Events

“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.