Together, Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair are known as The Girls—an artistic partnership that has revolved around intense tableaux self-portraits, live performances, videos and installations. Along with exhibiting regularly in the UK, they’ve shown at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and Milan’s UNO+UNO. Whether they’re taking on recognizable people and reimagining them, or creating entirely new and vibrant characters, you’re sure to be drawn in. I wanted to quiz The Girls about their most controversial pieces, their future projects, and how feminism fits into the picture.
Halloween is a time to bust out that creativity, play into the fantasy, and eat a ton of candy. It’s not a time to push adult sexuality or hyped up ideas of ideal bodies onto young kids. I’d rather by scared on Halloween by ghosts and goblins than by thoughts of little kids running amok in overly sexualized costumes.
Sometimes, products are all the more disappointing when they sounded pretty cool at first.
Case in point: Mattel's blockbuster franchise, Monster High. This series of dolls is centered around the children (mostly daughters) of werewolves, mummies and other classic beasties of horror tales. When speaking about the franchise to the New York Times, Tim Kilpin of Mattel said, "Who doesn't feel like a freak in high school? It started with that universal truth." Of course, high schoolers aren't Mattel's target market; in fact, most Monster High products are officially listed as "Age 6-8." Still, dolls that promote not buying into superficial mainstream standards would be neat, right?
Yeah, they would. Too bad that's not what's happening here.
Are the US media objections to Spain's Bebé Glotón further evidence of American's sexualization of the healthy, natural, and nurturing relationship between mother and child?