May 2022 – Yadi Wang

Intervention One Planning

The first intervention I planned was an online campaign. The campaign will be launched on social media, asking women who have been subjected to the male gaze online to describe their feelings in drawings. I will be using their paintings to create digital wearable accessories and the design will be given back to the corresponding respondent. I will also invite them as models for the shoot. Some details of the plan and forethought I have written below:

1.I wanted butterflies as the main design element, inspired by the butterfly effect. The visual product of each male gaze on the Internet is every little change, but eventually evolves into a chain reaction that can drive the system in a long and huge way. I have listed a few reference diagrams below.

2. Contact relevant cyberbullying and women’s protection organisations to collaborate. The virtual accessories will also be sold on NFT and I hope to work with these organisations to promote them, with all proceeds going back to the organisations.

3. If the production is in reality, is it possible to find opportunities to help women in terms of materials or craft.

The aim of this intervention is to bring together women who have been impacted by the male gaze to see if a community for women can be built. By presenting women’s experiences of the male gaze in an artistic way, it calls for more attention and awareness of the effects of the male gaze on women.

A butterfly made of lines, I wanted to simulate the electronic sensation of network data.

Male gaze and Female gaze

In the age of social media, hundreds of millions of photos fly around the world every day and a person can take a quick excursion through social media to thousands of photos/videos in a single day. At the same time most to images are the product of the male gaze and influencing women in a silent way. The art critic John Berger once said that women’s grooming and self-expression in public space is not really up to them – “men act, women behave. Men look at women, women see themselves being looked at by men”. Filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey first coined the term “the male gaze” in her seminal 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and she wrote that “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” The male gaze, on the other hand, is always in the ascendancy of power. It is embedded in advertising, popular culture, the teachings of parents and teachers, the rules of public space, and even our own expectations of ourselves, and it influences the way we dress, behave and talk (men, women and children) all the time.

Sexual fantasy is one of the most important drivers of the male gaze. In Feminist Philosophy of Art (2008), the scholar A.W. Eaton defines the male gaze as ‘the act of objectifying women with the male gaze for sexual pleasure’. In the male gaze, the woman is often an object that lacks subjectivity, and the female body becomes the scene of the viewer’s sexual fantasies. Thus, the process of ‘gazing’ or ‘looking’ at women often turns into a process of male gratification of his sexual fantasies. In this process, the viewer not only satisfies aesthetic pleasure, but also derives sexual pleasure from it.

A breakdown of the different scenes of the male gaze reveals them in different ways. But there are two types of inherent tensions that can be said to permeate most acts of the male gaze. The first is that although the male gaze is ubiquitous, it is very often accomplished through ‘voyeurism’. Voyeurism is not necessarily a sneaky act, such as peeking at a girl’s body in the underground. Film theorist Christian Metz has made the point that voyeurism is actually an act of viewing that is predominantly imagined and supplemented by voyeurism. The second point is that although the apparent object of the male gaze is a woman, the person to whom it is ultimately directed is in fact the gaze itself. When men admire women’s appearance, not only do women’s breasts, legs and buttocks bring sexual satisfaction and then pleasure, but being in the position of the ‘gazer’ also satisfies men’s identity or masculinity and brings them pleasure.

Whether it is the process of voyeurism or self-identification, they all have one thing in common: they embody the inequality of power relations. This is why the ‘male gaze’ can be seen everywhere, and the underlying problem is precisely the inequality between men and women.

In A Women Looking at Men Looking at Women, author Siri Hustvedt says: “There are two types of female gaze, one that follows patriarchal logic, that is, the gaze of women looking at women through the glasses of the male gaze, and the other is subversive, feminist, a gaze that that dares to confront patriarchal culture and requires a great deal of self-reflection.

In contemporary society, how far can women express themselves without being swayed by the male gaze? What is the relationship between jewellery design and gender? How can jewellery design be used in reality and help young women to reduce the objectifying influence of the male gaze?

Reference：

1.Adriana,M., Manago, L., Monique, Ward, Kristi,M., Lemm, Lauren,Reed, Rita Seabrook.(2015). Facebook Involvement, Objectified Body Consciousness, Body Shame, and Sexual Assertiveness in College Women and Me. Sex Roles volume 72, pages1–14.
2.Arjun,M., Kumar, Jasmine, Y. Q., Goh, Tiffany, H. H., Tan, Cynthia, S. Q., Siew. (2022). Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysi. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore.
3.Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T. A., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M., & Twenge, J. M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 269–284.
4.Kelly, Oliver. (2017). The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever. New Review of Film and Terlevision studies. VOL. 15, No. 4, 451-455.
5.Laura,Mulvey. (1973). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Part of the Language, Discourse, Society book series (LDS).
6.Rachel, M., Calogero. (2004). A Test of Objectification Theory: The Effect of the Male Gaze on Appearance Concerns in College Women. The College of William and Mary.

Reflections after tutoring with David and the Change in research direction

After my tutoring with David, I realised that I had been taking a personal approach to understanding the cyberbullying faced by people with facial disfigurement. All my sources of understanding came from academic articles or news interviews, I hadn’t really had a conversation with the facially disfigured and therefore I didn’t understand their real needs. Do they really need facial adornment to hide their scars? Do they think their scars are ugly? I may have started from a good point of view, but I hadn’t actually approached the target group to find out what they really wanted.

After this, I contacted a video site blogger Luli Scar who had a birthmark on her face. and conducted a brief interview with her. As we used text for the Q&A to protect her privacy, I have reproduced a translation of our interview Q&A below.

The Page of the Luli Scae and The text record of interview

Q1: Can you tell us about the origin of your scars and how you feel in the daily life? (e.g. Can someone have a bad comment or attack you on social media? Will you be impacted in reality?

A1: My scars come from a fire. I think it’s inevitable that receive negative comments or attacks, my scars are very ugly and scary, I don’t deny it. In real life my main job is as a cosplayer so the scars doesn’t bother me at work, but it’s hard to avoid in daily life.

Q2: In your videos you recreate your scars through make up, do you think you are beautifying/hiding your scars in this way?

A2: NO. Just like in makeup, you choose colours that suit your skin and amplify some of your features like your eyes or mouth. My scars are the same for me as any other part of my body, I just chose my own way of doing my makeup and shared it.

Q3:Do you think you need facial adornment to beautify or cover up your scars?

A3: If I was asked to wear facial adornments, it would make me feel very offended and uncomfortable. I’m happy to show my scars on social media, it’s not my fault or guilt, it’s part of who I am. Scars caused by accidents or birth have already caused trauma in our minds and I do not want to accept the influence of the outside world again.

After this interview, I realised that the direction I had chosen was not really helping the facially disfigured and might even be harming them. Unfortunately, this was a failed attempt. I redirected my attention to the original intention of wanting to change cyberbullying at the beginning.

The beginning about my friend’s cyberbullying stemmed from her breakup with her ex-boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend was a minor internet celebrity and after the breakup spread rumours on social media that she was cheating on him. The boy’s fans started using this to attack my friend on social media. I wanted to change the direction of the question earlier because I did not want to cause her secondary harm because of my research. But jumping out from that, we can see that the internet is full of such comments about women. When a woman behaves sexually in a way that is not in line with public expectations, people will always start to criticise her, whether this is true or not. All things in this category can be classified as Slut-shaming.

I was reminded that in my everyday browsing of the internet, the vocabulary of cursing in either language includes some female sexual organs. There are also specific vicious words used to abuse women. Especially with the rapid development of internet technology, a huge amount of information is rapidly transmitted to us every day from all over the world. Due to the overwhelming amount of information, it is difficult for people to take the time to understand the full extent of an event and often react extremely quickly in the moment. I wanted to change this and in my research I learned about the ethics of care. And in the article on Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying, the social experiments presented made me realise the power inherent in the ethics of care.

What I want to focus on now is reducing sexualisation of women in the internet and creating a caring ethical online environment. I started doing research on the idea and found a movement called Pussyhat that fits with my view as a reference.

A pussyhat is a pink, crafted hat, created in large numbers by women involved with the United States 2017 Women’s March. They are the result of the Pussyhat Project, a nationwide effort initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, a screenwriter and architect located in Los Angeles, to create pink hats to be worn at the march. Donald Trump’s comments about women and “grabbing them by the pussy” have spurred many women into action and led to the creation of hand-knitted pink pussy hats.

By making Pussyhats, the organizers also look to reclaim two elements that are traditionally associated with femininity and womanhood—and derided precisely because of those reasons. “Pink is considered a very female color representing caring, compassion, and love – all qualities that have been derided as weak but are actually STRONG,” the intro continues. “Wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.”The fact that Suh and Zweiman didn’t just ask women to go buy a pink hat and send it in was also deliberate: They wanted to celebrate knitting and crochet precisely because they’re traditionally women’s crafts—and skills passed from generation to generation: “Knitting circles are sometimes scoffed at as frivolous ‘gossiping circles,’ when really, these circles are powerful gatherings of women, a safe space to talk, a place where women support women.”

I also hope to form such communities to help women express their bodies and minds freely. This is what I will be aiming to do in my next research.

Reference:

1.Slut-shaming
2.26 English Swear Words That You Should Use Very Very Carefully
3.Ethics of care
4.Applying a ‘digital ethics of care’ philosophy to understand adolescents’ sense of responsibility on social media
5.Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying
6.Here’s the Powerful Story Behind the Pussyhats at the Women’s March
7.Pussyhat
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/pink-pussyhats-will-be-making-statement-womens-march-washington-1601088

Attempt to find the precise problem

Through data research and the questionnaire I did in my last project, it can be seen that appearance attacks are the most common form of cyberbullying.

People with natural birthmarks, trauma or disfigurement on their faces are often the easiest victims of attacks and most are ashamed to show their appearance on social media. Over a quarter (28%) of people with a disfigurement have experienced a hate crime, yet the majority did not go on to report it, according to new research by the charity Changing Faces.The survey conducted by Savanta ComRes of more than 1,000 people with a visible difference, such as a mark or scar, showed that, while most abuse happens in public, more than 40% of people with a visible difference have had negative experiences online and one in 10 say they are repeatedly harassed on social media. Almost half (45%) of those who have experienced negative behaviours say they have lost confidence, over a third (35%) say they now feel anxious when they go out and over a quarter (27%) say it has had a negative impact on their mental health.

And through a BBC News interview, I learn that in the real world, some haters secretly film them and upload photos in social media. The rapid spread of the internet has amplified the impact of these injuries and formed groups of haters on various social media. I began to think about the possibility of creating virtual facial adornments in conjunction with NFT’s technology to help facially disfigured people be brave enough to share their appearance and experiences on social media.

Reference:

1.Instagram removes picture of 12-yr-old with facial disfigurement, faces social media backlash, https://www.hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/instagram-removes-picture-of-12-yr-old-with-facial-disfigurement-faces-social-media-backlash/story-XxxI70fGZPl9UeNDnu3o4H.html
2.28% of people with a facial disfigurement have been a victim of hate crime
3.Living with facial disfigurement – ‘People stare and take photos of me’

What

Project 6 – What is the subject or area that you intend to research? What is the precise question that you will be addressing?

Based on previous projects, the direction I am interested in remains the relationship between technology and humanities in the Internet age. In my last project, I studied cyberbullying and tried to propose several interventions. David suggested that instead of thinking about jewellery all the time, I could jump ahead and consider which direction was an area of research that interested me. Based on David’s suggestion, I plan to begin by choosing a classification of cyberbullying for research and intervention. Combined with the fact that I had chosen NFT and metaverse as my research subjects in Project 3, I started to think about whether cyberbullying is getting worse because of the advancement of technology.

I did more multiverse and NFT related research. The “metaverse” builds on Web 2.0’s flat and largely asynchronous interfaces and combines our favorite features from the history of social media platforms, gaming worlds, AR/VR, and online transactions. Some of us have participated in some metaverse candidates already – whether it’s by spending time in the games or worlds of Meep City or Nikeland on Roblox, attending Travis Scott’s or Arianda Grande’s concerts in Fortnite, watching a movie together with friends in BigScreen, walking through the virtual halls of an NFT museum, or playing a military-simulation first-person shooter game or running a parkour course with your best buddies.

*Musee Dezentral is the first NFT museum fully realized on the Blockchain and will feature over 200 frames. Credit: reddit*

However, cyberbullying has the potential to become more insidious and impactful since the realism that accompanies VR experiences readily translates to fear experienced emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically when individuals are targeted or threatened. The rapid development of technology has brought good things such as more opportunities for education, entrepreneurship, self-realisation, discovery and wonder for children and adults around the world.But we cannot ignore the risks that come with it and cyberbullying is just one of them. I will delve into this field in my further research to find the precise question that interest me, and afterwards I will think about how to combine it with jewellery.

Reference:

1. ntegration in ego-centric reference frames determines full-body ownership. Frontiers in psychology, 2, 35.
https://nftevening.com/musee-dezentral-the-worlds-first-decentralised-metaverse-museum-is-transforming-art-curation/
2.Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying,(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563217302613?casa_token=q1IdL2vZgQ4AAAAA:QprB_Lz8cJePUflw0G0kRY-it0W4GReVGomz1L1_v_NmIzO0UzVwgpaHS_iZhnY8bPl-wHSckNE)