X-Out Boundaries Private & Public Symbolic Essay
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X-out Boundaries Private & Public Symbolic Essay 1. Introduction Gender interactions perplex human beings. Intimate unresolved space, complex background stories and taboos impede subjects’ expression, counteracting and deterring insight capacity. Hindrance to vent and to confront deeply entrenched personal events and feelings in the midst of the public arena heats the cauldron where gender inequalities are brewed and institutionalized. A reserved and excluding geography of sexuality precludes women, young women, and girls from constructing an alternative thinking, exercising their citizenship, maintaining an open dialogue, and taking subsequent empowered actions (Hubbard 2001:52). Such customary, jagged topography deflects social enrichment coming from forces that could otherwise foster untested foundations of moral progress. The symbolic essay being presented here aims to provide supplementary support to a discourse of openness and acceptance around sexuality, and to counteract double standards and consequent sex-related harassment, corruption, and crimes against women and children (Saunders 2008:1). It also intends to demonstrate that the stiff and brittle frontiers between what is private and what is public are intimately related to patriarchal values and praxis. Images, in two different categories, make up the essential product of this symbolic ethnology. They support a form of activism that aspires to elicit a collective change of consciousness in regards to the private/public dichotomy: A. Model-informants, who consented to portraiture of their erotic interactions, showing waist up nudity. B. Images that artistically compare the sexual organs of tropical plants and of humans, made possible by the voluntary posing of professional artists. The following visual-arts and accompanying research work have been assembled here in Montreal, beacon city, wherefrom women’s studies are generated, broadened, and diffused throughout the world. It is responsive to the present, challenged by issues of corruption, women’s oppression and child sexual commercialization. It aims to soften monolithically constructed vision by motivating a more assertive and vanguard political- will for change in relevance to social interplay within the private/public frontiers. 2. Problem Statement In the year 2010 nudity and sex are still taboo around the world with the exception of small and localized social groups. Talking overtly about sex raises deep emotional reactions or stern political stands. Binary oppositions, such as those of body and soul, flesh and spirit, instinct and reason, provoke cheerless controversy or mute silence. Even though our civilization has made large strides in the study and the explanation of non-Western peoples, we find it difficult to talk reflexively, or to question deep-rooted patterns that cause serious social disruption in our own society. This is especially true when such culturally constructed expressions are related to convention, behavior and crimes over sex. The severity of a worldwide problem to which humanity is just starting to awaken with news broadcasted almost every week about boys and girls abused in all kinds of institutions and contexts, hits our sense of humanity, and makes us wonder, in what kind of fundamentalist and oppressed societies we still live. Taking an example about a reality occurring in almost every country around the world, I will transcribe some statistics revealed in recent reports pertaining to a public motion carried at the Colombian Congress, pursuing condemnation of crimes related to forced sexual commercialization and abuse of children: In the last year, at police stations and social institutions, 18 000 cases of sexual violence against children were reported, representing only 30% of the estimated occurrences. Authorities reckon that there may be 35 000 children under the age of 14, who are sexually exploited and forced into prostitution (El Tiempo 2009). Throughout the world, as I write in April 2010, it is estimated that 1.8 million children are being propelled into the macabre market of sexual exploitation! And, what is even more scandalous than constructing wider spaces for sex talk, imagery, and openness, is the fact that, according to UNICEF surveys, around 150 million girls and 73 million boys worldwide have been either abused or sexually commercialized (Mojica 2009:1). On the Internet, pornography, a swelling and mutating mammoth industry, largely disseminated in the last decades, has opened the doors to more tolerant social attitudes toward sexual portrayals. This virtual trade, in 2003, comprised 260 million Web pages, and in 2006 produced 97 billion dollars in revenues worldwide (Techmision 2008:1). We also know that in this same year, according to studies of the London School of Economics, 9 out of 10 children of ages ranging between 8 and 16 years have accessed pornography on the Internet, unintentionally in many of the cases; and that in the same year, over 20 000 images of child pornography were posted online weekly (Techmision 2008:2). A pornography that dehumanizes and is structurally violent against women has the worst of effects on children who are discovering their erotic selves. Children are also confronted with the Primal Scene fear—a locus of observed, imagined or fantasized sights of parents’ intercourse, perceived as a scene of violence happening in darkness and clandestinity (Mijolla-Mellor 2005:1). No doubt, sexual education can benefit from more open artistic representations of sexuality within familial, institutional and cultural spaces. Understanding the true weight of the above-mentioned statistics and facts raises the deepest of questions in regards to what is wrong in our social order concerning sexuality and how it is dealt with. The emotion and meaning concerning the suffering that children undergo on behalf of the society that still feels pride in basing its values on dire patriarchy (Bailey 2000:388) will shake any foundation. 3. Background I walk through life as a communicator, as a recognized professional photographer, and as an aspirant anthropologist contesting the expressions of masculine hegemony, which are reproduced in the behavior of men and women among all societies where males are dominant. In this sense, identifying myself with centaur Chiron, who was irremediably injured, and still a healer, I obey an imperative necessity to alleviate by unveiling. Performing as any other father, I experienced an all pervading foggy and undeterred idiosyncrasy diffused socially and throughout the media, instilling patriarchal values of superficial becoming on an exceptionally brilliant girl who was soundly curious and assertive about knowledge. It rendered her self-conscious, spending precious time almost every day embellishing and trimming up her face, hair and body, insecure and obsessed in front of a mirror. 4. Environment The use of personal problems for intellectual purposes, the turning of inner debates into social studies, and the dramatization of the essential characteristics of our time, conform a dialectic synergy between self perceived reality and action for change (Mills and Mills 2000:201 in Brewer 2005:672). Bearing this approach in mind, kindly construe from some of the following paragraphs expounding strong statements. Current means of communication allow broader views of humanity. Glances at peoples’ actions in any corner of the world, or how their self-representations are exposed, reach us in instant image and sound clusters. Social networks on the Web, videos, e-mails, Web logs, self-casts, cell-phones, reality shows, and investigative journalism are some of the tools that are gradually erasing the barriers between the private and the public realms. Sexual, economic and political power constitutes the principal domain, in which ethical issues are discussed within society. Les bijoux indiscrets (Foucault 1978:77) of modernity, the ubiquitous voice of social response over pan-media information, presses parameters on sexuality secrecy, on economic confidential procedures, and on political murkiness. A haunted ring made of an alloy of social networks and information forces is magically exposing classified, or sensitive, information about familial, corporate, and government realms. This heightens a sense of openness and of visible responsibility with alleviating implications for the social discourse. The muting of sex seems to have come along with the surge of capitalism as a disciplinary power that commands all bodily forces to production and to the benefit of corporations. The suppression of eroticism by religious morals, likewise, restricted carnal expression to the bedroom of our parents, where they hid to procreate (Dreyfus 1983:128). Women’s dissatisfactions were also confined there. The patriarchal apparatus has utilized the potential of marketing strategies and communications to maintain masculine hegemony in command of an extreme form of capitalism, which buys, defiles and plunders. This system, for the sake of individualistic and commercial interest, diminishes women and lures them away from power (Krystal 2008:1). Women, therefore, fail to be equally represented at the head of social, scientific and political institutions. Rights of self-determination, earning capacity and political influence of women are still clearly inferior to those of men. Women are also markedly subservient to men in the realm of mass communications. Articulated stereotypes in market advertising and entertainment media (i.e. movies, music lyrics,