Final Project Proposal

What I find most common is getting unpleasant stares or comments directed my way. When I told one of my guy friends: “those men in the deli have been staring at me and my friend for the past five minutes that we were standing here,” the reply I received was “but aren’t you used to that?” Used to that? That’s exactly the issue. Why do I feel like I am getting undressed in their mind and I can do nothing about it but feel uncomfortable? “Yeah, I can’t relate, so I don’t know how that feels like,” says my male friend. Most men don’t. This is why I will put together a book that include short stories, alongside digital illustrations, explaining different scenarios of sexual harassment, bullying, and unfairness women face. I want to be able to put readers into the shoes of a woman and have them visualize what it may feel like to be female for a day. My inspiration came from a quote from Telyn Kusalik found in the book Gender Outlaws, "I am confident that if the man behind the counter had read me as a man, he wouldn't have said those things to me. And certainly, the vast majority of my friends who had been sexually harassed were also read as women or girls when they were harassed" (55). Therefore, I intend on writing short stories based on the unpleasant encounters other women and I have experienced to shine light on what is hidden away in media and what is (possibly) not being discussed between adults and teenage girls who may be beginning to experience this side of the world.

Using my Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign skills that I have learned from taking major related courses at Hunter, I will incorporate my own graphic designs into the book. I wanted the left page to be for illustrations related to the experience blurbs that would be on the placed on the right page. Thus, this fits into my line of work in graphics and I hope to use some of the pieces as potential portfolio pieces. I was planning on publishing the completed book on www.issuu.com; however, if I run into issues, I have a backup list of other sites that I could use. Possibly, if my book meets the requirements of Amazon Kindle direct publishing I will attempt to get it published on there as well. Since there is almost about a month left until the presentation date, I plan on creating a pair of pages per day. I also need to make sure to take out time for sketching, rough drafts, proofreading and creating the full document in InDesign.

To reiterate, I do have a lot of stories to tell and I plan on including a few told from friends’ perspective and even potentially my mom. My ideal message is to show other women and young girls that they are not alone and be able to give them a voice to speak up about their experiences. I intend on a male audience to read this in hopes that they could understand how their actions may affect us. I am not speaking for all women, nor am I directing this at all men. I am also not purposely excluding other genders or sexualities in this work; I will only include the perspective(s) that I have background in. The purpose of the book is to spread awareness of the issues by discussing mine and others’ personal experiences; thus, I am also not attempting to claim that my experiences are more important or worse by any means than another persons’. This project may grow to reach a larger audience and I hope to strengthen my graphic design skills and add the final product to my portfolio. Additionally, it would be interesting and beneficial to learn more about designing a book and its content. Overall, I do hope my stories could enlighten people on what a day in the life of a women is may be by demonstrating some scenarios women have to deal with on a daily basis.

Works Cited

Bornstein, Kate, et al. “Identity, Schmidentity.” Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Seal Press, 2010, p. 55.