pro-choice love?

recipient:

Lucky Magazine/ PO Box 37650/Boone, IA 50037-2650

sent:

“I Love Pro-Choice Boys” and “I Love Pro-Choice Girls” stickers from NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading advocacy group for privacy and a woman’s right to choose, who conduct their work by helping to elect pro-choice candidates, organizing local communities, lobbying Congress, and conducting research & analysis on the federal, but also state and local levels as well.

reasoning:

a magazine like Lucky with its focus upon shopping, clothes, and other goods, and its primary target being women would most likely be pro-choice or female reproductive freedom-friendly, so these stickers should seemingly be right in line. perhaps they’ll even look up the website, and the merchandise, and feature it in the back pages of ads as something you can buy online.

it’s interesting to note that these “I love pro-choice boys” and “i love pro-choice girls” sticker seem cute, laughable, and irreverent at first glance, and something most progressive, liberal-minded folk would gladly wear or display. but as my housemate, charactersketch, pointed out, would it be ok for a boy to wear an “I love pro-choice girls” sticker, with perhaps an implication that he could do whatever he wanted with them, and sleep around, and they may or may not exercise their choice in possibly aborting the baby that may result from one of their late-night trysts? and if i a girl were to wear an “i love pro-choice boys” sticker, to mean that she is attracted to like-minded boys who wouldn’t mind if she chose to get an abortion. this speaks only of heterosexual relationships, what about homosexual, queer, or uncategorized acts of love, what does one person wearing this possibly signify to the other?

it may seem that we’re both reading too much into the words and first glance meaning of the sticker, but these sayings on stickers, pins, and t-shirts are becoming ever-popular. people are adopting them to say the things they feel but do not want to necessarily constantly verbally express. so while the purpose behind “i love pro-choice boys” and “i love pro-choice girls” may be a seemingly superficial attempt to tell people one’s own political views, and to hopefully attract looks or chuckles from seemingly like-minded people, there’s a power behind words, languages, and clothing as a form of expression. i’d be cautious because the implications of this saying reach far deeper into the pro-choice/pro-life debate to being whether or not the act of an abortion is allowed, acceptable as a form of birth control, or excusable, and also the need to commodify every movement, feeling, and expression in our consumerist culture today.

first attempt

recipient:

Creative Home Arts Club/New Member Processing Center/P.O. Box 3449/Hopkins, MN 55343-4711

sent:

description of I.D. Tags exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art

”ID Tags is an ongoing series of supplemental labels for select works on view at the Smith College Museum of Art. The project aims to consider the artworks in terms of aspects of culture that forms one’s identity, such as race, gender, sexuality, and economic status. The project brought a group of Smith faculty members, museum staff, and students together to select, discuss, and write about artworks in the collection taking race as a thematic focal point. In counterpoint to the anonymous authority of the traditional museum label, ID Tags are transparently rooted in the personal knowledge and experience of the writers who are identified in the labels as well. it is our hope that such reflections will give voice to members of the museum’s community and will enhance viewers’ experience through their consideration of how art can relate to our current understanding of our cultures and ourselves.”

Tattered and Torn, 1886, Alfred Kappes

works of art include:

• Pretty Penny, 1939, Edward Hopper, Tagwriter: Nicole Roylance, Smith College Museum of Art.
• Freedom: A Fable by Kara Elizabeth Walker, 1997, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Tagwriter: Elizabeth Willis Smith ‘08.
• Andrew Faneuil Phillips (1729-1775), 1755, Joseph Blackburn, Tagwriter: Sophia LaCava-Bohanan Smith ‘08.
• Mrs. John Erving (Abigail Phillips, 1702-1759), c. 1733, John Smibert, Tagwriter: Sophia LaCava-Bohanan Smith ‘08.
• The Honourable John Erving (1693-1786), c. 1772, John Singleton Copley, Tagwriter: Sophia LaCava-Bohanan Smith ‘08.
• Dr. William Samuel Johnson, 1761, Thomas McIlworth, Tagwriter: Sophia LaCava-Bohanan Smith ‘08.
• Tattered and Torn, 1886, Alfred Kappes, Tagwriter: Daphne LaMothe, Smith Afro-American Studies.
• Tattered and Torn, 1886, Alfred Kappes, Tagwriter: Floyd Cheung, Smith English and American Studies.
• The May Queen, 1875, Daniel Chester French, Tagwriter: Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe Smith ‘08.
• Recolte des Oranges a Capri, 1868, Edouard Alexandre Sain, Tagwriter: Daphne LaMothe, Smith Afro-American Studies.
• Bust of a Chinese Man (Le Chinois), 1872-1874, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, Tagwriter: Ann Musser, Smith College Museum of Art.

reasoning:

People in Minnesota should know about what’s going on in the Smith College Museum of Art, plus bringing accountability and the recognition of bias to a seemingly neutral piece of writing is a reminder that however factual, there’s always a partiality to written work. A hard lesson that I learned the winter of my first year in college, when social critic and activist Keith Snow illustrated the ties The New York Times had with other sketchier conglomerates like Exxon, and Victoria’s Secret.