#unit summary

[liliana-iona-reflective-journal]

Unit  Reflection

For the ‘Illustration and publishing’ project our brief was to look at a building and from the building create an 8 double sided page publication that also includes text. The building could be any building of our own choosing as well as the text included. For my publication I chose the building I worked in in Norwich, which is a ladies clothing shop called ‘Sahara’, creating a small publication about a day working at Sahara and interactions between myself, co workers and customers. The book included illustrations and quotations from customers, with the narrative being what goes at the beginning of the day to what happens at the end.

To start this project I listened to customers conversations during the course of one day and made a note of the most memorable, amusing and outrageous. Theses formed the text part of my project and were the starting points for the imagery. I made small thumbnail sketches of the customers and also of the building and details of the interior of the shop. Together with the text, these formed the main part of imagery for my project.

I knew that I wanted to create a book made from fabric which would reflect the nature of the building. I investigated the work of artists who work in textiles for example Louise Gardiner and Rosie James, to look at how they combine contemporary images with stitch. The freely drawn figure work of Rosie James lead me to think about using the Wacom tablet to change my sketches and photos into a digital illustration. These could then be printed onto fabric and then stitched together with a machine. I also looked at other artists work on Pinterest, focusing mainly on antique fabric books. These images of books gave me a better understanding as to how I could construct my book and what materials to use. I found that there wasn't any example of what I wanted to do so due to this I took inspiration from children’s fabric books.

After completing my first Wacom illustration for the book, I experimented with colour. Originally I wasn't intending on using colour but after doing a colour version I felt like this would improve the book, showing a reflection of the colourful clothes in the shop and also make it more visually exciting to look at. The style of illustration has a slightly comic book look to it as I looked at comics and also other children books illustration and was inspired by the free flowing movement the illustrations have. I also experimented with the font of the text. The font I decided on works well with my illustrations as it has a hand written look to it. The lines of the font are quite thick, matching the lines of my figures. The font letters are also at different heights, making them look not so perfect and straight. This is a reflection of my own drawings and also of the stitching holding the book together.

To construct the book I had to think about the layout. How would the illustration and quotation merge and link together? To do this I made a few different layouts. Originally I had planed for the image to be half a page then for the quote to make the other. The challenge with this would be how the image and quote once stitched on, how the backing of the stiching would be visible on the next page and over lap and obstruct the corresponding image and text on the other pages. To solve the problem of this I changed the layout and sizing of the images and quotes making it so that the image takes up one side and then the quote sit comfortably in the centre of the corresponding page.

While doing this project I improved my Wacom tablet skills by using different styles of brushes. Typically when doing Wacom illustrations I tend to only use one style of brush but for these illustrations I decided to use a different brush that gave my work a less smooth finish and more of a rough and sketchy look around the edges. I used a different brush head to make the background, which also gave a raw and more contemporary look, complimenting the figures and outfits. To develop and improve my book I could possibly make the illustrations into posters, print them out and hang them around the shop and in the changing rooms. Although if I was to this I would want to keep the figures looking fresh in the Sahara outfits. To do this I would update the outfits the figures are wearing so they are always drawn in clothes which are in season. I could also try and include the illustrations on the mailing list sign up cards. These cards are seen by customers who wish to sign up for catalogues and emails, so this would be good publicity of my work.

If I was to redo my book I would maybe include more quotes and make sure to include everyone that works for Sahara as this would be a nice sentiment for them to all be included. I could also look at the size of my book. Being A5, the book is quite small so fits comfortably in the readers hand. To make it bigger would lose this comfort and make it more cumbersome. This would also add to the cost of creating the book.

Overall I am happy with how my book turned out. I received positive feed back from my peers and also from my co workers at the shop. It is now displayed on the table in the changing room for all the customers to look through. The bright colours of the books front cover make it noticeable and is often picked up by people to look through.

For the next project ‘Illustration as Event’ we were given the task of doing a collaborative project with other members of our class after being put into groups. The collaborative project formed a live group event that was part of the ‘kaleidoscope illustration festival’. Our theme for our stand was Archaeology, the theme was assigned to us by tutors. The lead up to the festival consisted of five tasks set over five weeks that as a group we worked together to complete. These tasks helped us to come up with ideas for the stand and to also let other groups give us feed back about how to Our stand at the illustration event work on and improve our ideas together.

To begin the project we were put into random groups and given a numbered envelope. Inside the envelope was written our theme “Archeology’’. After this we were given our first task of visualising our subject. We had to look and find images that showed a process, objects and colour palette. To do this we discussed as a group what we thought archeology meant and what goes into it before finding images on google. For the rest of our tasks we all worked together in completing them as best we could. To arrange meetings and share ideas we created a Facebook group chat. In the chat we shared images and arranged times to meet and discuss ideas. It also meant if anyone was unable to attend a meeting we could let everyone know what we had discussed. Images shared in our group chat Throughout all the tasks we were given we would come together as a group and discuss our ideas. Working in a group was a new experience as all my previous works while studying have been solo projects. While working in a group everyones thoughts and ideas have to be taken into consideration. Also as a group we had to rely on one another to complete our set tasks and to also respond to group messages. Overall we worked successfully as a group and our end stand came together well.

This project gave me a new insight in to how collaborative projects work. Having not taken part in one before I learnt how to work with other people who had different backgrounds in art and to use each others ways of working to complete tasks that had been set. I also had the experience of working behind a stand as I hadn't taken part in an event like this before. I already had experience working with the public before but this was different as it was explaining what the activities rather than trying to sell clothes. Overall I enjoyed this new experience and way of working, although it wouldn't be a way I would chose to work personally, it was a new experience of sharing ideas and developing them all together.

[ronaldreagansux-blog]

Unit Seven Post: “Like Totally Whatever” Summary

My unit post for unit seven is the poem “Like Totally Whatever” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva. I found this one scrolling through YouTube, as well, and I picked it because Lozada-Oliva is making a point through her poem about how gender is performed through language. She deconstructs the way certain diction and sentence structure is seen as inherently masculine (“declarative sentences, so-called because they declare themselves to be the loudest, most truest, most taking up the most space, most totally white man sentences”) while others are seen as feminine (“maybe I’m always speaking in questions, because I’m so used to being cut off”).

This relates to chapter seven in Gender Stories, which explains gender performance as “all enacted behaviors...certain attitudes and actions as girlish, boyish, womanly, or manly.... A gender performance includes appearance, mannerisms, and verbal and nonverbal behaviors” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 164). This includes the way we talk and what we say. “A submissive, less powerful conversational pattern often involves listening more than talking, allowing interruptions, and being unassertive and indirect” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 196). In her poem, Lozada-Oliva explains that this submissive way of speaking is often seen as a feminine way to perform gender. And, because it is understood to be feminine, it is constantly criticized by men (“they like interrupt a conversation that isn't even theirs and are like ‘speak like you mean it’...and they put my parentheticals, my likes and ums and you knows on a waitlist, tell them no one will take them seriously”).

An interview from npr.org discusses speech patterns like uptalk and vocal fry. In this interview, Penny Eckert, a linguistics professor, explains that “complaints about female upspeak and vocal fry (a tendency to draw out the end of words or sentences with a low, creaky voice) ignore the fact that men also engage in those habits,” because it’s not about policing language so much as policing women's language (“From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?”). The interview explains that these speech issues are issues to people because of their preoccupation with how they present themselves. Jessica Grose, a journalist accused of uptalking, went to a voice coach to try and fix that problem (not for very long though)--kind of like the “anticipation” that Foss, Domenico, and Foss point out as a part of performing gender (179). Grose was preparing her voice based on the social context wherein uptalk is seen as unflattering and feminine. Grose, however, when she tried to do without her speech quirks, felt “like it was blunting my emotional range. I felt when I was self-conscious about my voice it lost that expressive, connective quality” (“From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?”). Interestingly, she felt like she couldn’t as easily present typically feminine traits. She decided not to change her voice drastically; similarly, Lozada-Oliva reclaims her “feminine” speech quality as something that shouldn’t be attacked by men, as most feminine things are.

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Unit Six Post: “To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang” Summary

Continuing on the theme of Harry Potter related slam poems, my artifact for the unit post for unit six is Rachel Rostad’s poem “To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang.” I picked this for unit six after finding it on YouTube, because Rostad is addressing a popular fiction character--Cho Chang from Harry Potter. Though she primarily is talking about race in her poem (how Cho Chang is reduced to being simply “Asian” and falls into stereotyping--”Cho and Chang are both last names, both Korean last names. I am supposed to be Chinese”), this poem also highlights the intersections of race and gender when it comes to pop culture representations. Rostad counts Cho Chang’s character as part of a Western pop culture tradition of "turning Asian women into a tragic fetish.”

This reminds me of chapter five in Gender Stories, which explains that pop culture can either retell, revise, or rewrite the binary. Part of retelling the binary are stories of prescription; that is, stories for adults that “explicitly prescribe how men and women should be” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 109). Rostad is criticizing that in Harry Potter, Cho Chang represents prescription for Asian women. Not only is it a retelling of how women should act in general but how women should act when they’re asian: “We giggle behind small hands and ‘no speak English.’ What else could a man see in me? What else could I be but what you made me? Subordinate. Submissive. Subplot... a best-selling caricature.” Rostad then describes her own experience with a boy, his interest in her race, and their break-up and explains “we were just following the plot.”

In “Gender-Role Perceptions: An Intergenerational Study on Asian-American Women,” Chi-Kwan Ho explains the race and gender stereotypes faced by Asian-American women. These include “captive prostitutes, submissive women, fragile China dolls with bound feet or erotic Suzie Wong sex pots, or they are seen as good housekeepers and dutiful wives” (679). Ho also says that Asian-American women have to respond to these stereotypes, and they are sometimes internalized. The internalization of these stereotypes is exactly what Foss, Domenico, and Foss mean when they explain binary prescription through pop culture. Pop culture gives these examples of how men and women should be (Asian women, in this case), assuming that the people who consume this media will follow suit. However, when poets like Rostad do not follow suit and decide to criticize it through poetry, they are also following one of the aspects Foss, Domenico, and Foss talk about. By questioning the binary’s racist assumptions of Asian women through the media of poetry, Rostad is also engaging in revising the binary.

[ronaldreagansux-blog]

Unit Three Post: “What Kind of Asian Are You?” Summary

For unit three (Gender and Sexuality Stereotypes), I selected “What Kind of Asian Are You?” by Alex Dang, which I found browsing through the recommended videos on YouTube. Dang’s whole poem is about stereotypes that he faces because of his race. While the unit is on gender stereotypes, I selected this one about Dang’s experience with racial stereotypes, because I think that the stereotypes someone faces because of their race affects gender stereotypes and vice versa.

I related this to Foss, Domenico, and Foss’s discussion of gender stereotypes. They say that stereotypes are formed because from ideas of genders being different getting oversimplified and applied to whole groups of people in order to keep them pinned down into the expectations presented by the gender binary (83). Stereotypes are generally believed, because sometimes there is some fact in them and then society runs with the ‘science behind it.’ However, Foss, Domenico, and Foss explain that these stereotypes are false--sometimes research that says so is even ignored, just to uphold gender expectations. That’s because, even if scientific evidence does say the contrary, society wants to focus on the differences between men and women, rather than the contrary (100). Dang, similarly, is confronting the racial stereotypes that have gained prominence in U.S. society that do not have solid science backing them up or are upheld because the U.S. wants to see Asian people as different.

One research article entitled “Perceived Masculinity: The Potential Influence of Race, Racial Essentialist Beliefs, and Stereotypes” by Y. Joel Wong, Angela J. Horn, and Shitao Chen explores the way that racial stereotypes affect the perceived masculinity of men in the United States. They found, for example, that Asian American men are viewed as less masculine than White American men and Black American men. What this implies is that racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes cannot just be separated--they play off of each other. Dang implies the same idea in his poem, when he says that U.S. society projects him as “nothing but the secondary role and never the leading man” (Dang). The stereotyped idea of masculinity he faces, then, is affected by the stereotypes he faces as an Asian man. Because of this, I believe this poem on stereotypes is completely relevant when it comes to gender and sexuality stereotypes... especially if we ask ourselves what stereotypes/assumptions came to our heads while watching this poem.

[ronaldreagansux-blog]

Unit One Post: “Feminism” Summary

I found “Feminism” by Ashia Ajani, Tolu Obiwole, Abby Friesen-Johnson, and Alexis Rain Vigil by googling ‘slam poetry gender’ and found a Huffington Post article on feminist slam poems. (The first one is The Period Poem by Dominique Christina and is probably one of my favorite slam poems ever.) I selected this for Unit One (Introductions, History, and Culture Components), because one of the most important basic concepts for feminism, in my opinion, is intersectionality. I think, as we did in class, it should be one of the first topics taught and a topic that informs all other discussions on gender after, rather than being an isolated unit. This poem does a great job of capturing the essence of intersectionality, especially in regard to race. As the poets note, the feminism that Friesen-Johnson lives is going to be different than the feminisms Ajani, Obiwole, and Rain Vigil live, because they’re women of color. And they all probably have different class statuses and sexualities that also affect how they experience feminism.

As Christie Launius and Holly Hassel explain, intersectionality combats “hegemonic feminism: that is, a feminism that was ‘white led, marginalize[d] the acvtivism and world views of women of color, focuse[d] mainly on the United States, and treat[ed] sexism as the ultimate oppression’” (117). The poets here confront the same issue of white feminism equating sexism as the primary oppression. They discuss the issue of the abortion debate and how, in an exclusive feminist topic, the conversation is pinned down to pro-life and pro-choice. However, while the debate over that rages, there are whole other conversations on reproductive justice that need to be had--they mention the forced sterilization of women in prison. Intersectional feminism pays attention to a wider range of issues and how they’re affected by the linking of race and class and gender (etc).

As this article by Christine Emba in the Washington Post explains, “Although the term was originally used to describe how race and gender could intersect as forms of oppression, intersectionality has broadened to encompass a number of additional social factors — sexual orientation, nationality, class, disability and others.” Emba also raises interesting points about how intersectionality has become a popular topic, possibly to its detriment, and how it gets criticized for it’s use of privilege and possibly reviving “identity politics” (Emba). This article made me think that, in terms of the poem, while the poets do a good job addressing the intersections of race and gender and also class, they do not have any mention of sexuality or ability. While you can’t cover everything in one poem, it reminds me that there is always another perspective of privilege and oppression to be considered.