viz. - women

Objectifying the Office - Michelle Obama and the Spanish Magazine Controversy

Cate Blouke — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:36:38 +0000

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.

The image is based on a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist titled Portrait d'une négresse, completed in 1800 and currently hanging in the Louvre. While the painting is a depiction of a slave, according to at least one art historian the portrait “may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage.”

Karine Percheron-Daniels, the artist responsible for the cover image, has responded to the various attacks and accusations of racism with a statement explaining her thought-process and expressing a (seemingly) sincere admiration for Mrs. Obama. And, to be fair, this image is one in a series of nude political figures including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana, Eva Peron, and Obama himself (among others).

It interests me that most coverage of the "story" has chosen to censor the image of Mrs. Obama while leaving the breast in the original portrait bare. This explicitly condemns Percheron-Daniels' work (as not-art) while retaining the artistic value of the original.

While much to do is being made of the artist’s choice of source painting, I’m particularly interested in the significance of the choices Percheron-Daniels made in her adaptation – particularly the shifting of the subject’s gaze.

In the original work, the woman depicted confronts the viewer directly – a much more active role than the demure, side-long glance of the Percheron-Daniels’ portrait. As such, the new image removes any agency from its subject, turning her body (and face) into an object to be gazed upon. This ties in with the Spanish magazine’s rather odd caption – that Michelle Obama’s face will be key in the upcoming election – as well as the continued American obsession with Mrs. Obama’s arms.

It also seems significant that Percheron-Daniels chose to incorporate the American flag, tying the image into nationalism. On the international stage, then, the cover portrays America as being inescapably tied to its roots in slavery, and the first lady is presented as an aesthetic object. And given the kind ofappalling headlines some coverage has indulged in, the incident is certainly disheartening – particularly if you heard NPR’s recent interview of GOP-leaning veterans in which Bobbie Lucier (of Indianapolis) complains that “It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.” And one can’t help but chalk that kind of comment up to race.

Hat tip to this year's viz. editor Rachel Schneider for helping me talk through these ideas.

Meat is Murder, PETA is Porn

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

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).

All images from PETA.org

The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent. Indeed, the "Veggie Love" ads make clear PETA's alliance with the values and visual motifs of porn:

Veggie Love Casting Session screenshots from http://features.peta.org/casting-session/default.aspx

Playing on the designs of paid pornography websites, the PETA site promises "explicit casting footage" starring bikini-clad women (and one man) in the throes of passion... with their vegetables of choice. Visual allusions to fellatio recur throughout the images and videos. The message, again, is one equating vegetarianism with sex. It makes me wonder who the audience is. Since most of the celebrity spokespeople for PETA are women and most vegetarians are women (a 1992 report claims 68%), perhaps PETA is trying to induce more men to give up meat. Is PETA implicitly promising naked women to men who "go veg"?

Regardless, it's yet another sad entry in the hall of shame that is PETA. I sometimes wonder if the organization is funded by the meat industry. What better way to discredit vegetarianism and animal rights than to make their most outspoken proponents seem like sexist lunatics?

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

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.

I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”

What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo.

The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:

However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network

The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).

Image Credit: The Social Network

The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy.

This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.

As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film.

While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have.

Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster.

(Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.)

Picturing Survivors

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:43:48 +0000

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.

Image: David Jay, The SCAR Project

SCAR stands for "Surviving Cancer: Absolute Reality," and the images the project produces clearly offer a counter to the disembodied pink ribbon. SCAR's strategy is not entirely new; campaigns raising awareness for other issues have often used images of injured or otherwise physically affected individuals to further their cause. These images, however, avoid falling into overwhelmingly sentimental appeals to pity, guilt, or shock. The women pictured are self-selected, volunteers who chose to show their bodies to help fight breast cancer. While absent or reconstructed breasts may be shocking to some viewers, the comfort that the composition projects steers the images away from pure shock value. Looking directly into the camera without fear or shame, these women do not seem to need help; rather, with knowing expressions, they are here to help you.

Gathering support for a cause is difficult, and I certainly wouldn't discount the effect that pink ribbons have had on breast cancer awareness. However, the SCAR project seems an important counter to "thinking pink." At the nexis of tragedy and hope, these images seem to balance between the incessant positivity that Barbara Ehrenreich critiques in Bright-Sided and an apocalyptic sadness. These women are survivors, but they aren't unharmed; getting better and being strong does not have to (and often should not) mean hiding the marks of what happened to you. That complex message, spelled out with these women's bodies, may not always be apparent in the more common iconography of breast cancer.

Ugh! Milk Gone Bad

erinhurt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:58:22 +0000

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.)

Here are visuals of the pictures that disturb me the most:

The Serious Side of Sarcasm

Jillian Sayre — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:18:38 +0000

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.

Katie Couric, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and now Newsweek have all noted how Obama's rhetoric contrasts with the optimism and hopefulness of her husband's campaign. But while most of these sources will present the trait as positive (albeit dangerous), the Times for instance called Obama "Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy", Clinton is considered dour or angry.

The funny thing is, the visual argument seems to be presented in the opposite manner. Newsweek's profile of Michelle Obama featured a good deal of "stern" pictures, despite the frequent mention of her humor in the text (she pokes fun of her husband, makes frequent jokes that not everybody gets). Despite a few nostalgic young Obama shots (and the cover which features a controlled smile on a woman who seems almost to be physically restraining herself), most of them looked like this:

both images property of Newsweek

Hillary, on the other hand, as Tim's devil picture indicates and as Jon Stewart has pointed out, seems discomforting in her happiness, the "hard-nosed realist" who enjoys lambasting hope and faith. When she makes these sarcastic comments in speeches and during debates, she smiles, even laughs. While I think we would agree that this normally says, "hey, joke here!" it is read by these critics as over-rehearsed or abusively cynical.

Perhaps what I am most intrigued by in this debacle is the disjunct of rhetorical strategy and analysis. While Obama's serious posture is productively rebellious, making her a thoughtful as well as humorous (Newsweek says that she's not the expected "Stepford booster, smiling vacantly at her husband and sticking to a script of carefully vetted blandishments"), I think Clinton joyfully produces her barbs so that the listener is encouraged to hear her and laugh along, a sort of benevolence. The effect, though, is suspicion and distance; these critics argue that her smiles actually isolate the audience and I wonder what context creates this reading.