Hello!! My Final Project is based on how media and society has made online dating a huge market and advertising has made great affects to get people to pay for the sites, engage in these dates, meet people. How are so many people online and dating constantly? My approach is that people do not know each other before they commit to a relationship or have sex. Sex therefore becomes the tone of the relationship, when in fact maybe something different could have happened first to get the potential couple to bond and get to know each other. What do we already know about dating? We are stating the obvious but why are more and more people driven to this rather than meeting people in person?

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-BdR5TiWzaUD3xWXC_josXbFfEv2VECGP-MdglxYQ9Y/edit#slide=id.gaf98988e7_0_16


Tumblr-annaaronis74.tumblr.com

Bibliography- 

Gender Roles and the Media-“Inforrefuge.com. Web. 25 March .http://www.inforefuge.com/gender-roles-media

Kilbourne, Jean “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.” Center for Media Literacy. Center for Media Literacy. Web 25 March 2015

Berger, John, “Ways of Seeing”. London: Penguin Books, 1972: 45-64 http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/be-mine-parallels-between-digital-advertising-and-online-dating-155677

The Burgeoning Belly…and Everything After

The Burgeoning Belly…and Everything After

Join Below to Become a Group Member and Receive Updates!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/667579043345988/671093436327882/?notif_t=group_comment

 The intent of the group is to create an open,honest and comfortable dialogue for women to converse on women's progression in with their bodies not only relating to pregnancy but in regards to both pre/post baby.  A lot of conversation is lost during this time and and women we should be able to open communicate struggles with infertility, hassles about birth control, the pregnancy process, how body image is effected and even the lack of unity amongst women. By perpetuating this idea of a non judgmental group where new mothers, experience mothers and future mothers can all take a breather from their family life and discuss things from baby products to episiotomy.

Since the group itself is currently so small and intimate it gives everyone an opportunity to get to know each other, learn everyone's opinions and ideas about the birth and all the things that encompass it.

In our first meeting we spent a lot of time discussing birth stories, talked about breastfedding, the competitive natures about moms, and we ended the discussion with watching a trailer to a documentary called "The Business of Being Born" to set up the next discussion on medical interventions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DgLf8hHMgo

The object of my group was to have it grow in numbers…initially a friends attend, then their friends, and when it turns into a bit of a bigger group I would begin looking to find sponsors who may want to contribute to these events and begin renting small spaces to host these discussions. 

For example my good friend Ghita El Kholti works for a company called Choopie that is based on baby products, I was fortunate enough to have her provide me with some giveaways to give to attendees and as my group gradually grows I will look to branch out and feature these products that can assist in the cost of running these events while simultaneously generating profits for these businesses.

http://www.choopie.com

The Group would feature either a bi-weekly or a monthly brochure that touches base on what was discussed in the last meeting and what to expect in the next, where to go and brief quotes from attendants. The main purpose of the brochure would be to invite other mothers to the event and to reach out to a bigger network of people. 

As the group gradually garners more and more members it will give a larger platform to discuss more serious topics related to women's right and thus creating a positive atmosphere for women to continue being part of the conversational area of being a mother but also have an active role and opinion for women's rights. 

Post 5

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is an American artist and activist. She was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in October 12, 1985. Tatyana was influenced by her mother to become an artists. Her mother was an artists as well as an art teacher. Tatyana didn't really start on making her own art until she was in high school. She attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and graduated in 2007 with a fine arts bachelor's degree. She mostly an oil painter and she started getting noticed when she made work of Barack Obama which was also in a book name Art For Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change. She gained notoriety in 2012 with her art/activist project Stop Telling Women To Smile by using the streets to get her message across.

Her project Stop Telling Women To Smile has created a political movement which addresses gender based public harassment. Her medium of wheatpaste and posters have been being plastered everywhere. The original posters were first displayed in New York City but has gotten so large and popular which ended up getting to other states as well. The project was based on interviews Tatyana had with women about what they have faced through public sexual harassment. Her posters have a sketched portrait of a women along with a caption responding or retaliating to the sexual harrassment. Street harassment has become a serious issue for women around the world and I think that it's great that a Tatyana is using the streets as her canvas where this harassment is occurring.

For more information check the site:
http://stoptellingwomentosmile.com/

Mindy Kaling

                                                              Mindy Kaling

      Mindy Kaling is a hilarious actress, writer, producer, director and author who routinely pushes the envelope with her brilliant writing and her successful show, The Mindy Project which is partly inspired from her own life. Born June 24th 1979 to ambitious and driven Hindu Indian immigrants, Kaling's father was and an architect and her mother a obstetrician/gynecologist. She attended and graduated from Dartmouth College and got her Bachelor's in playwriting. Kaling is easily recognizable for her TV role as Kelly Kapoor on The Office but her significant contribution to the writing of the Emmy award winning show is what sets her apart. Kaling joined the writing staff at the young age of  24, being the only female on the staff.  In addition to her co-directing and writing episodes for The Office she also worked on webisodes and produced. 

     The Mindy Project which was inspired from Kaling's observations of her mother was picked up by FOX in 2012. Being Kaling's first starring role she is aware of the significance she has stated in interviews that she is often forced to feel exceptional for how she looks: "I often forget that ... being Indian, an Indian-American woman who is not, sort of, pencil thin -- that that is very new to broadcast television."  Kaling is very aware of her marginalized category and how her voice and image opens paths for other women of color who are looking to break into the writing world. 


     As Southeast Asian myself, I applaud Kaling for her comedic chops and how she handles the intimidation in a industry that is predominantly run by white men. Her role and writing signifies a change in the way the audience perceives and receives new characters delivered to them. She has provided characters with relatable appearances and Kaling said being raised by immigrants and in a cultural family gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing as well as the"everyone against me mentality" that she has been able to incorporate into her writing. 

“I feel that I’ve become capable, and had to be capable, even if that’s just been the result of being incredibly hard-working and incredibly decisive, but I think the best stuff I’m going to do hasn’t happened yet.” 

     I personally feel connected to Kaling's for our cultural background but what exemplifies her to me is her raw talent and the talent she has introduced to the film industry in the short time that she has preoccupied it and I look forward to experiencing more of comedies and anything else she explores. 

G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson is a successful journalist and writer who has recently become a major player in the world of comics thanks to the success of her Ms Marvel title. Wilson started out as a journalist based in Cairo and wrote for various publications including the New York Times and after delving in other areas such as music criticism before breaking into the comic industry with the award winning graphic novel Cairo and series Air. However, in 2014 the huge success of Ms Marvel has put her on the map as a major driving force in the world of comics which in a world dominated by straight white-men in both the creator and product sides of the equation, it has been considered by many a very welcomed change.

First image shown of the new Ms. Marvel

                   

Ms Marvel stars Khamala Khan, a muslim teenage girl living in New Jersey who one day finds herself with newly awoken shape-shifting powers. In between balancing her home and superhero life many readers have been able to resonate with Khamala's story and has drawn many comparisons to what Spider-Man comics did back in the 1960's but now for a new generation that is helping reach a wider more inclusive audience. She may not have been the first muslim character comic nor first female superhero but her success both critically and commercially has brought to the forefront to the major comic publishers the fact that success can be had and is welcomed with characters other than the prototypical straight white superhero. The audience identifies with Khamala because at its heart, Ms Marvel is a story about growing up and dealing with all the problems and responsibilities that come along with it. The audience, especially those who are minorities finally have a hero who more closely can identify with them and in a way represents their story, even if sometimes it is by punching a 50-foot robot.

Ms. Marvel #1 can be purchased and read on iPad/other tablets here:

Comixology

Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh is an artist whose work and inspirations exemplifies the balancing and bridging of two identities. She is an American-born artist to immigrant parents from India. She got her degree in Fine Arts from the prestigious Columbia University, but her career as an artist started from more humble means. Since she preferred expressing her own ideas, and reinterpreting dominant narratives, she involved herself with smaller, emerging artist networks in the beginning. More known for her work with visual and handmade arts such as drawings and comic books, she still works across all forms of visual medium to explore gender and the female body in various ways that diverge from the common images she has been exposed to in her experience with comics, histories, and philosophies. Chitra’s works are a true extension of her as a person, and express the multitude of identities she associates with. The art she produces traces back to India and general Asian visual material, street art from living in New York City, femininity, and her reinvention of dominant ideologies she took curiosity in. Little can explain her and her artwork more than her belief that we have to understand the dominant images we have in our minds—where they stem from and why we feel a certain way about them—because ultimately, images and identities are open investigations.

Chitra has a website where she also has a lot of her work posted. Under her installed artwork, I found an installation of hers that I really enjoyed entitled, "Jungle Beneath" (Click here to see "Jungle Beneath" on Chitra's webpage). I find the images and words to be very poetic, and I love that a lot of her work seems mystical and surreal. In terms of how it falls into the Bechdel Test, to me there seems to be at least four women depicted. And they do in some way communicate with each other. I noticed that, in looking through all of Chitra's work, the women all tend to have conversations with themselves. That is, they talk to themselves about who they really are, and the choices that they have made as women. This part of her artwork makes Chitra's work particularly reflexive to me!

 
**Currently, Chitra Ganesh has an installation at the Brooklyn Museum in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. 

Post 5: Barbara Kruger

I'm sure you have seen the images above before. Both are Barbara Kruger's most famous pieces. Barbara Kruger took up photography in 1977 with a series of black and white images of architectures, and she would add text to it, telling the story of the statue. Two years later she stopped taking photographs, and began to use images from other sources in American media and collaged words directly over them. Kruger’s messages were feminist centered, touching on topics of sex, politics, racial stereotypes, consumerism, greed, and much more. Recently, she has taken her art to public spaces in galleries, museums, buildings, trains, and parks.

I believe that Barbara Kruger’s work is well received, especially from younger generations because of the aesthetics in her work. The words jump out at you,  even before you see the image; it captures our attention. Her work also has a lot of sarcasm, that can make someone laugh, or want to have a discussion with someone about the intent of her message. Her work is many times criticized for having messages that has no voice, or rather an ambiguous voice. Many people want to know who is speaking. I feel that this mystery is what makes her work interesting to explore. It made me want to search for all of her work to see if I can figure out, or at least speculate as to who the intended audience is and where the voice is coming from.

She is also criticized for being a hypocrite. Many of her messages demean consumerism, desire, and greed, although a lot of her work is featured in magazines, the major creators of the things she seems to detest in her work. Moreover, her messages are in many consumer goods like t-shirts, notebooks, phone cases, and so on.

How does Barbara Kruger explain her work? I’ll let her tell you:

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices. I started very young as a graphic designer and while I enjoyed it initially, it really grew old very quickly. I basically wasn't cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else's image of perfection. It was much more satisfying for me to try to be my own client, and to in fact try to construct my own images of perfection, to try to construct my own commentary, my own visualization of what it means to live a life. I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.