Browsing by Subject "Western Gaze"

This thesis studies the visual representation of girls in aid campaigns. I have chosen to analyse an aid campaign by Plan International Finland titled Maternity wear for a 12-year-old. The campaign focuses on child pregnancies in the majority world, portraying a pregnant, 13-year-old Zambian girl Fridah as a main character. The campaign aired originally in 2017, reaching more than 70 million people and ending up being a financial success. By choosing a notable campaign, I want to highlight how much impact and responsibility aid campaigns have on producing a certain type of image of the majority world. Through my analysis, I want to take part in the discussion that problematises the way in which the aid industry operates at large. Drawing on the theoretical traditions of post- and decolonial feminism and black studies, I have paid explicit attention to how Fridah’s body has been portrayed. I find it important to focus on the corporeal aspects of the campaign, since the black body, especially the black female body, carries a long history of control and objectification in the eyes of western spectators. Using the methodology of semiotic analysis and applying the theoretical tools of a western gaze and a white gaze I have been able to discover racialised and colonised representations of Fridah. The campaign has visualised Fridah in a manner that draws on colonial binaries between a civilised, modern, and safe minority world and a traditional, backward, and dangerous majority world. The campaign fixes Fridah in her pregnancy, presenting her as a universal representative of any pregnant child in an ahistorical, rural, and black “developing world”. Through the image of a pregnant Fridah, the campaign draws a boundary between an idealised western child living in freedom and safety and a “third world girl” doomed by her rural, uncivilised destiny. The campaign sexualises, objectifies, and animalises Fridah’s body in a way that connects her to the negative stereotypes of hyper-reproductive and hypersexualised black women and girls. Fridah’s fetishised pregnant body joins the historical continuum of the regulation and exploitation of black women’s bodies for the consumption of the western spectatorship.