RESEARCH & APPLICATION
While developing my idea and the project outcome further, a lot of research was conducted. This consists of literature that I read, related practices, that inspired my project, as well as the social media research I did through Instagram.
Seventeen is a YouTube channel that offers a variety of topics to their audience such as fashion, beauty, celebrities and lifestyle. They often upload informative videos, that engages their viewers to join in on the important conversations of the 21st century, like feminism for example. This specific video finds a number of individuals being interviewed about what feminism means to them personally. Everyone seems to be giving similar answers such as the equality of the sexes, the topic soon shifts towards intersectional feminism. All people involved do a great job at explaining in short, what intersectional feminism even means and why it is so important for us in the times we live in now. In the end, one of the participants summarises it nicely by mentioning, that if your feminism is racist, transphobic or ableist, then it cannot be classed as feminism, as we have to acknowledge the different levels, that womanhood alone brings.
This video is an excellent example, of what feminism in the 21st century needs to be looking like, and that it is completely outdated to not be inclusive towards other minorities within the feminist movement.
Seventeen YouTube, What It Means To Be A Feminist (2017)
MasterClass, How to Write Poetry: 11 Rules for Poetry Writing Beginners (2021)
As someone who never wrote poetry in a professional setting before, it was extremely difficult to find a starting point. Research into this brought me to a MasterClass article in writing poetry. Throughout the 11 rules, the article guides the reader into understanding the structure of poetry, as well as stylistic choices that are classed as impactful. The biggest eye-opener towards writing decent poetry was learning to treat my spoken word like any other essay, as well as not writing and finishing all at once but rather to sit on it for a couple of weeks to revise and improve.
Anita Corbin, Visible Girls (1980, 2014)
During the 1980s/90s Anita Corbin went around London pubs and bars to photograph women. Her initial goal was to create a photo series of women representing different subcultures throughout those two decades.
She revisited these photographs in 2014 when she started to reconnect with some of the women for a follow-up interview and she was able to recreate some pictures in the exact same location and setting. This inspired her exhibition Visible Girls, which toured through the UK from 2018 to 2019.
Corbin’s exhibition focuses mainly on how these women changed over the time, that passed between the two captures moments. In a way, this inspired the intention behind the project. This project was created with the purpose of creating a base for a conversation between the generations. Just like the women in the Visible Girls series reflect on their generation from over 30 years ago, it would be an achievement if this project brings older generation feminists to remember, that they were once considered the younger generation.
Julia Engelmann, One Day (2013)
Julia Engelmann, a young German university student, went viral on YouTube in 2013, when she performed a self-written spoken-word piece at a slam poetry competition. Her work One Day talks about the anxiety that comes with wasting away days, while being young, which she based on the song The Reckoning by Asaf Avidan (2008). With the emotions, only a young person living through what she is describing knows, she captivates the audience within only a few minutes. This is what initially inspired to use slam poetry as a medium for this project. The power and impact, that spoken word has in gripping the listeners in such a short period of time, is what this project strives to achieve.
Blythe Baird, Pocket-Sized Feminism: The Short Film (2017)
Blythe Baird wrote Pocket-Sized Feminism in 2016 and performed it at a slam poetry showcase. She describes the guilt, that occurs when she keeps her feminism to herself, when she doesn’t speak about something, that someone did to her and has to watch them do it again to someone else. She elaborates by mentioning the fear of standing up (for herself), and someone noticing, that she was sitting there all along (Baird, 2016). Baird’s short film adaption, that has the same name, makes use of the poem as a voiceover, just like this project plans on utilising the written piece. The source embodies very closely, what this project will look like visually. The footage chosen is of feminists during the Women’s March in Washington D.C, while also overlapping it with the spoken word, which is performed by a variety of women, of different ethnicities and ages. The stylistic choice of portraying the visual images in black-white, as well as the impact it has, is also something this project was inspired by.
Anna George, Slam Poetry – A link between black feminism and oral poetry traditions (2017)
Anna George mentions an important link between feminism, especially black feminism, and spoken word in her essay, which was published in the International Journal for Intersectional Feminist Studies, Vol. 3, Issue 2. She puts a big focus on the origin of oral poetry within the African black culture, but also contrasts, how poetry is often seen as a less sophisticated form of literature. As the oldest form of literature, poetry dates back to times where written material was not imaginable. Over time poetry evolved to a written and printed medium, even though the latest trend shows lyrics, a form of poetry, winning prizes, such as the Nobel Prize for Literature. Taking this into consideration it can be said, that poetry has shifted from being displayed on a page, to being performed on a stage. George puts emphasis on the impact poetry has, when it is performed. The audience is not just experiencing the written word but is able to emerge themselves into the emotions, that listening to a human voice can cause.
Stassa Edwards, The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism (2018)
This articles discussed the sudden exposure of a so-called Shitty Media Men List, which was published in Harper's Magazine. It later turns out, that the list was compiled by writer Katie Roiphe. This list sparked a backlash towards the at the time ongoing and rising #MeToo movement. This negativity was especially seen from second-wave liberal feminists, as they accused 21st-century feminists of being radical and having a bad influence on feminism as a whole. What was criticised the heaviest was the way some women were forced to come out with their own #MeToo stories, without being ready for it. Older generation feminists don't seem to understand the wish of self-inflicted victimhood by announcing one's story to the whole world.
The representation of the difference between the two generations of feminists is very obvious within this article. This gave an appropriate point to start the initial research into this issue. I quickly realised, that this is a conflict, which goes way deeper than I originally thought, as I started exploring the relationship between daughters and their mothers, while also reflecting it back onto my own upbringing.
Roberta S. Sigel, John V. Reynolds, Generational differences and the Women’s Movement (1979-80)
During this article, Sigel and Reynolds develop something called the sex-stratum theory, which is a hypothesis based on the initial stratum theory by Anne Forner. In Age Stratification and Age Conflict in Political Science (1947), Forner theorises, that a difference or misunderstanding in or because of age does not cause conflict between individuals, if they have a common ground, that is either in jeopardy or even unifying.
The stratum theory, that was discussed in this text, is the inspiration behind the message and intention of this project. This project is hopefully able to aid as a mean to start a conversation between the generations, to realise, that instead of focusing on differences between the age groups, to rather concentrate on the reason, that brings them together as feminists.
Deborah Frances-White, The Guilty Feminist (2018)
Deborah Frances-White is an Australian comedian, who created The Guilty Feminist Podcast in 2015. Out of this idea, she originated her book under the same title in 2018, in which she states to be a feminist even though she confesses to doing certain things, which could be classed as being anti-feminist. At the beginning of her book, Frances-White gives a short introduction to the waves of feminism, which is incredibly helpful for anyone just getting into the topic of women’s rights. In relevance to this project, however, it was her characterisation of the third, fourth and even the currently still forming the fifth wave, which was the most insightful. While first-wave feminists were mostly white women, who in retrospect behaved in a racist manner against non-white women, second-wave feminists had a large group of women of colour, as well as Jewish and queer women. This fact often gets forgotten and only the third wave manages to embrace the intersectionality.
Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism (2014)
Laura Bates, an English feminist writer, founded the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012 through a Twitter account after experiencing multiple, of what she calls, tipping points. The occurrences she describes within this are all experiences of sexism, that were aimed towards her. These can be minor incidents, such as having a guy whistle at you on the street, or something bigger and more gravely, like sexual abuse for example. She compiles all these instances and labels them under the term Everyday Sexism. This project, which started out as a social media account to share with others who experience everyday sexism, soon grows into a website, that allows to send in anonymous submissions to share personal stories.
Everyday Sexism helped develop the methodology of social media research for this project. The initial use of Twitter to help people with similar experience, share their stories and find like-minded individuals, inspired this project, to make use of the social media platforms available, which are in majority are used by people ranging ages from 15 to 30. Therefore, this methodology would help gather insights from the target audience of the third, but mainly the fourth wave feminists, or generally speaking feminists, that grew up during the late 20th and early 21st century.
Social Media Research (Instagram)
Through the research stage, I also started collecting impressions from willing participants on Instagram on my topic of generational feminism. They all answered a variety of simple questions, such as Do you class yourself as a feminist? or Have you experiences a generation gap within feminism yourself?
The results showed, that 83% of the participants would say of themselves to be feminists and 81% also agreed to have experienced the gap within generations before. The responses gathered from this research were used to create the spoken word, as I wanted real-life experiences from people as well as my own background to influence this part of the project.
