selling Madonna

"Selling Madonna" looks at the history of images of mother and child. Specifically the project looks at representations of mother and child in advertising published in parenting magazines in the year 2005 and looks at similar images from renaissance paintings. Together the set of images presents an iconography of motherhood that is over 500 years old and continues to saturate media images today.

As the viewer walks past the images they morph from images that distinctly read as advertisements to images that reference Christian renaissance art of the Madonna and child. The process of morphing creates grotesque images of motherhood that, for me, question reality and the truth of photos and paintings. How many mothers are actually represented by these classic images, or, more importantly, how many mothers or images of parenting are left out? Motherhood is not always romantic, as the classic images might suggest.

Do You Know Her?

"Do You Know Her?" is an exploration of "female archetypes" that appear in women centered magazines from the 1930s to the present. The semiotics that surround advertisements marketed towards women include: home appliances, detergents, beauty products, personal hygiene products, feminine hygiene products, grocery items, children, household products, wedding rings, pots & pans, and lingerie. The advertisements, originating in printed magazines, layered onto the mannequin, and then onto the window, demonstrates the layered marketing techniques the media/companies use to promote ideas of "ideal womanhood." The mannequin acts as an instrument of extraction, to emphasize the body that is imaged again and again. Important to note that the mannequin and the advertisement, the bodies, image the "ideal woman" as "white." It makes "ideal womanhood" inaccessible to women of color, thereby enforcing a cycle of idealization and struggle to obtain a womanhood that is impossible. "Ideal Womanhood," then, continues to reinforce ideas of subordination, inadequacy and self doubt and perpetuates the power systems that promote this ideology.

In Pursuit of Comfortable Space

"Comfortable Space" was a collaborative research project with three undergraduate students and one graduate student (me) at Syracuse University and the LGBT Resource Center. The main focus of the research was on how the university LGBT community defines comfortable space.

There were two large outcomes of this project. First there was a close examination of heteronormative spaces on campus, particularly bathrooms. A number of students are not perceived as belonging to the gender dichotomy of male and female, therefore a directory of single stall bathrooms, along with specific details about safety and the current labeling of the bathrooms was compiled. That compilation is available as a webpage off of the SU LGBT Resource Center website and as a printed brochure.The project also included installation at Company Gallery that looks at comfortable and uncomfortable space through physical space, video, audio and maps.

Some single-stall bathrooms have been re-labled (2 years later) as a result of the continual lobbying of students and the LGBT resource center.

A set of 6 "trading cards" that point out heteronormative space and the many locations and spatial situations heterosexuals take for granted. These cards are used as a way to initiate the conversation outside of the installation, or as a continuation of the installation.