Collage

For our "show and tell" type project tomorrow, I chose an idea that I had from HMK's narrative collage. Her collage was about women's strength, particularly through characters and superheros, and after looking at the images I noticed a trend with most of the women. It seems like there's no shortage of women superheros (though it's no comparison to men superheros), but one thing that is constant is the way they're drawn/created wearing skimpy clothes and having large breasts.

I realize that there is a certain style to comic book drawing, which I guess can be most accurately described as "exaggerated". To be fair, women's bodies aren't the only ones that get distorted in these depictions; men are drawn with huge muscles and a general body-builder physique. However, since this is a women's studies class, I decided to focus mainly on the depictions of women and so I gathered images of superheros like Catwoman, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman, as well as some human images of these cartoon characters like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and Xena. I wanted to include the real-life women in my picture to show how the style of dress is still exaggerated even in real life.

Before this class, I didn't pay much attention to these characters. Of course, I'm not the first person to notice this trend of scantily-clad, supposedly "powerful" women as cartoon characters, but I definitely noticed the trend more as a result of this class.