How do socially enforced gender roles affect us? Confronting these aspects of performative femininity challenges us to think critically about our personal choices.
These photographs are the first series in the Performing Femininity project, Marks On Our Bodies/Things That Constrain Us. Society frequently controls women through their bodies and physical appearance. We are pressured and we pressure ourselves to conform to impossible standards of beauty. Choosing to wear clothes or use products that constrict our bodies literally leaves marks, often red and sore. These marks are reminders of the lost time, energy and money we put into conforming beauty regimens, as consumerism and capitalism unite to diminish our resources.
The videos that follow investigate the conflicting beauty and difficulties of motherhood. Women’s unseen labor is taken by society without compensation, part of the unrealistic expectations placed on parents by a society that offers little support for those who choose to raise the next generation.
Part One:
Marks On Our Bodies/Things That Constrain Us
Part Two:
The Beauty and Difficulty of Motherhood
Things That Constrain Us
The Impossible Mandate Of Femininity, No. 1
Accepting Ourselves
We Glance Seductively
Do Not Sit Quietly
Compressed Into Submission
The Impossible Mandate Of Femininity, No. 2
Constricting Our Very Breath
A Public Indecency
Not Feminine
Hobbled By The Constraints Of Femininity
The Impossible Mandate Of Femininity, No. 3
Watch a 30 second video of this work in Unmuted at the Hyde Park Art Center
Part 2:
Socially enforced gender roles have a toxic effect on women in American culture. Women are pressured to accept the role of primary or sole caregivers in our society, whether in the personal/domestic or public/professional spheres. In our capitalist economy the model of woman as caregiver is an important aspect of toxic femininity. Women are not compensated for many aspects of their labor that benefit society. This unpaid labor is not included in economic measures, such as GNP. The devaluation of women, as evidenced by the pay, wealth and power gaps that affect them, causes a general acceptance of the correctness of society’s history of taking women’s labor without compensation.