Feminist Art Project
I like Nylon because I identify with the fashion. I like reading women's magazines in Spanish because the people in their magazines look more like me and my family. So I thought, why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? So I'm going through page by page and replacing the face of every white model with the face of a Hispanic model or celebrity from Spanish language fashion magazines, remaking it more in my own image I guess. This is in reponse to posts like these: A man was sentenced to two years in jail for driving his wife to suicide by calling her "black." This was in India, where, as previously reported, fair skin is highly deisired, and where being called dark is "worse than physical torture," according to the court. In the case, Syed Fathima was so distressed after two months of marriage to Farook Batcha (two months of constant fighting, and of him calling her too dark) that she put an end to the marriage — and her life — by pouring kerosene over her head and setting herself on fire. Just a note to the people who don't think it's a big deal when fashion designers refuse to use black models: It's all related, and it's global.
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Jezebel) And like this one: Whose Fault Is It That The Ethnic Women In Magazines Are Whitewashed?
I like Nylon because I identify with the fashion. I like reading women's magazines in Spanish because the people in their magazines look more like me and my family. So I thought, why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? So I'm going through page by page and replacing the face of every white model with the face of a Hispanic model or celebrity from Spanish language fashion magazines, remaking it more in my own image I guess. This is in reponse to posts like these: 
6 comments:
I love this project...I would say more but I am really tired and not completely coherent. Maybe tomorrow?
I agree, your project is awesome. (I don't really have words for the India story. But I'll be linking to this soon.) It reminds me of when I wanted to make a gender-flipped Bible so my Christian guy friends who couldn't understand why it might bother me that God and Jesus and Moses and so on were all he's could see how it feels. Maybe you're just not as vindictive as I am, haha, but what I think would be really cool is to take a random sample of women's magazines that aren't explicitly marketed towards a certain race, and see 1) how many women of color are in them and how that ratio compares to the ratio in the population, and 2) how white women who read the magazines would react to a magazine where photos were switched to show a ratio of races that matches reality. Because I bet they'd say it looked like the mag was trying too hard to be "diverse."
Ha. Your second idea is really interesting. Actually...maybe I could figure out a way to try that...I'm thinking like, at a doctor's office, or some other place where magazines are left on tables for waiting patients to read. Hmm...that's a really really interesting idea.
Brilliant, badass idea. Huzzah to that!
thank you for all your comments and encouragement. and amelia and girlythoughts, i think all of those ideas are cool too especially the doctor's office one. or maybe sneaking them on to newstands.
so far i've cannibalized 3 latina magazines and i'm not even near half way done.
when i was making my portfolio for my fashion sketching class, i had to take all my black drawings out because their dark skin color is "too distracting from the clothes"
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