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God I’ve read some shit from intelligent people about #cuties When I started drawing Becoming Unbecoming I had to depict my own 10/11 yr old self in sexual situations with adults S’what the book is about after all. I struggled with the problem of making inadvertent child porn...
Thereby exacerbating the issue I was trying to critique: society’s global problem with recognising whose fault child sexual abuse is. I’d studied visual culture for years as well as my own long discovery through therapy. Crucially tho I’d also studied feminist & trauma theories
I just read an article that explained #cuties come from a conservative perspective despite what the culture war says about it. Well, duh!!
Of course it’s conservative! It protects the status quo. What’s the status quo? 1. The spectacle of hypersexualised girls 2.The freedom of men to wank at it 3.the complete & utter disregard for the safety & future well being of girls everywhere. Collateral damage they are
How did I overcome the problem of making inadvertent child porn about my own life? I took some early drawings to a v wise older feminist professor (we had them in the olden days) & talked through how my work would operate within the wider visual culture. #cuties
Some drawings were taken out forever & will remain out of public view. It was useful for me to make them as part of the whole “critique” & process of making a work of art as well as exploring my own perspective as an abused, exploited girl. #cutiesnetflix
But those drawings didn’t need to be part of the whole for the work to *work* In fact the work works better without them. It draws people in without repelling or titillating them & allows a deeper undertaking for those who’ve not really considered these issues much
Of course it didn’t get loads of clicks & cause outrage & earn me ££££ but you know what? It did allow 1000s of women & girls to contact me to discuss their own experiences & start recovery + people generally to understand more about misogyny
And it inspired things like this around the world https://unacomics.com/2019/12/29/becoming-una-five-years-on/
This blog post from 2014, just before Becoming Unbecoming came out is about spectacle in rape depictions, honor among artists & artistic freedom #cuties #cutiesnetflix https://unacomics.com/2014/11/19/comics-forum-presentation-the-legacy-of-artemisia-or-why-should-we-care-that-someone-was-raped/
Director Maïmouna Doucouré claims to want audiences to feel uncomfortable. This is what Phoebe Gloekner said about A Child’s Life. It’s meant to be uncomfortable viewing but as we already see with #cuties taken out of context a single image is it’s own creature. It’s free...
Taken out of context those videos of girls humping the floor *are* child porn & can be used as such. Total disregard for the girls on screen & girls everywhere who are treated like this. Doucouré is not showing us anything we didn’t know but #cuties gives this spectacle wings
