By Courtney Brookes
Project title: Naming or Shaming
Emergent Practice: The emergent practice that the design project lends itself to is a combination of social action and experimental process. The end product will be a call for social action and the content will be created through what I consider to be something experimental.
The issue: As Feminism has evolved as a movement we have seen a New Wave emerge which heavily relies on modern technology, specifically the Internet, to share their cause. Using Social Media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, and Personal Blogs issues such as Body Image, Sexualisation, and basic gender equality are challenged and opened for discussions in mediums the contrast the traditional protests and essays of the traditional movement from the 1960’s. The accessibility of the Feminist discussion now has opened the movement up to a large amount of backlash and shows high amounts of verbal abuse against individuals sharing their opinions and the entire movement. The degrading language and comments is now almost inseparable from New Age Feminism and highlights the necessity of the movement, but is also simultaneously holding it back through stopping the discussion.
The possible change: The possible change that can occur is a reduction in derogatory and abusive language used towards woman who identify as Feminists, as well as, common place names used for all girls and women. The effects of the ‘slut-shaming’ will be made prevalent and also be reduced overtime.
The design action to the support change: The design action to support the change in language surrounding Feminism and women will be in the form of a video. It will be a structured and scripted short film, which will go for 3-5 min and use dialogue, which I have created, and some from the comments section of various Feminist social media accounts.
The Brief: The project ‘Naming or Shaming’ will be a 3-5 minute video, which utilises humour to address the serious issue of derogatory and abusive language, which is affecting the Feminist Movement, and overall perception of women. The video will consist of a number of scenes all filled with vulgar dialogue which can be labelled as ‘slut-shaming’.
The everyday scenes will contrast reality, as the normal reaction to this language will be removed, showing a speculative future but also highlighting how frequently this type of language is used to describe women and the Feminist Movement.
The video will have to be storyboarded and scripted using dialogue created and collected and then locations scouted to film the variety of scenes. The scenes will interchange quite frequently and create a humorous and punchy video that has quite an obvious and serious underlying message. The video will be easy to share online which will assist the Feminist Movement also attempting to fight this issue.
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