In order to catch up...theories, inspiration and photographs

Having submitted my proposal my project was stopped for a while (That's true and I feel quite bad about it...)

Anyway, I was reading The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler again and again (this is such a powerful text!) and decided to relate to it in my project. Then I visited the website of the V-day (www.vday.org) which is an international movement inspired and initiated by Ensler in order to stop violence against women. The first V-day event took place on 14th February 1998 in New York and when many famous women such as Winona Ryder, Glenn Close, Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg and many more joined and performed The Vagina Monologues. The event was such a success that money raised at that moment allowed to launch a movement. Since then the V-day has been organised at many schools and colleges around the United States and in Europe too. The students direct and perform The Vagina Monologues; thanks to organising the event they raise not only consciousness but also money to support the local groups which want to stop violence against women.

There is a vast amount of information on the V-day and how to organise it. They give clear tips how to take action. I feel I lack confidence to organise such an event at university on my own, maybe this idea could be passed on to the Student Union or maybe some drama students would like to direct it and perform? I am going to see their production titled Corpus Christi next Friday and I hope I will have chance to talk and spread my ideas. As I found on V-day website there is also a range of other texts that are suggested to perform at the V-day events and they also include the roles for males. This is definitely worth checking.

In the foreword to The Vagina Monologues Gloria Steinem lists the different forms of violence against the female body such as :
- rape
- anti-lesbian violence
- sexual harassment
- female genital mutilation
- terrorism against reproductive freedom
- psychical abuse of women
Although my project is supposed to depict the femininity I deeply feel these sad issues constitute the experiences of many (too many) women in the world. The V-day.org provides some useful statistics as well.

I am thinking of organising the content of my website around the various issues that relate to the theme of femininity. As my audience will move from page to another they will get to know these aspects, and these good (such as motherhood or strength) will intertwine with those bad (as listed above) I decided to take FOREST as a metaphor for this entanglement of ideas and issues. As I remember from the literature lessons in the seventeenth century it was common for the noble men of Poland to write a sort of diaries in which they put all the issues they deemed relevant; such books were known as SILVA RERUM what means ""forest of things". My project will be such a forest of things relating to the issues of femininity and gender.

Therefore I went to the forest in Addington Hills to take some pictures of trees and bushes. I will start to work on them tomorrow and will manipulate them using Adobe Photoshop. I plan to reduce colours to black and white and probably adjust threshold to gain an impression of an unreal ambience. Depending on the effects I might change the strategy. I want to use these pictures as background for each page and in a sense give a feel of walking in the forest. Each page will have two or three links to other pages and I want navigation to be far from obvious.

I am working on the flowchart now- it looks quite chaotic now... When I finish I will post it here. I want my website to be informed so I am also reading two more books:
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and Media, Gender and Identity by David Gauntlett. As I stated earlier I do not want to produce a website which will be a one-sided expression of oppression of the females, this is not exactly the way I perceive the world. I agree with German psychologist and theorist Ute Erhardt that in the Western world this is women's failure that they allow to be constricted and treated as "the worse sex". Females lack confidence and assertiveness, she writes and observing other girls and myself I can confirm this is true. Thus, as my project aims to look for some positive solution to the inequality I will be thinking how to evoke changes at the 'micro-sphere'. Maybe my project will make some girls think about what they really want? Maybe someone will get inspired to organise the V-day? Maybe some people will start thinking about their attitudes towards gender and sexuality? I wish my project could get people think about what they probably take for granted and never question in the everyday life.

I already started to work on the sound- I want to use mainly fragments of songs by a Polish band called MASS-KOTKI. The name of their group is ambiguous as 'masskotki' might mean 'toys' or 'mascots' but it also relates to the word for 'pussycats' in Polish language. The group consists of two anarcho-feminists playing electro-punk. I like the roughness of their music and I think it will match especially the issues of violence and rape. I am looking for music for the positive aspects of femininity though.

There is one more thing I would like to mention. My friend gave me a permission to use some of her photographs for the needs of the projects. She is a photographer who recently started to exhibit her works in our city (Wroclaw, Poland) As she is also interested in the issues of gender and femininity the most of her photographs constitute those of women. I really like these pictures and I already picked few of them. I hope such incorporation of my friend's photographs is OK if I provide the references... I will talk to my tutor on Monday to clarify.

To be continued...