Photo: via Jezebel
Artist David Trumble knows how to stir a pot: Give real, revered feminist icons the old Disney-princess treatment — flowing hair, small waists, and real fun clothes. That's what his latest work is doing with women like Gloria Steinem, Anne Frank, Rosa Parks, and Jane Goodall. In Trumble's artistic portrayals, they are sparkly, megawatt dancing queens on par with Cinderella, throwing their status as certified social warriors and/or catalysts into a strange dissonance. It's jarring, of course, but that's the point: Trumble's dark humor prompts us to examine how we relate to Disney's style of gender normatives and underscores just how unsuitable it is to paint all women with one pastel, soft-focus brush.
Citing the furor surrounding Disney's "princessification" of Brave's Merida as inspiration, Trumble told Women You Should Know that he "wanted to analyze how unnecessary it is to collapse a heroine into one specific mold, to give them all the same sparkly fashion, the same tiny figures, and the same homogenized plastic smile." He put his argument into action by choosing female role models who are decidedly not of the "Stepford wife" mold and filtered them the way he thought Disney would. Upsetting? Surely. Vitally demonstrative of a very real problem? Absolutely. (Jezebel)