Reply

The 'Manosphere' is a term used to describe the vast and growing realms of the internet that are dedicated to misogyny. That misogyny is motivated by varying factors, but all participants on its forums, websites, and online journals subscribe to one central idea: women have ruined their world. These online users tout harmful, sexist and absurd ideas as fact. These spaces serve as a breeding ground for violent escalation and encourage its participants to threaten women. These sites are growing in quantity and ubiquity. The underpinning of hatred toward women anywhere online is so insidious that it exists as a backdrop to our regularly visited sites and apps. Even in spaces we assume are our own, misogyny seeps in. Men's hatred of women is clear and abundant on social media under photos of old prom pictures, restaurant reviews of women owned businesses and comments under female-led YouTube tutorials. My thesis exhibition is my girly, syrupy response to the manosphere. Misogyny and hatred do, and will always, exist as a part of the internet, but instead of the female public's internet archive facing constant misogynistic abuse, my work threatens the manosphere archive. My work takes the manosphere content out of its context and places it into an uncomfortable, cloying, messy realm. Violently photoshopped Lolita characters, frenzied claims that women prefer to be raped, and dozens of threads dedicated to the intricate plotting of mass femicide are transformed into stickers and icing. They stick, intertwined with the oft-ignored remains of an insidiously gendered American childhood. Rainbow stickers, little plastic green guns, Barbie shoes, sour candies, plastic knives and long, soggy pink lollipops. All of these elements are centered around a piece of text that was carefully plucked out of a baggie of pony beads to spell out the top incel.is post of the day. The digital misogynist archive meets the physical hot pink archive, and is overrun. My thesis exhibition asks, what if the content of the online world was the same, but the context shifted? What if the level of violence and absurdity with which women are subject to online is met with a fever pitch of feminized absurdity that surpasses the intensity of any manosphere forum? What if this female amalgam the manosphere users have built up in their minds -- the obsessive, sex crazed, pink clad, infantilized deaf and dumb girl -- regurgitated their misogynistic rhetoric in a big scrapbook-esque pastel mess? My work pulls from the feminist art historical canon, and the artists that exist at the cross section of text-based art and feminism that often utilize satire and humor. Specifically artists like Barbara Kruger, Ann Hirsch and the Guerilla Girls. Like my predecessors, my art uses humor as an entry point and as a way to inform. This thesis writing considers the virtual and physical consequences of the Manosphere, materiality and appropriation, and the function of satire in art. This writing examines these issues through the context of an increasingly online environment and through the lived experiences of myself and my peers.Includes bibliographical references