How to Have it All

Spring term, I enrolled in JCOM 301: Gender, Media, and Diversity, a required course for all communications majors. Along with older concepts like Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and intersectionality, we covered contemporary topics like media erasure, counterpublics, and the manosphere.

For the course’s final project, students were sorted into groups and tasked with choosing one of the several subjects explored and producing a creative media artifact based on the readings and discussions.

My group found a deep interest in postmodern feminism, a modern movement that questions the traditional feminist conversations about gender, identity, and power. Specifically, we wanted to focused on how this movement has led some digital communities of women to regress into domestic roles like the social-media-trending “trad-wife.”

Our research focused on the idea of how postmodern feminism encourages women to reclaim this domesticity and femininity, which conversely rebrands self-surveillance, capitalism, sexualization and objectification as empowering.

As the groups assigned Media Producer, I created an online magazine to communicate our findings and criticisms of postmodern feminism. Using Canva, Adobe Stock, and Photoshop, I produced a 10-page zine entitled “How to Have it All: A Modern Mother’s Guide to Being Perfect.” (Available on Issuu here)

This was my first experience utilizing graphic design tools, and overall it was an incredibly fun learning process that allowed me to flex different creative muscles. I wrote the copy and created multiple drafts of the publication as my group-mates conducted research.

I wanted to take a satirical approach to the content in the zine, as my group decided on taking a more traditional feminist perspective on contemporary ideas of women’s liberation. This choice was influenced by our familiarization with social media content that rebrands misogyny and sexism as something that should work for women.

Our focus on social media’s impact on postmodern feminist ideas was rooted in this new idea of a “trad-wife,” or traditional wife, that has gone viral on social media. It embraces being a stay at home mother and partner who focuses on cooking things from scratch, wearing modest clothing, and tending to all domestic chores while the husband is away. Not only does this come from a heteronormative perspective of what a modern family looks like, but it also suggests that in a world where women are given the independence to make the choice of pursuing a career and having equal position in the home, they will choose to a submissive, domestic role.

Using brash, loud images and colors was something I thought was an obvious choice when I suggested we make a zine. Connecting back to the Riot Grrrl origins of alternative media and communication, I focused on obnoxious graphic design elements and aggressive text. Additionally, it reinforces the satirical tone, where the content being discussed promotes femininity, though the images are quite moody.

Overall, the experience of creating “How to Have it All: A Modern Mother’s Guide to Being Perfect” was very fun! I always enjoy when classes encourage students to produce work that gives them the opportunity to make cool pieces of media, whether it’s a podcast, video, ad campaign, or magazine.