CoP 3//Social Responsibility?

Today I spent the day delving into any animation site, book and magazine I could attempting to remind myself of creative works that feature the theme of social responsibility or discover something entirely new, which is most of the list featured below.

• Animal Farm, Halas and Batchelor (1954) featuring a political type uprising that is overthrown by individuals who adapt their own society.
• Can't Don't Dance, Warner Bro. Family Entertainment (1997) featuring t segregation of a group of characters within a society because of their identity
• Zootopia, Walt Disney Pictures (2016) featuring the segregation of a group of characters within a society because of their identity
• The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios (2004) featuring the shutdown of a formula of powerful individuals within a society by individuals within the same society
• Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli (2001) featuring a character who questions the social conduct and roles within a society and challenges it
• Monsters, Inc., Pixar Animation Studios (2001) featuring a character who questions the social conduct and roles within a society and challenges it
• Wreck-It Ralph, Walt Disney Animation Studios (2012) featuring a character who questions the social conduct and roles towards his identity within a society and adapts it by acting
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit,  Walt Disney Studios *owned since 1981* (1981) featuring a group of character who respond to the social conduct and roles towards a sub-group within a society and change it by challenging it
• Rick and Morty, Adult Swim (2013-) featuring the questioning of class roles and political power over the masses of societies and more

There's a just a few of the animated features I've noticed a 'Social Responsibility' theme, because it's a very common writing tool. The idea of an individual, often an outcast, rising up and changing the culture/society around them.  For example, Walt Disney Animated Studios 'Aladdin' (1992) features a homeless working class character, going from living in a social structure that is predict against people like him to a point where he's changed his societies views and social behaviour. Although, in this movie Alladin has to adapt himself to be higher class in order to have the opportunity to achieve within the story; which is an odd message to portray. This writing trait is very common in storytelling, because the audience always responds well to an underdog character achieving - probably because we all have/are wanting to active something sometime in our lives. 

If I'm going to suggest animation often features and presents 'Social Responsibility' as a theme, I must mention that there are stars of animated films that represent the theme fantastically - Like Animal Farm, which also features a string of other political movements.  I'm going to suggest all (if not most) animated stories have social responsibility incorporated or represented as a characters motives and goals. For my essay I'm planning on focusing on animators working within the industry and their approach to storytelling rather than selections of films produced with animation.  For instant, I'm mainly researching Rebecca sugars work; as a bisexual woman she represents LGBT culture and challenges gender norms within her series Steven Universe. 

CoP3// Artists, Rebecca Sugar

''By excluding LGBT content from children’s media, a clear statement is being made that this is something that should be ignored.'' - Rebecca Sugar 

Rebecca sugar at the 2016 Comic-Con publicly stated that she identifies as a bisexual woman and despite the fact I didn't attend the convention, I near instantly heard about her 'coming out' from friends, the internet and all over social media. I also identify as a bisexual woman and seeing a current animator and creator of her own show being so public about herself and her characters gave me this sense of security and identity. Feeling myself represented as a queer female animator, by the first female animation series creator on cartoon network only inspired me MORE to push for diversity and representation within cartoon and my own works.

I also watched an interview like presentation given by Rebecca at the School Of Visual Arts online, in which she addresses the work process of Steven Universe, her working environment and how each episode is developed, as well as other pieces of her work like her original comics. At the begining of the presentation Rebecca also lightly touches on LGBT representation directed at kids, mentioning that LGBT themes are as much themes for children as they are adults; a child growing without representation because the idea that talking about queer culture to a child seem very inappropriate is very outdated after all, or at least it is in my own opinion and many others. She also presented a few pages of a comic she developed in 2010 titled ' Margo In Bed '. This comic reflected her own experience with manipulation within a relationship and speaks lightly about how it helped her get over the whole event, by working on the comic; despite never finishing the comic past sketches.

With the popularity of Steven Universe hitting not only the animation culture by storm, but TV ratings too; the show is set to run for it's 5 season. I'm so glad that children can grow up watching a show like this, that questions gender-norms and represents such a wide variety of not only physical identities but sexuality identities and gender identities.

CoP 3// Artists, Lauren Faust

'' I have been a lifelong feminist, and as an artist working in the animation industry for more than 16 years I have striven to do right by women and girls in the animated projects I have been part of. '' - Lauren Faust 

Lauren Faust is a self identified feminist, animation on a string of popular shows featuring strong female characters and themes such as Cats don't dance, The Powerpuff Girls, Foster's home for Imaginary friends, Wander Over Younder and creator of the reboot of my little pony 'Friendship is Magic' (first three seasons). I listened to the full Nickelodeon Podcast featuring Lauren Faust and found the interview very inspirational. The interview goes in depth about the creators experiences, inspirations and beliefs. Lauren talks about in the interview about more women getting jobs in animation, talking about how female creators getting stuck in 'clean up' roles within animation studios and missing out on higher up jobs. She also goes very in depth about strong leading girl characters in cartoons and that it's important to represent a range of emotions within characters, regardless of that characters gender. Within her career she also mentions in the interview that she took a break from animation to develop into the toy making industry, because at the time 'no one wanted girls shows'. Yet in the toys industry she felt suffocated because she was being constantly told to make her designs more pink because her toys were aimed at girls and within that industry, if you're making girls toys - it has to be pink. Overall the interview reflects on her experiences as a female animator within the animation industry, wanting to make shows representing diverse female characters.  Towards the end of the interview Lauren herself gives advice to artists wanting to get into the animation industry, talking about how important it is to get your foot in the door and really push for a better role and always look for responses to your work - which she mentioned is incredibally important for women in the industry. Outside of getting a job, she gives advice to live cheap when you're young and make sure to save money. 

Lauren Faust also mentioned Steven universe in her podcast interview, praising it for it's female representation and it's audience of both male and female, much like the audience for her creation My little pony: Friendship is Magic (although she does mock the 'bros' secretly liking the shows before coming out about enjoying a 'girls show'). Lauren Faust is the creator of many strong female characters full of diversity and not just female characters that (in her words) 'Behave like the male ones do'. 

CoP 3// What do I want to focus on?

Social responsibility is the concept that an individual within their society is in some way responsible for their own societies identity, including that societies beliefs and conduct and that an individual within their society has the capability to shape how that society is.

Within my own research in the last two years of study, I've focused on sexualisation within animated media and cartoons, and how the individuals behind these representations, create these representations only as a marketing tool - for 'sex appeal' to encourage buyers/veiwers. I've also looked into representation of strong female characters and how a female character having sex appeal doesn't necessarily mean they're falling victim to sexualization, arguing that the female form in itself has been treated as visual sex rather than a characters body. In my previous year of study, I talked about the pre-code character Betty Boop and how her character was written to be a sexually liberated young woman - at a time where women lacked confidence in their own sex and sexual expression. Because of my pervious research I've approached this new research topic in the same manner I have done for the past two years of study, falling head first into the sexualization and sexism thrown at the female form publicly in society. I developed a project called 'Just tell them to fuck off' which focused on street harassment; in the story a young lesbian woman faces several instances of street harassment each until finally she responds, giving herself a voice about the situation she's having forced onto her. I wrote this project to represent the need for victims of street harassment to feel confident enough to respond to their abuse and have a voice about it, instead of pretending it's the social norm to quickly remove yourself from the situation, smiling and not saying a word. In the end I dropped this project, all the work on the project can be found on my blogs previous to this one.

Recently I've become far more open with my own identity, both as a feminist and a queer woman, and as a creative I've written my stories and narratives to reflect my own identity and many identities that I'm aware are under represented. I attended a zine festival near a month ago where I had my own table, selling my comics and promoting my work as an animator.

 The zines I created for this fair are listed below:

• Bonk Dog, a zine about depression and anxiety 
• Lady glare, a zine about street sexual harassment and the responses from women. This zine also features transgender/genderfluid characters.
• How to be a man - How to be a woman, a set of two zines each with the same narrative that described how to be 'you'. These zines featured transgender/genderfluid characters as well as same sex relationships, body positivity and together these zines commented on how gender norms are outdated and all together stupid.
• How to love pigeon, a zine about pigeons and how they're awesome.

When I attended the zine fair I also networked with other comic creators and illustrators, a few from leeds college of art but most of them were freelancers. The artists I talked to spoke about LGBT representation and education on it, and how they feel their work helps inform others about the LGBT identities. I talked much the same with other artists are feminism and left-wing politics. Coming away from the Zine fair I was more inspired to represent within my storytelling, regardless of what media it may be in, as many sub-cultures and identities as possible.

I attended a meeting with my tutor for this year at my university which heavily encouraged me to continue the research subject I'm focusing on; I spoke about my interests in researching into LGBT culture and also animators that express their identity within their work. I mentioned Rebecca sugar ( creator of Steven Universe ) and was encouraged to research further into her work, because of the female and LGBT representation within her works.

I've begun researching gender politics, post-modernism and it's relation to feminism and character writing with taking books out from my university library. I'm also planning on researching into creatives that produce works and/or identify openly as what I've spoken about in this blog as well as animated characters and animated themes that are relevant. I also want to look into Identity representation because the nickelodeon animator Jorge Gutierrez has really caught my eye about representing Mexican culture within animation.

CoP 3// Summer Project Part 4 - dropping the project

I've been going steady though the process of inking up pages of my summer project ' Just tell them to fuck off ', a comic about street harassment. Much like my zine making process I've been using a Lightbox to trace the sketch of the comic page from one piece of cheap paper onto slightly better quality cartridge paper straight with a fine liner.

Finished Pages with 'rough pages' beneath ^

I also began working on scanning the first few pages in and digitally colouring them, but at the same time I met with my tutor for this year and discussed my idea about my year of study. In this meeting I realised I wanted to focus on LGBT and gender politics, I feel very passionate about these subjects as a story teller because I myself am a queer woman. I've also been made aware just how much I need to research in order to prepare for my dissertation.Also looking back at the script, I feel unhappy with it. It's too much work as far as pages of illustration goes and I feel like for the story it is it's visually too complecated.


Here are the first two pages of the comic project, One finished with colour:

I've began focusing more on transgender representation within LGBT representation and origionally I designed this character to be a trans woman. However I feel like this project doesn't communicate well, as a 'transgender story'. After this project I'm hoping to start developing another project titled 'Drempt awake' which focuses on the anxieties of a trans character.

CoP 3// Summer Project Part 3 - Script writing and comic thumbnailing

Today I scripted the comic I'm working on as part of my studies into Social Responsibility titled 'Just tell them to fuck off'. This comic is about street harassment, following a young trans woman named Francesca on her journey to meet her girlfriend in town. From morning to meeting, Francesca progressively experiences incidences from strangers ranging from socially appropriate to physical assault.  I'm using Francesca as a representation of events I've heard from the women I've spoken to about their experiences with street harassment. I'm also using this comic to make a comment on what is socially appropriate and what clearly isn't, such as a friendly stranger saying good morning to a stranger commenting on the size of your breasts.

It's rare I write scripts in this way for comics, I normally tend to dive straight into thumb nailing comic strips. Here's a screenshot of some of the script I've been working on...

I also spent the remainder of the day thumb nailing pages for the comic, using a fine liner and copic markers to help identify certain parts of the pages. I'm planning on begining to draw out the comic pages tomorrow...

CoP 3// Summer Project Part 2 - Street harassment research

Social responsibility is the idea that every individual and organisation within a society is responsible for that societies conduct. For this project I'm taking on this basic definition of social responsibility and applying it to responsive I've seen within the society I'm currently living within towards sexual harassment.

Image from www.stopstreetharassment.org

I've been researching street harassment statistics on a site I saw reported in an newspaper article 'www.stopstreetharassment.org' about sexual harassment. The website features a number of pages involving statistics, online articles, help & advice and a blog that that documents different stories submitted by readers. The blog posts are predominately submitted by women, about verbal harassment. The statistics recorded show a clear larger percentage of women have experienced street harassment then men and of the men that took part in the survey were LGBT identifying men who faced homophobic street harassment and slurs.

I've also spoken to three people about their experiences with street harassment - all had experienced sexual street harassment in some form. All had been verbally sexually harassed and made to feel uncomfortable. All had been followed either around a bar/pub or on the street and two had been sexually assorted multiple times. I also interviewed each on their experiences, below are quotes from the interviews;

'' So I was 14, maybe? I was on my way back from school, so I was in a school universe - it was a skirt, a shorter skirt but it was obviously a school uniform. And I walked past these guys, about four of them, all taller than me and one of them just wolf whistled at me at me and then another one joined in, and the whistles followed me down the street. And the other two guys laughed, ya'know they were laughing at me. It was terrifying, I was on my own and I was 14. ''

'' Okay so, he worked in a different building of the college but we had to walk up the same road. And I remember he would  come in on his bike, but when he saw me he'd slow down so he was right next to me. And he started off talking just kinda friendly like, like 'you're in the art class, yeah?' - it was fairly harmless. And then it just starting getting really uncomfortably sexual? He kept asking if I'd come round his place that night, happened about three times on different days. Whats worse, whenever i'd get into college he knew one of the guy's in my class - and the guy, knew it was going on and he didn't seem to care. In fact one day, after this happened I escaped into the art building and then the guy in my class came in and said 'yeah you know my mate? talking to him earlier? yeah he wants to shag you tonight at 6, so yeah.' and he just had this big old smile and found it really funny. He didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with that statement, I talked to him a lot less in class after that. ''

''so i was at the brudenell and i was with everyone, just drinking and seeing a gig, everyone had gone outside for a cig and i was taking a bit longer, when i was done i went inside, and these two men, like, called me over, and i couldn't not go near them 'cause they were standing near the front door, when i did  go near them one of them got so close i had to back against a wall, they were just trying to flirt with me, being very provocative, i was really intimidated, they were really big men, their hands were all over me, they seemed to find it quite funny with one another, i pushed past them, but afterwards i was mortified that i didn't say anything to them, and that i had to ask my friends for help because it was just so mortifying, and scary, and they both just seemed to find it funny.''

'' Alright so, (NAME) has always been a little too 'approachable' and she gets a lot of harassment, so we were walking home from college one day and we saw this dude loitering at the intersection of a road we were crossing. (NAME) made eye contact with him, smiled and said she liked his hat. We kept walking after that, heading back to my place. And we looked back and the guy was following us, just a few meters back. Not even being very subtle about it. It was very worrying and uncomfortable. In the end it took an advance from our more intimidating female friend to scare him off, well it was back when she had a mohawk. Big leather jacket. And Dr Matins. All it took was a few stomping steps towards him to have him running off the other way, if it had just been me and (NAME) I doubt he would of left us alone. ''

"so i was in a bar, where my boyfriend works. and it was pretty, quiet, it was maybe 6, he was about to get off work and i was waiting for him. this guy comes in, as soon as he comes in he looks at me, and starts going 'mmm yeah!', biting his lip, looking dead pleased to look at me, and he comes up to me and starts saying how much of beautiful woman i am, looking me up and down, i didn't say anything to him but he kept saying how beautiful i looked, how i was a 'proper' woman, it was very uncomfortable, my boyfriend noticed and came up 'cause i was looking so uncomfortable. the guy noticed that the bartender must be my partner and started justifying himself, claiming he wasn't trying to steal or objectify his woman, he's just lucky to have this woman, whatever, obviously my boyfriend was working behind a bar, and had to serve customers, and this guy just stayed next to me, staring at my breasts and legs, saying the same things over and over, and he kept trying to justify himself, saying women 'like the attention'. it was about twenty minutes before he left. But before he left, he forcefully kissed my neck. Then he left. ''

CoP 3// Summer Project Part 1 - ''Just Tell Them To FUCK OFF''

I’ve chosen the subject of ‘Social Responsibility’ for the focus of my final year study. Social Responsibility is (very briefly), is a societies behaviour and what is seen as ‘good’ and/or ‘acceptable’ behaviour. 

Introduction

I’ve been living and studying in Leeds for nearly two years now and previously coming from living far out in the country side, where everyone was either taught by your grandfather or went to school with your mother, I found it difficult at first to feel comfortable and safe walking around by myself; but soon got used to it. Although back home it’s expected to say good morning to a stranger if you pass them by and smile, it’s no where near as friendly as that in Leeds, mostly because of the obvious reason that Leeds is full of people. 

Not to suggest the people of Leeds aren’t friendly, but they’re often closed off to other people until they either: 

1. Bump into you   

2. You bump into them

3. Both at the same time. 

There have been moments (often at bus stops) where I’ve engaged in small talk with strangers, small talk itself I feel is some sort of social acceptance that we’re only speaking because it’d be awkward or perhaps even uncomfortable is we didn’t. But just as many as the friendly little moments  - I’ve had people make sexually suggestive comments towards me either by shouting them across roads or refusing to leave me alone on the street, make comments about my body and appearance and sexually assault me by touching my breasts. I’ve also witnessed other women being victim to similar behaviour by others in public, in the past two years I’ve only ever seen the victim look uncomfortable and remove themselves from the situation as quickly as possible or smile and pretend its a compliment, in hopes of getting that person to leave them alone.  Personally I’ve been in situations where I’m so intimidated by someone and feel so uncomfortable, that I’ve smiled and pretended to have taken the behaviour as a positive thing - because I’d rather get out of that situation as quick as possible then risk angering the person. 

‘Social Responsibility’ means that the individuals within a culture/society behave respectfully and in a sensitive manner towards social, cultural, economical and economical issues. This extends to how these individuals socialise with one another within their solitaires in a manner that does not change regardless of race, religion, gender, age, sexuality and so on. However there are instances which I’ve witnessed for myself where aggressive behaviour is directed towards someone because of their gender, appearance, race or religion and no one defends the victim nor do they voice their disgust about that behaviour. Not only this, but the victim themselves is silent to the abuse they’re being subjected to. I myself have hurried away from someone who has just grabbed my breasts, shouting insults in my head that I wish I could say out loud; but never do. Personally I believe women in particular act to these situations with a silent smile and a quick departure, despite the clear sexual harassment because it isn’t socially acceptable to shout at a stranger with vibrant words for ‘being nice’ or ‘giving you a compliment’. It’s become the norm for some women to be victim of sexual harassment on a daily basic and I’m starting this project to encourage them to just tell those people to ‘fuck off’.

Project outline

I’m planning on developing a comic/zine about street harassment. This project will define the difference between what is socially acceptable behaviour and what is harassment, taken from what I’ve witnessed, read, heard from victims of sexual harassment and personal experience as a woman walking down the street. I want this project to resolve itself in the end with the victim defending herself by telling the harassers to ‘fuck off’ and not just smiling and walking away. I want this project to focus on us as individuals and our obligations to our societies responsibility as feminists. I also want this project to give confidence to victims of street harassment and that it's okay to be offended and angry at someone being verbally or physically abusive towards you.

Methord/Material

I plan to hand illustrate these cartoons and to digitally colour them in photoshop, although I may change my mind as I’m really enjoying using Copic markers right now - I just can’t afford to keep replacing them.

Research

I plan to conduct my own research by speaking to other women about the sexual harassment they’ve faced publicly and how they dealt with it and how they wish they had dealt with it.