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.