Sunday, November 22, 2009

Lesbians??

So I was reading the Ciasullo article, and I was linking it to our class discussion on Thursday. Remember, on Thursday we looked at some print ads, and we found possible queer connotations to them? And then as I was reading the article that Ciasullo wrote, which I loved, I sort of thought of the same thing, but in regards to lesbians.
Ciasullo talks about two predominant lesbian images that are evident throughout the mainstream media. She mentions the "butch" and the "femme." The former, she argues, is the stereotypical image of a lesbian, wearing male clothing, no make-up, and erasing all traces of being a female. She appears to be tough, strong, almost like a male. The latter description, Ciasullo argues, represents lesbian identity in a different form. it "normalizes the heterosexual" image of what it means to be a female, and even though a woman is a lesbian, she looks like a woman, and there is no correlation with being the stereotypical "butch."

So I was looking through many ad campaigns for designers, and I came across couple of images that might be interpreted in a similar way that the ads we analyzed on Thursday did.

The Versace Fall-Winter '08 Campaign
And here is the Marc Jacobs Fall-Winter '08 Campaign.
(it is actually worth noting that this campaign used the two singers from the group called TATU, who made their career by making their lesbian relationship public, and a part of their group).

3 comments:

  1. And then they fell out of the spotlight when one of them got pregnant by her boyfriend.

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  2. Hmm. I guess then they might as well play into the stereotype of the butch and the femme.

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