Welcome to Badass Beauties: The Culture of Rebellious Femininity
An explorative multi-media essay aimed at capturing diverse individual expressions of femininity.
About the Project
Senior Honors Thesis Creative Scholarship
“Badass Beauties: the Culture of Rebellious Femininity” is an explorative multi-media essay aimed at capturing diverse individual expressions of femininity. By capturing women’s insecurities, confidences, struggles, and personal experiences with femininity through images and words, it is my hope to re-imagine the feminine in an effort to be more inclusive, and to capture a genuine representation of feminine power and identity. This project is an inter-disciplinary accumulation of my college education, my interests, and my personal struggles as a woman trying to establish my own identity in a world that often marginalizes women’s voices, identities, and abilities. I hope that with this project I can help to break down --or at least bring into question-- gender roles and norms, and the stigmas around female sexuality, natural beauty, and individual and non-traditional expressions of femininity. The photo series addresses this challenge to restrictive feminine norms through an inter-sectional feminist framework in order to identify the ways in which concepts of the feminine are tied into race, gender, ability, power, and sexuality. The project has developed through its own creative process, evolving as an expression of these women’s personal experiences with their femininity independent of my artistic vision in a way that captures the raw emotion and power of these women’s personal experiences with their own diverse feminine identities that I would not have been able to access if I had tried to force the artistic process. It has become a way for women to voice and celebrate their femininities for themselves, and that’s something worth sharing.
Portrait Sessions
This project began from an idea and developed as I learned more about myself and what it became as I photographed more and more of these women. It became less of an artistic project which I could manipulate and more an outline of a project that created itself. I was able to create an outlet for self expression for these women, and I learned much more about my own femininity in the process.
The Mission
This project is aimed at not only bringing in to question and challenging traditional notions of femininity, but also celebrating the diversity, power, and beauty of individual expressions of femininity.
Background Research
This project has been influenced by my college education as a whole and the intersectional feminist perspectives I have gained through my own personal experiences. It encompasses my own perspectives of feminine identity, collaborated with those of the women I photographed, and I examine this through an intersectional feminist framework largely influenced by the books "The Beauty Myth" and "The Body Project".
