Saturday, November 10, 2012

Women facing challenges


As I was researching Alternative media on women, I found a magazine called “ BUST”. This magazine was found in New York City in 1993 by Stoller,  Henzel, and Marcelle Karp. Debbi Stoller was a graduate of Yale University and Parsons School of Design, out of dissatisfaction with women’s magazines. The purpose of publishing Bust magazine was to inspire women to speak out in women issues and think positive of themselves  instead of feeling guilty being a women and facing gender issues   in this generation, where women are still being neglected in many gender issues.  Stoller states, “was to start a magazine that would be a real alternative to Vogue, Cosmo, Mademoiselle, and Glamour, something that was as fierce and as funny and as pro-female as the women we knew"( wiki). As we recognize how mainstream Vogue, Cosmo, Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines  contains  artificial body images, beauty and style, so Bust is something different that no women would be brainwashed and influenced to become like someone else who they are not. They name the magazine BUST, because it represents “provocative, funny, and also sexy”(Wiki).

Bust is not like the other magazines that you can find it anywhere; readers can only find Bust through Barnes & Noble, Borders Books, Tower Records, or subscription. The average reader is most likely between the ages of 18-30. As I was looking through this magazine on online, in each issue  there are news, popular culture, crafts, humor, personal narratives and scholarly essays. Bust magazine is for the women who are tired of reading about women being stereotype, this magazine is meant to be for the “real” women, who are positive.  This magazine is unlike the other young women’s magazine, it do not give advice about men or products need to use to become more beautiful or lose weight. Bust is about other women and issues related to women. It signifies women who are independent, young and sexually liberated. The magazine targets for younger women with an interest in feminism.


Another alternative filmmaker/ dancer  is B Girl Rokafella, she is also known as Ms. Garcia. She runs the hip-hop collective Full Circle Productions with her husband, Kwikstep who is a break dancer. When she was 10 years old in 1981, she loved dancing but at that time break dancing was only meant to be “for boys”. So she would watch boys in her neighborhood dancing Hip-Pop. In the New York Times newspaper she states “I wasn’t able to participate,” she said recently. “I was young, and I was under the impression that girls couldn’t do it.” The very term for the dancers, “b-boys,” (Claudia La Rocco).  

She wrote a grant proposal to the Ford Foundation to fund this series of discussions called “The B Girl Sitdowns”. In 2006 she curated a six city series of discussions and activities that would be organized and hosted by female street dancers in their own cities, outspreading an invitation to all Hip Hop artists, male and female alike. The archival film began to grow a story of its own and so began the search to produce a documentary about the journey of B Girls. Full Circle has recently received a film production grant from Bronx Council on the Arts. According to the reading Women Make Movies Debra  states, “ The development of multi-media technologies, including the internet, and the growth of the new cable channels have opened new doors”( Zimmerman, 265).  The reason we know about Rocafella is because of the internet and other Alternative  media sources that shares inspiring stories about real people that we don’t watch continually on ads and media mainstream.

 





B Girl Rocafella directed a documentary film call “ All The  ladies Say”. In this documentary she brings all the women and men who are break dancers.  Rocafella’s story is very inspiring, because lot of women even today do not feel comfortable saying they break dance. Most of the movies that we watch men are always doing breaking dance, when female are just dancing “sexy hip-pop dance”, now that Rocafella has shared her story of being female break dancer it should motivate other female break dancers to really go out there and battle with the men.  








http://alltheladiessay.com/blog/

1 comment:

  1. Interesting piece. I love to watch the show "So you think you can dance" when I have time which these days is hardly ever. However, they have had some female breakers, they have also had female krumpers. I think that through that show they are very accepting of any style of dance. The have choreographers work with these dancers in so many different genres trying not to discriminate with race or gender.

    I think this woman B Girl Rockafella is amazing from what you say. I think her love for the art of breaking and her desire to make it acceptable for woman to partake in can only do good. It is not about being a man or a woman it is about being a dancer, an artist, to her.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.