Project 3: The Girls’ Aisle is Pink:

and the other aisle is like bluish and stuff

Description:

This project was created as a three-part abstract video. During its presentation, people who identified as boys were asked to stand on the far left side of the room, and people who identified as girls were asked to stand on the far right side of the room with everyone facing the screen on which the video was projected. The first part of the video, “A Regular Day, Haunted by the Ghost of Gendered Past”, begins with clips from a documentary style interview of two young children, a boy and a girl, about toys for boys and girls and their opinions about the binary view of gender reinforced by toy manufacturers and stores. It continues into a series of video clips of myself performing the activities of a typical day in my life with translucent ghostly images of myself in very stereotypical feminine clothing superimposed over the video footage. Part 1 fades into Part 2, “A Dream of Gendered Madness” with a stop-motion animation of myself going to sleep. The tame background music of Part 1 is replaced by an upbeat song, following along with a shift into bizarre stop-motion animation dream world imagery. The images include several faces made up of various combinations of parts from the faces of Chuck Norris and a Barbie doll, toys for girls and toys for boys flying through the clouds over a city, and pink and blue squares combining and breaking apart to form new shapes and colors. The final Part of the video, “A Dance of Gender Freedom” continues with the same upbeat song, but the dream images are replaced by text relaying a short set of dance instructions: “1. Run everywhere, 2. Do everything, 3. Don’t break stuff, GO!”. The viewers followed the instructions, running across the room in a chaotic breach of their previous gender separation, and then exploding into random dancing and motion without form or boundaries in the reflected light from spiraling pink, blue, and yellow bars on the screen. Watch the video.

Design:

The video was created with Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, a Canon digital camera, a Dell webcam, a canon digital video camera, and mp3s of the following music:

“The Video Section” by Broken Spindles

”Fair Weather Friends” by Daedelus

Discourse:

This project was inspired by various discussions about gender identity throughout the course and by my general interest in how my own gender qualities and choices are interpreted by others and by myself. Part1 of the video represents the idea that every action in my daily life, including making choices about how I will present myself, is influenced by the fact that, like most Americans, I have been conditioned to believe in a socially constructed and often oppressive ideology of gender since early childhood and even before. Despite my attempts to lead a gender neutral lifestyle, I am haunted by the constant presence of the spirit of myself as an ideal woman, following the rules of gender according to the society I was raised in. The second part of the video expresses my consciousness of the idea that the gender binary is socially constructed, bizarre, ridiculous, and confusing. Regardless of my failure to actually live as gender neutral, I am constantly conscious of the nonsense and oppression that I feel is created by a failure to break the cycle of gender binary reinforcement. The third part of the project, instructing the viewers to break out of their gender confines and dance freely, is my attempt to share my vision of the way things could be if everyone worked to deconstruct and liberate future generations of the gender ideologies which I consider to be harmful and oppressive. The dance represents my personal ideology of gender as a boundless mixture of parts in a constant state of undefined transition, and regardless of my ability to express my beliefs through my daily actions, it was a pleasure to share and celebrate them with others.