viz.

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag.  Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best.  The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

Imogen Bailey; image from http://www.imogenbailey.com/peta.html

It's not news to say that PETA, in its quest to protect animals, regularly objectifies women in disturbing and disturbingly consistent ways. We've had a couple of posts on viz. already that discuss some of PETA's tactics, such as Posing for Your Eating Habits and the Girls-Gone-Wild parody examined in Ugh! Milk Gone Bad. I object to PETA's ads both for how they perpetuate some of the worst sexism and objectification and for how they are counterproductive; I am a PETA-hating vegetarian. But the trainwreck that is their media campaign is, at least, provocative, if nothing else (which, I suppose, is their "strategy"). Now, PETA has done it again with a new set of videos and pictures that connect eating vegetables to pornography, which they call the "Veggie Love Casting Session". Before we look at "Veggie Love," however, I thought I'd share a few salient images that demonstrate how it is a logical outgrowth of their previous work.

Warning: the rest of the images in this post are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Youtube

If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4.  Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg.  When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere.

October is breast cancer awareness month, so you may be seeing pink ribbons and products more frequently. While the pink ribbon is a powerful symbol of breast cancer awareness, "pinkwashing" (exploiting consumer grief or guilt to sell products, such as pink hair dryers or nail polish, with minimal donations to breast cancer organizations) has been the target of much critique, in part because it allows consumers to feel that consumption of material goods is a solution to a widespread health problem. The SCAR project, which takes and exhibits photographs of young breast cancer survivors, offers a different visual argument for cancer awareness. Depending on your office environment, the images after the jump may be NSFW.

Yuck!

So I've put off posting about this image because I find both it and PETA's numerous ways of using women in confusing and often objectified ways distasteful. They've titled one of their latest campaigns "Milk Gone Wild."

A just as smarmy take on Joe Francis' "Girls Gone Wild," PETA's current campaign wants to draw a connection between hot women and the dangers of drinking milk. But for me, the images they use don't add up to making any kind of supportive visual argument. Instead, they lose credibility. (Update: Some of the images below the fold might not be safe for work.)

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.