complication of gender

so for class, i decided to go with the women's version of the electronic weapondry arsenal belt. it was ideated as a reaction to this:



points and observations:

• the humongous majority of people you see with electronic gadgets clipped to their belt are men. business men overrun the pack, with their cellphones, blackberries, and pdas strapped around their bellies. the few women who do similarly are only because of their professional uniform, such as for policewomen or military women. business women, those who may need to get in touch with others with ease and speed, still never tend to wear the 'toolbelt.' phones and things are tucked in purses, to avoid disrupting the female silhouette or to keep the immediate nonessentials out of sight.
• men tend to display their gadgets openly. there's a study where men just whip these things out in public, exhibition-like, much more than women do. [there's a study out there, link to it here later]
  
• i liked how the women of early iran (our week 2 reading) wore their garment pins as both feminine symbols and also secret defensive weapons. the same objects that might culturally delineate or commoditise the women could be used for their own personal advantage.

so, the idea was a female version of the toolbelt, one that kept a women's stash of tools or 'weapons' handy and accessible, enabling a feminine sort of secretive power.

so here's the physical prototype of the femininised belt. i got some stretch lace at windsor button and illustrated how it could hold personal electronic objects such as a cellphone, blackberry, or pager. more personal objects that might be needed for immediate access could also be housed on this hidden belt, such as a vibrator or a sentimental object. i liked the image of it being obscured beneath a skirt, invisible, and then exposed as needed for the benefit of the wearer. the woman can be empowered without being encumbered.

an interesting suggestion would be to design a skirt to go along with this garter belt, with strategic slashes and pockets, so one could just reach into the slashes to fetch the cellphone. i like the idea of the woman as enigma, where there's much more than expected behind the surface.

there were a lot of interesting projects presented last tuesday, though the most seemingly successful ones had to do with dealing with issues of hair. hair as a signal of masculinity, or removal of hair as a signal of femininity. it's such a human thing--we're mammals! we're hairy! though how each gender formulates its conventions on how to manage it or display it establishes the weird cultural norms we associate with hair and grooming rituals. control of one's own hair sort of aligns with control of one's own gender. interesting how nefarious areas of hair in particular places on the body really associate with enculturated behaviors, ideals, and expectations.