How Rape Culture and Sexism Destroys Creativity
For our final Comping Techniques assignment, we were asked to create a product or installation that depicts Urban Life in some way. My team chose to look at it from a social perspective---we feel one of urbanisation's biggest problems is security, or lack thereof, and we want to take it from a personal perspective---rape culture and sexism.
For our final project, we decided to do an installation to raise awareness. We want to promote AGAINST rape culture and sexism. Our goal is to shake the viewers up. We want to put them in our shoes and make them uncomfortable, even threatened, since that is how we, as females living and commuting in an urban area, feel.
This was our initial sketch.
We considered a few different materials, such as cardboard and wires. In the end, we decided to go for wires because it's more sturdy, and will show more technique.
Our lecturer evaluated our plans and told us to make them more comprehensive, so we revised everything and decided to narrow down our sketches:
This is what we ended up with.
We'll be using the cup as the blow up doll's "mouth". As we have mentioned before, we wanted to depict a blow up doll because it symbolises sexual exploitation.
This is how the installation will look like in the space. We're going to put it up in the upstairs cafeteria, so people will definitely notice it. We also added a pool of clothes under the wire mannequin, strings to support it upright, a sandwich board nearby containing all information, and we'll be filling the mannequin up with crumpled pieces of magazines, newspapers, and book pages to symbolise how sexual exploitation limits creativity and expression. This negative outcome is ultimately what will promote people to fight sexism and rape culture.
We also moved into the typography that we'll use on the sandwich board. This is one of our sketches.
One thing we still haven't decided yet is what to name our artwork. It's either "No Means No" or "Please". I personally feel that "No Means No" is a more comprehensive title for the installation. It's already a famous line against sexual exploitation in pop culture, whereas "Please" brings images of sadistic horror movies. No doubt it's a cool image, it's just not the image we want for our artwork. However, ultimately we'll have to discuss this further as a group.
The challenge will be manipulating the wires accordingly to the mannequin, and taking care so as not to be too "horror movie" and not enough "sexual exploitation". There's a thin line between the two, so we have to watch out.