Concerned Citizen: Aubrey Schuring and Project Consent

Several months ago, I was surprised to read what an old high school friend, Aubrey Schuring, had posted about her last four years. She’d been in a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship all that time, and now, out of it and trying to heal, was speaking out against sexual assault, abuse, and rape culture, “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused” (Marshall University).

Since the first post I read, Schuring has posted and talked tirelessly, trying to stimulate discussion about these issues. She volunteers with the Center for Women and Children in Crisis as a Rape Crisis Team member, answering phone calls from and making hospital visits to rape victims.  A few months ago, she got a volunteer position as Staff Photographer for Project Consent, “a non-profit, volunteer-based campaign that aims to combat and deconstruct rape culture by raising awareness of the harmful way with which it is regarded in society, educating our audience about the disparity of discussion of sexual assault, and promoting positive dialogue about the importance of consent.”

Schuring has created two photography series for the campaign, Face Value and The Very Best We Can. In the first, she documented the emotions of herself and three other volunteers talking about their experiences with consent. In the second, she created an anonymous survey about consent and photographed models acting out the emotions and stories shared. That’s two stories in four months. But ideally, she said, “I would be doing a project every week or two. But it’s been kind of put on the backburner because people are scared to share.” It’s understandable, she clarified. Rape and sexual assault are hard things to talk about. But if we try to talk about assault, abuse, and rape culture without attaching personal stories, people aren’t going to listen.

Even when she does share stories like her own, Schuring says people aren’t always supportive. Opposition has come from all directions, even family, although she attributes a lot of that to “a generational gap”. The conservative culture in which she is based - Schuring’s a Utah native - balks at the uncensored language and stories often used and shared when discussing rape and sexual assault, and she says people “shut down and they don’t want to listen.” So as passionate as she is about how she wants to communicate the few stories people are willing to share, she’s juggling between telling censored, dehumanized stories that people won’t listen to and the more realistic, more painful stories she wants to tell that people won’t listen to, either.

As Goldbard said in Human Rights and Culture: From Datasan to Storyland, “anyone who wishes to make significant headway on a social problem or opportunity must engage with people’s feelings and attitudes about it.” She acknowledges the importance of telling these stories in a way that even - and maybe especially - her conservative peers, family, and community can understand and relate to. “Right now,” she said, “I’m trying to find a balance.”

Face Value

The Very Best We Can

Project Consent

The Center For Women And Children in Crisis

World Building

Daniel Schindler

Rachel Lawyer

Keith Grover

Tabitha Brower

Artists' Statement:

Our activities in class prompted us to begin this assignment by creating a little bit of history for our world. Our world was a simple: a world in which elderly people are seen as beautiful in the way that young people in our society are seen today. So why is youth seen as beautiful? Youth is equated with a sharp mind, healthy body, and a sign of more years to come. So in order for old age to be seen similarly, it would have to represent those same things. In this society, old age is equated with having survived something others have not. So in our world, nuclear devastation created defects and illness in the newly born. Young people are sick and afflicted, whereas their elders are healthy. Their age indicates affluence, a long life, and wisdom.

With a backstory in mind, we were able to better imagine what kind of artifacts would manifest themselves in such a society. It was hard for us not to focus on things that we see in our own world. The glamorization of youth is often seen in the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries, and the artifacts we created are indicative of this. In a society that values age over youth, these industries which value the outward appearance and pocket change of individuals target the group that is most influential and affluent. They project the type of people that everyone wants to be. So in our magazine, advertisements, and song, we catered to that group by using simple designs, easy to read text, and images both visual and lyrical of wisdom and old age. It is an aesthetic that is created out of an underlying principle of society, inspired by this week’s viewing of La Jetee, where production design and aesthetic choices matches this pioneering science fiction film, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where fashion is based on caste systems and products such as Soma are born of a deeper cultural implication.

We strived to make ourselves a part of this world. While, yes, we were only able to create things that  we have seen or experienced, we were able to arrange them in a way that was new and tailored for our new environment. This, in a way really blurred the line between science fiction and science fact. We had to ask ourselves questions that sometimes we never asked before to enter into this new world. Questions such as: »If I was driving down the freeway, what would I see?« »Would they really wear that?«. What makes this even more interesting is that we all have our own vision on what this world would be like to us, which in some ways was challenging but in others gave our artifacts some dimension. Afterall, it would be strange if every magazine in our society is the same, but there is a common thread that illustrates a cultural trend.

       There is still so much room to grow with this project. In our brainstorming of ideas we talked beyond advertisements and fashion, and discussed how this might affect the value of art in general. In a society devastated by nuclear war, would art even exist in the same way? Would magazines still be a practical way of communication? Or even advertisements? Our advertisements reflect a value of homeopathic remedies over perhaps more complex medications. In a simpler world like the one we imagined, perhaps our artifacts would be of mediums that are completely different than that ones we experience in our society. If we were to further explore this project, we would like to completely change the medium conventions reflected here, but with the same emphasis on the affluence, wisdom, and beauty of age.

Webspinna Battle

Adam Hardy
Tabitha Brower

Austin Kleon wrote, “Steal like an artist,” a phrase he maybe stole (like an artist). We obeyed, first with the textual poaching assignment, then with the Webspinna Battle. Ideas were easy to come by and hard to agree on. Probably subconsciously recasting myself in the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I suggested an elegant couple from the 40s, arguing desperately. Adam thought of a child playing, then fighting – maybe with another child over a beloved toy, maybe with his mother. I kept seeing myself in elegant black and he kept seeing himself in the mismatched rage and confusion of childhood. We came to a compromise we both felt good about: we would play an elegant couple in a child custody battle, and as the battle wore on, we would regress, becoming childlike and ridiculous in our fits of passion. Such were the inelegant origins of perhaps a slightly more elegant idea; we would have our cake and eat it, too.

Originally, we brainstormed for very specific characters. I wanted to use clips from The Queen of Versailles and the horrible ex-girlfriend from The Parent Trap; I was going to be nightmarish and a stereotype and care very, very little for the child for whom I was fighting. Adam searched fart noises and clips of immature men; he was going to be a man-child who cared more about his action figures than his kid. But it evolved into something gentler. We found Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer protesting gently, “I want my child,” and Dustin Hoffman’s concerned, firm “You can’t have him,” and let that be the heart of the piece. From there, we reasoned, we could descend into whatever madness we chose.

Typing and clicking and laughing and maybe getting distracted by too many Flight of the Conchords clips, we found insults and comebacks and adults throwing tantrums  - “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” one screams at her WiFi. Adam was comfortable with the idea of doing everything very freestyle, while I was nervous at the thought of it. So again, another comfortable compromise: we would pull everything together into one blog post, but remix and source and scratch those clips as we wished.

We tried to keep the emotional core firm; inserted amidst the Little Rascals insults and Andy Samberg screaming, “I’m an adult!” someone sobbed, hilariously but genuinely, “I just love him so much!” and Adam Sandler calmly defended his parenting abilities. At the end, though, we wanted to show how ridiculous the whole thing felt to us – not the Webspinna Battle, but the material. The parents we ended up creating were terribly, terribly flawed and childish. My character threw the marks of her adulthood at her ex, hurling earrings and a necklace and mascara; Adam’s pulled out the toys of his youth as weapons, chucking a Hot Wheels car and a shower of tiny campaign buttons.

At the very end, King Solomon decreed from centuries before us, “Cut the living child in two.” We desperately wanted some kind of doll to rip in half at the end, but memory and time failed us and we never got one. But there was something wonderful about inhabiting this half-world between adult and child, fiction and reality, experience by proxy and actual experience. By stealing like magpies,  a little here and a little there, something shiny and something that only looked that way, we built a nest of knick-knacks that I think we’d be proud to live in.

Remixing Rubens' 'Big Girls'

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

-      -    George Orwell, 1984

I never identified as a “big girl”. I knew “big girls”, and just didn’t see myself in them. However, by 13, I was already heavier and curvier than the majority of the girls in my grade. And these days, at a size 14-16, bra size 36DD, and a weight that I wouldn’t fib about but wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming with, either, I realize I am probably seen as one.

Is that my identifier? Because the things that I see as a key part of my identity are not so obvious. But how do I tell you about being the child of deaf, divorced parents, or about being happily raised in a non-traditional family, or about being 22 and never having had a guy tell me I was pretty? I started following a different train of thought, thinking instead about facets of my identity that are not important to me but are obvious. The clearest was this idea of being a “big girl.”

Rubens came quite immediately to mind. Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque painter in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, was known for painting beautiful, full-figured women. In his milieu, they were considered “the apogee of beauty” (Alastair Sooke, BBC Culture). And where I have never identified as a “big girl”, I am quick to identify with Rubens’ women.

In our culture, “big girls” can be cute or even pretty, but they are not and cannot be beautiful. Perhaps that is the reason I balk at the label. In the shower, my thighs definitely touch. On the beach in a favorite swimsuit, my stomach has rolls. In bed, wearing as PJs that rom-com-esque oversized men's button-down - well, it fits. But I don’t feel just cute or pretty; I feel beautiful.

Ruben’s depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, sex, and desire, has rolls when she sits. She has cellulite. She has cankles! The goddess Diana barely has a jawline. Rubens’ own wife is painted with a slight double chin. But his women are beautiful.

In Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real”, he speaks of placing materials in “the context of lived experience. [They] assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked.” I fragmented Rubens’ art and milieu, pulling just his women, then considered beautiful, into today’s fashion editorials. I wanted to prove that beauty then can be beauty now. Because perhaps if you see Venus on a modern beach, her stomach folded as she sits, and still think her beautiful, you might reconsider. Rubens’ women, “big girls”, plus-size, curvy, call us what you will - don’t need to be the “apogee of beauty” anymore. Just let us be beautiful.