Article:

Darstellungen starker Weiblichkeit. Ikonografische Bildanalyse von TAKING A STAND IN BATON ROUGE

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the picture TAKING A STAND IN BATON ROUGE (2016). Both art-historical gender studies, as well as iconograph-ic aspects shall be applied to the above-mentioned picture and other compar-ative photographs within the subchapters »Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge as a reproduction of traditional perceptions of femininity« and »Political Staging of femininity in the 20th and 21st century«. The content and consequential impact pictures have, constitute the collective visual memory of a society. This visual memory influences our notion of culture and is the reason behind the reproduction of collective attribution of meaning. In the following, we will elaborate on the general structure of TAKING A STAND IN BATON ROUGE, its con-tents and the interpretation of these in the light of gender studies. In order to achieve representative results, we will consult comparative photographs from the 20th and 21st century, which feature similar iconographic aspects in their portrayal. As a result, we will prove that these pictures – despite their icono-graphic portrayal – shall not be seen as icons of feminism. Instead, we want to show that their impact evolves because of the attribution of meaning – which says that women are the weaker sex – in the collective memory. Previ-ous interpretations of the pictures shall be challenged and a new interpreta-tion illustrated, which so far was neglected in the social and media discourse.