“Although this video may be challenging gender inequality, it does so at the expense of upholding racist ideologies about France’s Other.”

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Posted in Gender, Race, Reblog, tagged discrimination, feminism, France, Gender, intersectionality, Oppressed Majority on 2014/02/21| Leave a Comment »
“Although this video may be challenging gender inequality, it does so at the expense of upholding racist ideologies about France’s Other.”
View original post 686 more words
Posted in Culture, Media, Race, Visual Culture, tagged ハーフ, discrimination, double, hafu, japan, mixed race, multicultural, racism on 2013/10/07| 4 Comments »
I got a great comment from Maya on “Video: ‘White Japanese People – 白人系日本人'” about how mixed-race people living in Japan are also often treated as “foreigners,” and I wanted to share some recent links on that subject.
Image via The Diplomat.
Posted in Art, Culture, Gender, Visual Culture, tagged agency, art, Asian art, C.B. Liddell, discrimination, female artists, female representation in art, feminism, japan, male gaze, minority art, representation, sexism, The diverse works of Asian women artists, The Japan Times, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, women, women artists, women in art, Women In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012, women's bodies on 2013/03/14| 6 Comments »
This piece also appeared in Feministe on 1 April 2013.
One of the most striking scenes in the 2012 miniseries version of Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End is one in which suffragette Valentine Wannop takes refuge in an art museum during a rally. While she is quietly admiring a painting of Venus, another woman enters and slashes the painting with a cleaver, shouting, “What are you all gawking at? Do you think that is all women are good for?”1
As someone with a deep love of art, I was alarmed as Valentine was. I do not believe in the destruction of art, but what the stand-in for Mary Richardson said stuck with me. Consider the status of women in the art world: often considered the “muse,” rarely the artist; lauded as the pinnacle of beauty but having no worth otherwise: the Venus forever looking in her mirror, the object of the (male) gaze, not the subject of her own agency. Should a gallery or museum try to strive for the inclusion of women artists (and artists of color, queer artists, and so on), there may be criticism of ignoring the masters, so-called “female privilege,” and the desire for a gender-blind meritocracy that simply does not exist at present. If you were wondering what such an article might look like, look no further than C.B. Liddell’s “The diverse works of Asian women artists,” a special to The Japan Times.