PROJECT #2
Whose Genitalia is it Anyway?
The idea for this project was spawned after viewing the educational film, Surgical Reconstruction of Ambiguous Genitalia in Female Children. The title, intriguing in both its length and content, leads to a series of questions concerning ethics. With the short film I made, I hoped to show on a very basic level, the absurdity of assigning gender to a child who is barely over the age of 2 and unaware of the idea of gender altogether. To drive this point home, I compared the surgery to a kind of arts and crafts project, using construction paper to reveal the artificial aspects of this human-induced transformation.
This video is a combination of found footage, video I recorded, and segments of stop-motion animation. I opted for stop-motion animation for the assembling of the female stick figure because without the hands physically moving all of the pieces, it makes it seem more like an act of God -- a role which surgeons take into their own hands when assigning gender to a child. Other than that, I wanted to show the parallels of the two actions (the surgery and the construction of the stick figure) through continuity transitions, thus the juxtaposition of the found footage with my own.
