These images work to render the invisible violences of linguistic practices visible, present, and confrontational. The images focus specifically on the linguistic practice of naming women as edible objects, more specifically desserts.
This linguistic practice has become extremely normalized in everyday speech. Common nicknames like “honey” or referring to women’s breasts as “apples” or “melons.” reinforce a collective expectation and vision of women as sweet objects, to be picked, sliced, desired, decorated, sold, and consumed.
Due to the pandemic I shot these images with my roommates in our living room. It did not have the grandiose production value I had imagined. This caused me to find a relationship between textures and sensations of food objects with the female body itself- emphasizing the strangeness of this metaphor.
This linguistic practice inherently violent when you examine the words literally. And rendering women in this way is strange but is not obviously apparent through the use of language itself. This is what compelled me to pick up my camera.
Through my images I work to physically depict and transform women into different food objects, or spaces of consumption in order to confront the legitimacy of this narrative and make the gaze on women in this context uncomfortable rather than desirable.
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@meghan.marshall