Page 8 - GIRLS' LOCKER ROOM

Artist’s Statement
For the past year I have been obsessed with the concept of being a girl. What it means to me, to others, and to the world. Today, in 2016, the world of gender politics is being discussed on bigger and bigger platforms, and is demanding an audience. As an audience member and a speaker myself, I mulled these concepts over and over in my mind. I wondered where I fit in this web of femininity, androgyny, and fluidity. And, so then, what did I want to contribute to the discussion? How could I advance the lives of girls?
I began with myself.
I have always felt, what I like to call, aggressively female. I feel aggressively female both in my polarity as well as my feelings of ferocious protectiveness of the gender. I first realized I was aggressively female when I watched Daphne Blake in Scooby Doo. I identified with Daphne. I identified with her desire to look beautiful for herself in all situations. I identified with her taste and touch of glamour even when she was sick, scared, being made fun of, or even left alone. I was angry though when she was constantly the damsel in distress, and even angrier when I felt myself (briefly) wanting to be the damsel, because I thought that’s what being a beautiful woman meant.
But I also didn’t want to be Velma. While Velma was smart and rocked a pleated skirt better than anyone else, she was the classic archetypal woman “too focused on her career to care about her looks”. Even then, the second Velma lost her glasses, she became a damsel herself. Now where does that leave me?
I never wanted to be beautiful for the attention of men, or even women, for that matter. I wanted it for me. That’s why the definition of beauty is completely arbitrary; to be beautiful is how the self defines it, and therefore cannot be defined. And the self-definition is fluid and malleable. My idea of beauty and girlhood has evolved as I’ve gotten older, wiser, as I’ve found and lost love, and as the world has changed around me. It will change before spring, and it will change a hundred more times.
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