Gabrielle Edlin
MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, Central Saint Martins, UAL
Gabrielle is a feminist-creative from Manchester with over a decade of experience in arts education. Having graduated from Newcastle University with a BA in English Literature, History of Art and Fine Art, Gabrielle moved to London where she spent 5 years building a career in gallery education, producing digital content for Ben Uri Gallery and London Grid for Learning and coordinating the young people’s scholarship programme for the Royal Drawing School. She has been a creative campaigner for AnyBody UK, a volunteer for Women for Refugee Women and is the founder and director of Florence & Pearl, producing occasionally offensive greetings cards. She also runs the blogs Superficial Feminist and Anti-Food Porn.
For DeL 2015 Gabrielle will discuss what it means to be a feminist in a post-digital world. She argues that humour and visual imagery can be used to persuade the most sceptic of non-feminists – if the content is right. Read more.
Living in a post-digital world arguably makes it easy to be a feminist. So why isn’t everyone? In this presentation I will examine why, in a world where everybody can access the previously inaccessible elements of feminism, not everyone seems to believe in equality. Creativity in a post digital world can be faster, slicker and more prolific. This was exemplified by the hordes of digital alterations made to the infamous Protein World advert. Both brands and individuals took to Photoshop to doctor and then share their responses to the sexist copy, which seemed to spread like wildfire.
If it ever did, feminism no longer belongs exclusively to academics. The abundance of visual imagery around feminism in a post-digital world means that it’s everywhere, it’s easy to find, and most of all: it’s accessible, in the form of cartoons, flowcharts and infographics.
Even Playboy produced a shareable flowchart to remind men not to catcall. If you type “feminism” into Instagram’s hashtag search, there are currently over 600,000 results. And this for a platform which is arguably best known for Kim Kardashian’s selfies…
The feminist movement today seems to be played out using humour and visuals, arguably the most accessible means of communicating difficult ideas. But can this humour be used to persuade the most sceptic of non-feminist? I intend to argue that yes, it can. We just might need new content.