On Feb 17, 2020, the official account of The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League on Weibo announced the launch of its virtual idols "Hongqiman" and "Jiangshanjiao", and set up a new official microblog, and called on people to "come and support the League Idols".
You’ll find Johanna Toruno on the streets of NYC plastering pictures of her flower-filtered poetry, Kendrick Lamar, and Selena on blank walls, street lights and buildings. When I came across The Unapologetically Brown Series on Instagram I was intrigued not only by the name but by the concept of being unapologetic and brown as the premise for a body of street art.
A photo project/online feed to increase visibility of sex workers and increase the sex workers’ sense of community of voice, in response to a spate of violence against the community in Ireland. The project led to a piece in The National, and increased area interest and conversation about violence against sex workers.
The Guerilla Girls are masked art activists who seek to bring attention to women in the art world and expose the unfair dominance of white males in the field. Their research into the racial and gender inequality in the art world is exposed through ironically worded public posters and billboards.
Ultra-Red is a collective founded by two AIDS activists in 1994 to explore the intersection of the political and aesthetic through "militant sound investigations".
New York artist Donna Choi wanted to create a “weird, memorable way” to discuss fetishization of Asian women, so she put together a satirical series about how to diagnose Yellow Fever—the specific obsession many Western men have with Asian culture.
The over-the-top series is a discussion of race crafted for the attention span of the Internet.
I emailed with Choi about her thinking behind the Yellow Fever series.
In 2012, Sandra Fluke stood up in front of Democratic members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to advocate for the mandatory inclusion of birth control coverage in health insurance. Republicans on the committee refused to allow her to speak.
The group of NYU graduate students went to bars in Manhattan to shout back against sexual harassment and bring awareness to the Everyday Sexism project. Armed with coasters that said "#shoutingback" on them, as well as a slogan. Three different coasters with three different slogans were put on bars and tables in local watering holes. The slogans included "She ordered a drink.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
Breaking the Silence: The Importance of Mustang
Eylem Atakav on how Mustang offers an important challenge to perceptions of gender and female sexuality in Turkey.
As Deniz Gamze Ergüven's acclaimed debut film Mustang screens at the ICA, Eylem Atakav discusses gender and female sexuality in Turkey, looking at the importance of film in making women's experiences visible and changing perceptions.
"My body is not pornography" — that is the slogan written under many of the social media posts inspired by Yulia Tsvetkova. Women are posting pictures of themselves showing off their curves, body hair and scars, along with feminist art and pictures of everyday objects that look like vaginas — like fruits or flowers.
From 1993 to 1998, Spanish activist group Lesbianas Se Difunden (LSD) produced and published a collection of texts and visuals called Non-Grata (Snyder 10), using erotic images of the female body and sexual relationships to capture their audiences’ attention. Within these graphic publications would be calls for queer activism, female freedom, anti-capitalist critiques, and the overall necessity for protest (Snyder 10).
On December 1, 1994 also known as World AIDS day, participating members from LSD (Lesbianas Sin Duda), La Radical Gai, and other allies sought out to protest against the push back of rejection that many of them were receiving from the medical and social perspective.
Miku is a Japanese virtual idol. She is 16 years old. Miku is created in 2007 and has been heavily promoted since 2008 and was originally aimed at professional musicians. On September 12, 2007, Amazon.co.jp reported sales of Hatsune Miku totaling 57,500,000 yen, making her the number one selling software of that time. She was the first vocal to be developed and distributed by Crypton Future Media and sung in Japanese.
Before it was called the Downtown Arts District, many more artists lived and worked in this stretch of central Los Angeles. The neighborhood was a rough-edged alternative for people in need of large, industrial spaces. A home for those willing to be Skid Row-adjacent and amenity-non-adjacent. But Los Angeles is making an attempt at urbanization, at feeling like a much denser city, and rapid gentrification has followed.
Fanfiction is political, subversive, radical. Writing Harry Potter as a girl, Hermione as black, or Ron as transgender exposes people to narratives written from the perspective of marginalized communities. But is writing fanfiction a type of activism?
The latest in street art activism is confronting sexism in an unconventional, but wonderful, way.
Street artist, Elonë, from Karlsruhe, Germany, is paving her city with messages against sexism, street harassment and sexual abuse — all printed on menstrual pads.
Estados de excepción (States of Exception) is series of participatory cultural interventions created for women to freely and joyfully exercise our rights in public and secure environments, currently being produced in Mexico and abroad.
Empathy may be the cornerstone of any Global Justice movement, but how do we cultivate the conditions for empathy to thrive?
The wheelbarrow symbolises something universally useful, practical and pleasingly straightforward. A space to deliver things in an efficient and direct manner - no packaging and completely people powered.
Girl Be Heard is a theatre company founded by Artistic Director, Ashley Marinaccio and Executive Director, Jessica Greer Morris, which melds talent and background to create social justice theatre. The company has performed throughout New York City and worldwide to tackle global issues. Their productions include 9mm America, a Theatrical Uprising Against Violence, Girlpower: Survival of the Fittest, Trafficked, Project Girl: Congo, and Child Bride.
In March 2016, Chinese feminist activists had planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign against sexual harassment advertisements, and they worked hard to raise 40,000 yuan in a month and a half. However, after perfunctory, evasive, and rejection by the relevant departments, anti-sexual harassment advertisements finally failed to go online.
“Most people can’t imagine a futurist Africa,” says Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh. She challenges this in her project, Water Life, exploring real-world issues with an otherworldly twist.
Muluneh went to Dallol, Afar, Ethiopia, an extreme landscape where it is dry and hot to capture the essence of water to life. Through her work, Muluneh highlights how water scarcity is mainly a burden on women.
Project IMPACT is an 8-week leadership-through-storytelling workshop for teen survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. The goal of Project IMPACT is to introduce survivors to the idea that sharing their stories is a powerful advocacy tool that can impact the legislative process and work to combat sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.
Lady Gaga showed up to the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards wearing a dress made out of raw meat. She claimed that the dress showed her disgust towards the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, but missed the media opportunity to clearly string her thoughts together.
A photography project on China's marriage market has recently reignited the debate about marriage in China, and the phenomenon of women deemed too old to marry, or "leftover women" in the country.