Scared, But So Sexy

This week we chose two music videos to analyze and relate them to the Introduction to Women’s Studies course readings. I chose “Disturbia” by Rihanna and “Fly on the Wall” by Miley Cyrus. These two music videos are meant to appeal to very different types of audiences. Although Rihanna uses overt sexualization to get viewers’ attention while Miley is more subtle, both videos are a disservice to the perception of female sexuality because of how they are portrayed in the media.

In Rihanna’s music video of her song “Disturbia,” there are images of Rihanna behind a cage, wearing a collar, and wearing a feathered headdress. The creators of the music video specifically chose those images to emphasize the animalistic nature of “crazy” Rihanna. She’s an animal that needs to be caged because she is so dangerous. The exoticism of women of color reinforces the idea of white women as the beauty ideal because it makes non-white women animals; they’re less than human. It gives men and even other women society’s permission to objectify them in the real world. In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye a young, black girl named Claudia explains her disdain for Shirley Temple when she says, “…I had felt a stranger, more frightening thing than hatred for all the Shirley Temples of the world. It had begun with Christmas and the gift of dolls. The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” (19-20). Rihanna, a pop-icon of this time period, serves the same purpose as Shirley Temple and Barbie of their initial time period because they all did/do continue the notion that white is normal; one must idealize and exemplify “whiteness” and trivialize any other race or ethnicity. This thought is seconded by Anastasia Higginbotham in her essay Teen Mags: How to Get a Guy, Drop 20 Pounds, and Lose Your Self-Esteem when she writes, “Granted, there is that one light-skinned black girl in every fashion layout. But she’s just as thin as the white girl standing next to her, and that white girl is always there—like a chaperone. Like it’s the white girl’s responsibility to keep the black girl in line, make sure she doesn’t mingle with other black folks, start a riot or something” (88-89). Although Rihanna is the alpha female in her music video, this concept is illustrated when there are images of her caressing a white, male mannequin. The fact those images comprise one of few visual sequences of her being civilized reinforces that black women are meant to be taken by white men, controlled and civilized under their watchful gaze.

In Miley Cyrus’ music video of her song “Fly on the Wall,” there are shots in which she is singing in front of a black sports car. Why a black sports car? It has very little appeal to the tween girls who idolize her. The sports car is meant to please a male audience. Arguably, the video sets it up that women are similar to cars. You lust after the flashy, sporty ones that you can drive around the block a few times and show off, but you buy the dependable, sensible car that gets you from point A to point B in the fastest and most comfortable way possible. Despite the fact she’s singing about a doubtful, if not all out controlling, boyfriend, Miley’s facial expressions depict her as ecstatic rather than disgusted or fearful. She’s sending a message that a boy with trust issues is irritating and bothersome, but not wrong. He just has a quirk that could easily be solved if only employed “a little communication.” This is similar to the one described by Higginbotham when she writes, “Girls are bombarded with messages about the thrill of catching boys, so why is it shocking when a girl’s pursuit includes a little creative compromise, like forgiving her boyfriend for lying about the party, drinking when he tells her to drink, and being too drunk to care (or too drunk to resist) when he and his friends fuck her?” (88). Miley’s music video trivializes a serious problem. She gives her viewers mixed messages when in the second verse she sings, “If you were my boyfriend, I’d be true to you/If I make a promise, I’m comin’ through/Don’t you wish that you could/See me every second of the day/That way you would have no doubt/That baby I would never stray.” In this contradictory message, she assures us that she would be faithful but the boy in question might want to make sure for himself anyway. This supports the perception that women are untrustworthy and calculating. The attraction of this contradiction that Miley and other Disney superstars offer is their naïveté coupled with sexuality. Although they are not extremely sexual, these teeny-bopper stars are the embodiment of the virgin/whore dichotomy. Cyrus’ sexually enticing dancing and facial expression coupled with her clean “message” is an example of intersectional oppression, a seemingly harmless “invisible wire” that is part of a larger confining instrument (Frye 8).

Both examples of popular culture media illustrate the many ways in which women are not empowered in their surroundings. The vulnerability of women is sexy to men, which is extremely scary. Although a mentally crazed Rihanna and a paparazzi-hunted Miley do not seem to equate with rape, the fact that their vulnerability turn men on, and we market that fact, is extremely frightening. This tells us that female sexuality is being terribly misconstrued from what it was meant to be. This is the very thing I Wanna Be Like Britney is trying to communicate to the world. We want female sexuality to be normalized and for women to be able to identify the master’s tool that is marketing campaigns that allure us with sexual images.

~Katie Frye

Music Videos:

"Disturbia" by Rihanna http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6zdhHLvT7k

"Fly on the Wall" by Miley Cyrus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RSlhNJFohI

T t t tastay tastay!

When I found out that our assignment for this week’s journal was supposed to be a music video free-for-all I was elated. I missed class and thought we were supposed to journal on the usual articles and books we’d read so finding out about this was a nice change. I chose to look at Christina Aguilera’s video “Dirty” and Fergie’s video “Fergalicious” in order to point out a few of the more ridiculous and somewhat outrageous bits in both videos. While both Christina and Fergie play up their sexuality, each video has a distinct connection to the feminist community and how women’s lives are being shaped today.

In “Dirty” we first see Christina and several scantily clad women enter what appears to be a wrestling arena set in a sort of pit below the audience of all male spectators. The girls are encouraged to fight each other cage-match style in a sense (because they can’t just jump out of the pit) and are cheered on by the men above them who scream and throw things at them. As I mentioned in my discussion questions, this scene is reminiscent of when the Roman’s used to watch their slaves fight to the death or fight for their lives against lions and other animals. If looked at this way, Christina’s video advocates the battering of women. What’s worse is that it shows women encouraging it too, right along with the men who’d be just as happy to join in the fight themselves.

I can’t help but think of Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools when I watch this music video, and pretty much all music videos showing women in barely any clothing. The influence of the patriarchy is pretty evident in “Dirty” based on what the women are wearing and how they’re dancing. Everyone is hyper sexualized. Despite all of this, Christina and her gang of female friends seem to relish the attention they’re receiving from the men, as though they were the ones with the real power in the situation. This led me to wonder whether or not the video was a social commentary on men’s perception of women, almost like a “screw you!” being shouted out from Christina and her girls as they proudly flaunted their bodies. But I thought about it some more and realized that this is just another master’s tool, and a good one at that. It did its job after all. I was distracted by the women’s clothing and dancing and not focused on the real issue that we see in the video, and that is the making acceptable of battering and sexual exploitation. As Lorde says, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” (pg.38, FF).

In Fergie’s video, we again see women dressed in pretty much nothing and dancing ever so sexily, but that again shouldn’t be the main issue. After watching 30 seconds of “Fergalicious” I started to notice things I didn’t want to. First off, Fergie is dressed in a baby doll dress surrounded by brightly colored candy reminiscent of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Later we see her dressed up as a girl scout, saying things like, “Fergalicious (so delicious) but I ain't promiscuous, and if you was suspicious, all that shit is fictitious” all the while dancing seductively and eating candy in front of the camera. This just screams child pornography to me. That and that the ideal that women are supposed to be virgins and innocent has fully infiltrated society and probably isn’t leaving for a long time unless we start getting realistic about sex. It really bothers me that Fergie is using the innocent card to sell sex because it attracts perverts. In my discussion questions I talked about how this video sort of relates to Muscio’s Abortions, Vacuum Cleaners, and the Power Within because of some similarities I noticed between Fergie’s video and the reading both talking about innocence in two different ways, Fergie’s being that she was innocent and proud of it, and Muscio’s being ashamed of her sexual activity (to an extent). This idea that being sexually experienced is bad needs to go. We have to stop selling sexuality through innocence or we’ll mislead the next generation of girls and boys growing up in America and watching these things on TV, not to mention how many pedophiles we’ll make very happy if we continue.

It’s like Enloe says over and over again in her article Beyond the Global Victim, we must get involved and find out about what’s happening to the women of the world. Take the movie Senorita Extraviada that we watched in class the other day. Without documentaries like that being made and taught in classrooms, how many of us would know about the femicides in Juarez? If we keep letting the patriarchy define our lives, if we keep letting the master’s house be our only source of support, as Lorde says (pg.38, FF), we will never achieve anything. Videos like Christina’s and Fergie’s keep spreading the message that it’s ok for men to ogle women and see them as objects. That it’s ok—and even attractive--for women to be hurt and vulnerable. That it’s not ok to no longer be “innocent.” It’s time for a change. The last thing feminism needs is another setback.
~Paige

"Come On Eileen" and "Somethin' For the Fellas (That Like the Fellas)"

“Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners is a song about a woman whom the narrator once dated and his sexual desires for her. “Somethin’ For the Fellas (That Like the Fellas)” by TEAM PIMP is also a song about sexual desires. However, one of these songs would be considered offensive by many Americans because of the way it defies norms including heterosexual and gender norms. Cultural production and the public reaction to that production demonstrate a society’s norms and values. It is, therefore, important to look at why certain songs receive more negative attention than other songs.

“Come On Eileen” begins with lines that expose the patriarchy involved in the story. The lines, “Our mothers cried and sang along” and “we can sing just like our fathers” reveal the underlying gender norms and intent to follow tradition. The lead singer says, “With you in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty.” This is actually a very sexually-charged line that shows the narrator’s intentions. He also shows his intentions by saying, “At this moment you mean everything,” and “Ah, come on, let's take off everything.” In the music video, the band, and especially the lead singer, approach Eileen and proposition her. However, Eileen is walking with another woman and they are pushing a baby in a stroller. This setup is interesting because it implies that, while the lead singer and Eileen used to date, she has a new partner who is a woman. However, dating someone who later identifies as a lesbian threatens the masculinity and heterosexuality of the lead singer. He desires to have another chance with her and prove to her that she does not want to be with this woman. The line, “They’re so resigned to what their fate is/But not us, no, not us,” demonstrates the conflict between Eileen and the lead singer. She is not willing to resign herself to his orders, but he is not willing to give up. The band orders Eileen to “tell him yes.” In the music video, the band has to resort to carrying Eileen away from her partner.



“Somethin’ For the Fellas (That Like the Fellas)” by TEAM PIMP is also about sexual desire, but instead of undermining sexual agency, it encourages it. It is strictly about non-heterosexual sexual contact that is not within a marriage. Erika sings, “Dirty gay stuff is all I wanna do/I wanna fuck you and your boyfriend too.” Maxine sings, “taking off your shirt to make the fellas scream.” These lines in the song express sexual agency. The song is also about rejecting gender norms. Maxine sings, “You got me burnin’ up” and Erika adds, “My mussy’s on fire.” The song uses humor to be entertaining and fun, which are two adjectives that describe sexual exploration for TEAM PIMP. Erika sings, “It’s large like Charles in Charge” and “Fuck me in the ass ‘til you come real fast.” All of these aspects would make the song offensive for many parents. People reject media when it provides a free and open space to talk about sex, homosexuality, and gendered behavior. Yet, this is hypocritical. “Come On Eileen” is sexual and may even imply rape, but because it is through the heterosexual male gaze, this song receives no controversy.



These two songs relate to “Lusting for Freedom” by Rebecca Walker. Walker writes, “the suppression of sexual agency and exploration, from within or from without, is often used as a method of social control and domination” (22-23). People want to prevent their children, and especially young women, from being exposed to songs like “Something For the Fellas (That Like the Fellas)” because it may just help them achieve sexual agency, something that would subvert the patriarchy. “Sex in silence and filled with shame is sex where our agency is denied” (Walker 23). When we censor media, the things that are usually censored often present a sexuality that is beyond the norm. But this silence has a negative impact on youth who need proper sexual education. “We are growing, thinking, inquisitive, self-possessed beings who need information about sex and access to birth control and abortion” (Walker 24). Additionally, if young people are exposed to material we normally consider “explicit” and are provided with a detailed explanation, they will be better equipped to deal with the sexual issues that face them as they grow up. Walker writes, “there is no magic recipe for a healthy sexuality; each person comes into her or his own sexual power through a different route and at her or his own pace” (23). Therefore, it is imperative that we provide a wide variety of media that expose children to many different sexualities and gender expressions so that they may come into their own and know who they are, rather than closeting their sexualities.


We must be given the keys to our sexual agency.

-Erica

Truth v. truth

This week we read Desert Blood: the Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and watched Señorita Extraviada: Missing Young Women by Lourdes Portillo. Although Señorita Extraviada is a documentary and Desert Blood is a fictitious novel, they both use different ways to tell an audience about under reported crimes that are happening rather close to home. Many Mexican and Mexican-American women between the ages of twelve and twenty-five are being abducted, raped, and murdered. These atrocities have been going on since 1993 and they continue to happen today. Both Gaspar de Alba and Portillo use their art as feminist activism to let people know that this is a serious concern and needs to be given more attention and stopped.

Of the two choices, Desert Blood is the most effective at getting the true message across to Gaspar de Alba’s readership. The novel gives more of an insider view on the crimes; readers understand what is happening to the victims’ families and the dangers in investigating or researching the Juárez murders because they are on the same level as the character in this third-person limited prose. Also, it gives a glimpse into the situation as a captive. Irene’s character in the book, as well as the maquiladora workers, allows readers to understand what a captive must deal with in such circumstances. Her pain and fear hit a chord with readers and, although much of her story is based on speculation rather than actual accounts, those passages give readers more of a reason to identify with the nameless Mexican women who are murdered still today. The documentary is not nearly as effective to a non-Spanish-speaking audience simply because the subtitles are difficult to connect with the emotions of the speaker. The carefully chosen words of Gaspar de Alba are meant to invoke certain emotions. In interviews, the men and women are saying whatever comes to mind. This can be a very effective means to stir compassion within the audience… if they aren’t concentrating on the subtitles at the bottom of the screen, emotion and inflection of the men and women on screen completely lost on gringos squinting at the small words.

One bad thing about using a novel to convey an actual event is that everything cannot be taken as fact. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, no matter how thoroughly she researched to give us an accurate picture of the characters in her novel, takes many liberties. For some characters, she takes real people and makes parodies of them, and with others, she completely fabricates them. Also, to function as a novel, there has to be a climax and resolution. The true nature of these murders does not come with a nifty ending that wraps up everything nicely. The Juárez murders create an unending mystery that cannot be solved. The last pages that quell your sense of uneasiness are giving you something that shouldn’t be there: satisfaction and peace of mind. Many of the families and friends of victims don’t have that luxury and to give the reader that is a dishonest portrayal. Señorita Extraviada does a much better job of letting the audience know that there is no definite answer when the narrator asks “Who is responsible? The Egyptian? The gangs? The bus drivers? The police?” The audience knows that no one really knows. It’s everyone and no one.

Señorita Extraviada: Missing Young Women is the most accurate and definitely most truthful of the two mediums. You are given the information pertaining to these crimes straight from the source. Many of these different perspectives do not coincide and the audience has to come up with a conclusion of their own, much like the citizens of Juárez. What the documentary lacks in actual emotional involvement of the viewer it makes up for in music and cinematography. There are sequences in which young women are walking slowly across the desert and it seems as if they are disappearing. When there aren’t interviews, there are lots of still shots of sad faces and silhouettes. Between the cheerless faces and the gloomy music it isn’t difficult to realize that this is a somber topic.

There are a few things that both the documentary and the novel include. They both have some sort of focal symbol. For the documentary, it’s more tangible: the pink blocks with black crosses that we see being painted on tree trunks and telephone poles. For the novel, it’s pennies. The main difference is the cross is used as a symbol of hope, or at least remembrance, whereas the pennies are not only a symbol of the expendability of women, they become advantageous clues to the killers. These symbols function as a catchphrase or slogan for the movement which is helpful in keeping the feminist message alive within the audience. Also, they delve into different perspectives other than the loss of a loved one. Desert Blood and Señorita Extraviada discuss police brutality. It’s not just the criminals who are the “bad guys,” the “good guys” are bad too. Portillo conveys this message through the interview she has with the woman who was raped by police. Gaspar de Alba uses the interaction between Ivon and her cousin with the judiciales. Although neither of these mediums directly accuse the police of being the perpetrators of the murders, they illustrate the corruption of the entire system and give the audience an idea of how hopeless it often is for families of missing young women.

Although I preferred the novel to the documentary for its entertainment value, I realized that I needed both to fully understand the complexity of these femicides. I am not familiar with the culture represented and, because of that, I didn’t understand many of the characters Gaspar de Alba uses to represent real people and actual occurrences. The documentary was helpful in distributing facts about certain people and instances that allowed me to better appreciate the novel. What it comes down to is the truth versus Truth. Sometimes it’s helpful to know facts, dates, and specific pieces of information. When much of that data is hard to relate to, it is often easier to find work that gives an audience a more personal point view.

This novel and documentary are helpful to our Community Action Project because it helped me to explore different ways to convey our message about female sexuality in the media to our audience. I now know what types of things I would like to do with our documentary in respect to the Portillo created. Both of these mediums also reinforced how important it is to inform people. There are too many men and women who do not even realize the extremity of issues that result in the oppression of women. These projects reiterate how important it is that I Wanna Be Like Britney gets its message across as well.

~Katie Frye

Desert Blood

Before last week I had no idea that the women of Juarez, Mexico were being kidnapped and subsequently murdered consistently for over the past ten years. Watching the documentary in class on the missing women and hearing family members of the deceased speak of their encounters with the Juarez judicial system rocked me to my core. The police ignore requests for help and destroy evidence from crime scenes, blaming the destruction on disease and other kinds of contamination. All patterns found linking the missing girls to the actual number of dead bodies are ignored and the government claims the death toll is much lower than it actually is. But you know all of that. I just had to type it all out and really express how much this bothers me, and probably will continue to bother me, which isn’t a bad thing. Hey, it brings about awareness, right?
Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood encompasses every one of the things I listed above, delving into issues I didn’t even think were relevant to the Juarez murders at all. Throughout reading her novel, I noticed the underlying sexuality that permeated every chapter. Gaspar de Alba establishes very early on the Ivon is a lesbian who has come out to her conservative Mexican family, who received her with malice, save for a few characters, like her sister Irene. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaspar de Alba was trying to get across to her readers when she placed sexuality at the forefront of a novel that has its main focus set on the Juarez murders.
I thought about it for a while and it hit me: Gaspar de Alba could be comparing homophobia to the violence against women in Juarez. It may sound far-fetched, but I think there could be something there. Gaspar de Alba does a very good job communicating how intolerable homosexuality is in the Mexican culture and throughout the world in general by showing us the scene in the beginning of the novel where Father Francis asks Ivon not to tell Cecila’s family she is a lesbian because if they knew they wouldn’t let her adopt the baby (pg.36). We also see Ivon’s mother call her all sorts of atrocious names when she goes to visit her after she finds out Cecilia had been murdered.
Gaspar de Alba links the verbal violence against homosexuality to the physical violence against women. By showing the reader the abuse Ivon endures because she is a lesbian next to the gratuitous abuse the women of Juarez suffer from, Gaspar de Alba makes the connection that these two crimes are the same on some level. The women being tortured and killed in the novel are merely objects and Ivon herself lesser-than human for her difference in sexuality. Gaspar de Alba subtly builds this image for the reader, leaving the message that the treatment of homosexuals as objects or freaks is in some way akin to torturing and killing women. Again, I know how out-there this all sounds, but it’s worth thinking about.
Gaspar de Alba also delves into the issue of same-sex couple adoption in her novel, but fails to elaborate on it entirely. However, given that this novel’s main focus isn’t adoption and is murder it’s understandable that she wouldn’t go into more detail about the process, but it’s something to be considered because it plays a big role in the fear of homosexuality that the world still harbors. We won’t let gay couples adopt without practically having them jump through hoops of fire, which is simply ridiculous. I think the issue of same-sex adoption is one that Gaspar de Alba feels very strongly about and one that probably could have been explored more in the novel if not for clarity’s sake, then for the sake of emphasizing the negativity felt toward homosexuality today, which would in turn emphasize the parallel we see between violence against women and homosexuality.
All in all, this week has been really eye opening. It sickens me to think that there are women dying horrible deaths across the country as you and I read these words. They say a baby is born every minute, or every few minutes, but in Juarez’s case, women are dying. I wish there was something I could do, something the United States would do, to help end this, but it looks like our government doesn’t really care about what’s going on “over there” in Mexico. It’s just like Enloe said. Women need to become more aware of global issues because they affect all of us. If one woman is murdered, we all feel it.

-Paige

Fact vs. Fiction When it Comes to Desert Blood

In the globalized world that we find ourselves in, it has become increasingly important to actively pay attention to world events. As countries around the world become more and more interconnected, occurrences that take place on the other side of the world begin to affect us in a more substantial way than we may expect. Unfortunately, women have only been granted the right to be directly involved in international politics for a handful of decades, and this has been a huge setback; many females of this generation do not take advantage of their rights and continue to be ignorant of what goes around in their surroundings. In “Beyond the Global Victim,” Cynthia Enloe discusses how “feminists need to pay attention to international issues not only because international politics affects our futures but also because patriarchy creates gendered divisions of labor…international politics leads to both inequalities among women and the possibilities of organizing against those inequalities” (496). If feminists take the initiative to make themselves aware of world events, they will be capable of spreading information with other women. As a component of our Women’s Studies course, we, as feminists, are attempting to make both men and women aware about the homogenized idea of beauty and how it affects both genders in their personal perceptions beauty and their general beauty regimens. Our job is simplified because there is a lot of information at our disposal; a lot of it is provided by dominant media outlets, so our resources are easily accessed. How does one successfully shed light on a major event that has been poorly publicized? The ongoing Juarez murders that started in 1993 is an example of one of the world’s most troubling unsolved criminal rampages; unfortunately most people have never heard of them. I have come across a great deal of trouble finding news reports about the Juarez murders, and the ones I find are not from mainstream publications. Fortunately, in the last few years, feminists have begun to strengthen the amount of publicity received by the Juarez murders, with the release of Laurdes Portillo’s Senorita Extravida, and the publication of Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood.

 Gaspar de Alba’s book gives readers an in-depth look into the experience faced by a family who has directly been affected by the Juarez murders. Protagonist Ivon Villa’s sister, Irene, is kidnapped while she as at a party across the border in Juarez. The majority of the plot focuses on Ivon’s desperate search for Irene while she seals with her accusatory mother and corrupt officials. As realistic the story is, however, Gaspar de Alba states in her disclaimer that this is a fictional account. “All of the main characters in this story are fictional, “she says (v).  Any similarities to living or dead people are purely coincidental…Some readers who are familiar with the “maquiladora murders” may recognized certain details about a given crime and find that they don’t match “what really happened.” Because this is a fictionalized account of true events, I have taken liberties with chronologies and facts” (v). The question that rises then is if Desert Blood can be considered a legitimate source of information about the Juarez murders. Having watched Senorita Extravida, which is a very accurate documentary, I can see that the points that matter, including statistics and descriptions of victims are all true. Thus, readers will not get the wrong idea from reading this fictional account about the Juarez murders. Additionally, if this book was not fiction, Gaspar de Alba wouldn’t necessarily be able to incorporate all the additional themes she was able to fit in, such as homosexuality, gay parenting, patriarchy, globalization and the field of women’s studies, and discuss them in depth. By not providing the public with a conventional account of the Juarez murders, Gaspar de Alba still succeeds in informing readers about the ongoing crisis while educating them about other issues they are connected to; Desert Blood should be considered a piece of feminist publicity regarding the Juarez murders.

- Lavanya

The Brown Women Who Blend In

Desert Blood, a novel, made the real life situation of the Juarez femicides more available to people in the United States and elsewhere to read in a narrative form. Several weeks ago a fictional movie about the femicides called “Backyard” premiered in theaters in Mexico. Following the release, two weeks ago, a meeting between the Mexican president and several international celebrities occurred to cast public attention on the murders. Is the in-depth narrative a work of fiction can provide what is needed to motivate the international public to call for a widespread investigation into the “labyrinth of silence” regarding the femicides and the secondary status of women in Mexican culture?
In Enloe’s article “Beyond the Global Victim”, she says “the need to create links and coalitions across national and cultural boundaries remains paramount” (496). These links will help the people of different countries focus on the “meaningful connections” (496) between people instead of the differences. It is these connections that will raise empathy for the families of the victims of the femicides that will motivate people of other countries to call for justice. The women in Mexico live under a patriarchal culture that demeans them into second class citizens, contributing to the violence against women. News articles or reports are taken with a grain of indifference in today’s society, jaded the constant barrage in which they come. Works of fiction are taken singularly. The in depth stories that they portray let people connect emotionally. With this connection comes a degree of empathy and a stronger sense to correct the wrong rather than being informed about the facts, the reader/viewer is immersed in the situation. It is this immersion that is needed to motivate justice for the victims of the Juarez femicides and help for the women of Mexico.

In Desert Blood the character Ximeyna notes that no one cares about the "brown women" down South. Our CAP project aims to change that. We want to make sure that no woman blends into the background solely based on appearance.