Tutorial #2

So today I had another tutorial with my tutor as I felt really stagnant in my project and wasn't quite sure where to take things. Tutorials can be really helpful as it's an outside perspective who sees things that maybe at the time you can't.

I explained the new direction I wanted to take and showed her the experiments I've been doing and she basically wanted me to walk her through where my head is at.

She asked me why did I pick alternative women? I explained about the survey, and the volunteers - that there was an overwhelming amount of women especially alternative women. I said that the men that had joined did nothing wrong or anything it's just there was only 4 of them, I don't normally work with men anyway, and I think it would be really difficult to get men to join. We spoke about the pole, about the sense of community within pole but I was struggling for inspiration as the poledancers didn't really answer the questions or gave a few sentences, where the alternative girls had given me loads to draw off and that's what had pushed me in that direction.

I spoke about the fact my project is very whitewashed - I currently only have a few women of colour in my project and I'm not quite sure why there isn't more. She said about maybe there are more inequalities in the alternative world that aren't necessarily seen on the inside, or because I am a white woman, I empowered other white women to join or volunteer. The project could maybe take on a direction of why all women are not seen in the alternative spaces, but could work on including WOC weather I directly approach them or put out another call. She also wondered if the reason why so many white women joined was because they felt through my project I could give them a voice that they don't normally get in the spapce, which is actually a really interesting idea. For now, I'm just working with the photo's of the women have already volunteered.

She found it really interesting that I'd already thought about this, and another direction I could explore could be why is my generation so aware of ourselves? Does social media play a role? Is it the way we're raised? Who we talk to?

She also wanted me to think about further using social media to spread the word of my project if it's going to be a community based one. Maybe using tiktok to get people involved, along with twitter & instagram.

Another thing she wanted me to have a think about what that my generation are a lot more accepting of sexuality, gender, race etc and this feeds into our internet personalities. Instagram can be worst for people pretending to be something that they're not - but it means people get to present themselves how they want to be to seen.

I said I was interested in looking at feminism or sexism in the scene and she agreed that this was good idea. We are the backbone of the idustry, and yet there are still immense hurdles to go in terms of sexism, racism, just general difficult conversations happening especially after all the social uproar of this year and I wanted to represent that somehow. She thought this was a really interesting direction to go in, and gave me some good articles to look at.