Femininity In Glass Ceiling

This construction of femininity was only made possible due to the belief that women were “nothing but creatures of a male power-fantasy”, and as a result of being a residual category of masculinity. (Chizuko cited in Calichman, 2005) In the past, women have been depicted as queens of domesticity with the kitchen as their realm; today, a new form of representation is seen in the sexualized woman who is an object for the male gaze. In a comparative study of women’s portrayals in Chinese and U.S. advertising, Griffin, Viswanath and Schwartz (1994, cited in Frith, Cheng and Shaw, 2004) found that many of the Western advertising conventions and poses for women were being transferred across cultures, with models adopting poses and displays that conformed

In Glass Ceiling (2011), female athletes attempt to pose but the water knocks them into awkward positions. (Figure 4) The heels they wear are overtly absurd and hinder all movement, underscoring their lack of control and depicting the powerless woman in a culture run by men. The identities of the females have become insignificant as their heads are visually cut off, leaving only the bodies in focus – an analogy for how the female body has been sexually objectified by the male. The female experience is seen to be one of beauty, power and violence all colliding together as a result of contemporary society. (Greenberg,

In Dick Lee's self-produced album entitled The Mad Chinaman (1989), he mimicked Western homogenizations of Asia by prancing about in an androgynous traditional gold Chinese opera costume and pink and white ‘exotic wayang’ make-up in order to give it a degree of familiar banality. (Mitchell cited in Iwabuchi, Muecke and Thomas, 2004) Despite coming from a financially comfortable, English-speaking background, he deliberately incorporates Malay folk and Chinese pop music into his works and uses colloquial Singapore English that is a marker of the local. (Souchou, 2001) Similarly, local fashion designer Ong Shunmugam takes rich colours, fabrics and icons of the past to be recreated in her modern collections, referencing everything from ‘colonial-era vegetation, military intervention, South East Asian architecture [to] handicraft’, manifesting the Oriental tropes in her designs. (Shunmugam cited in Bruce, 2011) There is little awareness about the original meaning of the cultural symbols as a result of her repurposing in her collection, with these motifs contributing and further adding to the perceived image of the