Hi
Wednesday night (November 9th) I am showing some of my critical work (Princess) at the Cultch (1895 Venables in Vancouver). The show runs until November 27th. Come on down and check it out! See attached the invitation and one of the Princess pieces (Princess Glutton).
“Princess” comments on the current revival of stereotypical girlhood through the “princess phase” which is being marketed as a ‘natural’ part girlhood and, according to The New York Times book reviewer Annie Murphy Paul, “should qualify as an official development stage” [i]. However, is this contemporary princess craze that is being gobbled up by girls and parents alike a product of the disappearance of Feminism through the “preference for stereotypical girlhood … [and] the increase in anti-feminist ideas” [ii] or a “new sexism’? In her 2010 book “Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism” Natasha Walter states, “this hyper-sexual culture is getting fiercer and stronger, and is co-opting the language of choice and liberation”. [iii] Moe’s princesses deconstruct the origins and reinstituted normalization of the precious child in the economically privileged West. They are a documentation of the contradictions that can exist within the psyche of femininity that is informed by the patriarchal constructions of the romantic child: her hyper-feminine is playfully combined with irreverence and, exposing incongruity, work to complicate and transgress any reductionist and fixed notions of female identity.
[i] Paul, Annie Murphy “Is Pink Necessary?” The New York Times, January 23, 2011.
[ii] Dixon, Nicole “The Other F-Word: The Disappearance of Feminism from our Fiction” CNQ 80/ 2010 (2-17).
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