Dylan Farrow is Looking at Us
While the “he said/she said” label casts both Allen and Farrow as objects, Farrow’s photo asserts her status as a subject. Someone with agency. Someone with power. An accuser rather than a victim.
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Weird Science: NY Times Mag's "Planet Hillary"
Certainly a lot more interesting than the Justin Bieber mug shot.
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Attack of the 50 Ft Ginger Rogers: Sexism and the TIME "Unstoppable Hillary" 2016 Cover
The real question that journalists and pundits should be asking in advance of 2016 is not, “can anyone stop Hillary?” It is, “can anyone stop sexism?”
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Portraits of the Year
Some girls can rise to international fame and brand status while, for others....
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Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface
It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to overlook the tremendously casual manner in which fashion photographs repeat the ghoulish visual history of racism as style.
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Augmented Mannequins Figuring Prominently: The Globalization of Barbie
As the Times tells it, the mannequins are the brain child of factory owner Eliezer Alvarez, who “created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted—one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks.” The strategy worked.
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Hillary: Like Any Good Rorschach
Of course, in the contemporary media landscape, being old is a far greater crime for women than is being inauthentic.
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How About "Nyet": Explaining the Russian Gold Medal Sprinter's "Gay Protest" Podium Kiss
I thought Obama supposedly ogling a G-8 intern, or a couple supposedly making out in the middle of a riot presented classic case studies of news photos taken wildly out context. Those are merely silver medals, however, compared to the golden misread made by countless prominent national and international...
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One Sochi, Anti-Gay Russia Line of Attack: Putin's Repressed
In the next weeks and months leading up to Sochi, there is going to be a flood of images, and I imagine, visual provocations pushing back on Russia's primitive stance on homosexuality.
Continue ReadingWendy Davis and the Texas Abortion Filibuster – Lasting Images
As for Wendy Davis and the filibuster, the visuals from the drama in the Texas State Legislature the other night represent a wellspring.
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Military Sexual Harassment Pic of the Day: The West Point Student Body
Talking about the military's latest sexual harassment black eye, I was wondering what you thought of the photo accompanying yesterday's NYT story about female cadets at West Point being taped surreptitiously in the shower?
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Femen Storms Putin, but is “Femenism” really “Feminism”?
Unfortunately, Femen’s “new aesthetics” look strikingly similar to the optics of patriarchy.
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Where the Price of Freedom is Jail: Pics from Kabul's Central Women's Prison
To a western liberal audience, these rare photos of Afghan women incarcerated for so-called "moral crimes" are like a punch in the gut.
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Margaret Thatcher's Greatest Legacy: Co-opting the Female Role?
What was remarkable about Margaret Thatcher was not only how she bent associations to female roles but defied and exploited gender stereotypes.
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Women Who Expect One Thing and Get Another
Lately, I've been thinking about themes and patterns in the river of photos flowing through the news web.
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Steubenville and Madhya Pradesh: Rape, Media and the Visual Politics of Victimhood
It seems the case there is too much shame and degradation around rape to present a face to the world. So women are empowered to report and expect arrests, but the media has only a few ways to put a face on it.
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The Role of the Camera and the Photos in Domestic Abuse: Maggie, Shane and Sara Lewkowicz
Since most people seem terribly uncomfortable about actually addressing the images, let's go there.
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