Blackwell Reading - Erik Dierks

In the article, Blackwell brings up the topic of imagined communities of resistance in social movements and how they are constructed via different forms of art or media. One example of this Blackwell gives is Triple Jeopardy building solidarity and creating communities of resistance, whether it be in an everyday or social movement setting, via the use of powerful images of women and how they represented women as something other than mothers in the world and social movements

In this section of the article, Blackwell also brings up how solidarity in social movements was often built around “highly romanticized notions of revolutionary masculinity” (284). Her mention of this immediately made me realize and think about how often our society still tends to hold male revolutionaries on a pedestal but doesn’t give female revolutionaries the same praise. Blackwell then goes on to talk about how Triple Jeopardy would publish of photos of women in each issue that represented them as something other than mothers. Triple Jeopardy never published an image of a woman with a machine gun over one shoulder while she carries and breastfeeds a baby, which Blackwell calls the "revolutionary (m)other", in order to further the message that women are more than just mothers. Before reading this piece, I personally would have thought the image of the woman with the gun and child to powerful, because I wouldn't have even thought about how the baby in the image reinforces that women should be having children. After seeing Blackwell's perspective on this though, I now see how that can extremely problematic and how often today women are still sometimes solely portrayed as mothers and nothing else.  I saw her discussion of this as a way of showing how important the issue of representation is in society, even if the representation is as something as simple as women in conference meetings or a woman caring for a child in a photo. 

 Reading about this reminded me of an image I first saw when riots and protests started at airports following Trump’s Muslim ban in early 2017. The picture depicts a woman wearing a hijab that resembles the American flag captioned “We The People Are Greater Than Fear”. I was first shown this image in my GWS 102 class where we discussed the power and message behind the image and the energy it gave to the protests occurring in response to the Muslim ban. I think this image creates the same sense of solidarity that the images used in Triple Jeopardy would have, in that it is not only highly politically charged, but it sends a message that the people that are behind/support this message see each other as rightful citizens of the country and are a part of the same community no matter one’s religious background.

I'd like to further discuss how Triple Jeopardy never published the "(m)Other" picture in an issue, but did publish photos of women working as domestics. My understanding of domestic work is childcare and household chores such as cleaning, cooking, etc. so I found that to be a bit counterintuitive to the reason why they never published the (m)other photo and I'd like to see what other people thought of that. 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-several-reportedly-detained-at-o-hare-international-airport-20170128-story.html