For my Collaborative Something New, I worked with fellow Humes student Sarah Bobertz to create a zine. We wanted to inform people about the harmful racial and sexist caricatures that exist in film.
Sarah and I had to brainstorm a way to reproduce these stereotypes without causing further harm to the people they are supposed to represent. This is a common issue for artists. In class, we learned about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, a “massive sphinx-turned-mammy” made out of sugar (Thompson). The statue is meant to honor enslaved and subjugated African American women, but it has been criticized for its representations of race and sexuality.
Sarah and I decided that we could avoid reproducing harmful images by adding our own ideas into our work. We asked ourselves what each caricature was missing, how it might suffer and what it might say if it were a real person. Then, we added these thoughts and questions to the images, effectively giving the caricatures a voice.
In my definition of justice, I explain that making art can be a form of repairing injustice. If our zine is a physical manifestation of justice, then it is a very small one. All the same, it got us thinking about how harmful stereotypes are present in the films that we consume. This process of identification is a first step toward reimagining race and sex in film. Ideally, Sarah and I would continue to produce and hand out our zines after submitting our Humanities portfolios. This would allow us to involve more people in our small attempt at justice.
Filling the Absences in Harmful Representation
Works Cited
Thompson, Nato. “Curatorial Statement – Kara Walker.” Creative Time, 2014, creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/curatorial-statement/.
