Feminist Consciousness
BY MAISIE HEINE
book design | 6"x8"
oil paintings by Kay Lee
book design | 6"x8"
oil paintings by Kay Lee
For my Typography 1 class, we were asked to create a book out of an article about identity. My article, “Feminist Consciousness,” by Sara Ahmed, examines how we are not born feminists, but gradually, over time, assemble ourselves into feminists. Feminism, Ahmed says, is “DIY.” To be a feminist does not just mean subscribing to a set of beliefs or values; feminism is itself an identity. I knew almost instantly reading this article that I wanted to use the work of my friend, Kay Lee, a fine arts student in the Sam Fox School. Kay recently has been interested in exploring the female body, and specifically, how society tends to gaze on the female body as though it were made of meat you could consume. I thought this was very interesting imagery to put with the article, since Ahmed also talks about how we casually treat the female body in a derogatory way. Considering that Ahmed’s article is highly theoretical and the concept of “arriving at feminist consciousness” is not very tangible, I liked that Kay’s paintings had some ambiguity built into them. The painting I ultimately used is actually a close-up from one of her paintings, "Lovers," that initially had both a man and woman. You can vaguely see the paint marks and the underlying canvas in the photograph, which evokes the DIY concept in the article. Over the course of the book, the image gradually comes together, imitating the self-assembly Ahmed says is required for arriving at feminist consciousness.
|
|