Act 33
November 12, 2008
Watching Women Street Art–Part 2c WOC Edition–Turkish Gold
One of the biggest offenders in the gender ads WOC gallery seemed to be cigarette advertising. The Virginia Slims ads are particularly bad using stereotypes to sell the sexiness of their cigarettes while using the tagline “find your voice”. Firstly, cigarettes have long been proven to damage and actually remove your voice, secondly, using a stereotype and calling it individuality is just plain baffling.
I chose to use this camel cigarettes advert as the basis for my third and final stencil in part 2 of the series. It seems representations of Middle Eastern women are either belly dance/mysterious/spicy/sexy or completely veiled. It is the virgin/whore trope taken to extremes.
Act 32
November 12, 2008
Watching Women Street Art–Part 2b WOC Edition–Reebok Geisha
Following on from the Aunt Jemima stencil I became interested in other representations of women, and particularly women of colour, in advertising. I found GenderAds.com which is a fantastic resource, particularly useful was their WOC exotics section. I was inspired by this old reebok ad depicting a shy geisha girl stereotype wearing reebok sneakers.
Act 31
November 12, 2008
Watching Women Street Art–Part 2a WOC Edition–Aunt Jemima
Back in March I worked on Act 12, Watching Women Street Art, a set of three images that I shared on the Internet for use as street art stencil and sticker templates. The images were created using iconic images of women in western art, women whose images were created purely for the pleasure of the viewer. Inspired by the recent creation of the Hollaback Australia site I had repurposed the images as viewers themselves.
In the comments of Act 12 Mehitabel Moody Moss Said:
In my city we would need some African-American iconic women for such a project. For the US I’d suggest Queen Nefertiti, Aunt Jemima, Angela Davis.
I decided that I really wanted to take this on board and to include some images of women of colour in my next watching women street art set (I had always intended to do three sets of three images for this project).
