In Her Image: Producing Womanhood in America

In Her Image: Producing Womanhood in America is a collection of media images accompanied by original song which acts as a springboard toward questioning how popular images represent and shape female life in America. Accompanied by a facilitator’s guide for discussion and action, this film generates dialogue about the ways in which commercial images of girls and women—images that are so common we might feel immune to them—portray and influence American life. In rearranging the obvious, In Her Image refreshes the investigation of gender dynamics in the United States today (a topic that, despite its importance, is tired of being discussed), and encourages viewers to become critical consumers and advocates for a society that is not dictated by commercial interests and pressures.

Watch the In Her Image trailer.

Motivation and Production
In Her Image: Producing Womanhood in America is not your typical documentary. It began as a live slideshow and musical performance followed by discussion (that version is still available too) and was made into its film version with guide in an effort to facilitate national outreach and adaptation to specific facilitator’s needs.

The entire process of making this film was and still is a completely by-the-seat-of-my-pants, intuitive (yet organized and purposeful!) adventure. Key to its completion was working with talented filmmaker friends, meeting with current field experts, learning tons about troubleshooting with technology, weather, and life in general, and researching everything from media to feminism, copyright to health advocacy. But what I learned most was to trust my instincts, listen to encouragement, and be willing to take risks.

I was motivated to make this film out of unwillingness to stand by while women in America are depicted as commodities in public media. This commercialization is based in entrepreneurship and private enterprise, and despite its profitability, there exist the negative consequences for all Americans of making women into objects (e.g. sex seems trivial and meaningless, aging becomes a “problem,” definitions of womanhood are unattainable and therefore are often harmful to female well-being, personal experience is devalued in the face of expert knowledge, medicine and cosmetics merge together). I hoped that in “re-seeing” information that is normally viewed unconsciously, audience-members would become aware of the contradictions found in the many roles that girls and women are told to fill, as well as the paradoxes inherent in gender role issues and their possible resolutions.

However, while the film is organized to question how commercial images represent and shape daily life, I felt it was important not to dictate pre-processed conclusions to audiences; rather, I decided to utilize images, text, and song—the usual methods of communication found in magazines, print advertisements, movies, and TV—to allow audience-members to recognize and access the collected content. It was an experiment in what would happen if people could experience these images condensed within one presentation and out of their usual expected context; I thought when viewers connected the dots and actively interpreted as they experienced the film, they would gain a new consciousness about the high volume of messages we internalize every day. (While some movies can be forms of mindless entertainment, film can still be a really powerful and thought-provoking medium!)