Jeanne-Francois Le Barbier

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The illustration of women and their bodies during times of revolution and political protests have been considered viable sources of commentary on the legitimacy of the cause and their agency within the public sphere. Weather being idealized or demonized for their thoughts and actions, women have been subjected to their bodies being inspected and manipulated by the media to create allegories of heroism or vilified to discredit a movement all together. Two teenage girls, Jeanne Laisne and Emma Gonzalez, are no stranger to this contrasting predicament. Jeanne Laisne, known also as Jeanne Hachette, became a symbol of heroism and courage to the French people following a battle in 1472 despite her gender. As seen in Jean-Jacques-Francois Le Barbier’s …show more content…

They were restrained from participating actively within the public sphere, for it went against the biological precedent of female behavior of modesty, passivity, declicay, piety, compliancy, and submisivness. Joan B. Landes, in her book Visualizing a Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France, noted that if women went against this ideal, they “risked achieving not greatness, but personal notoriety. They came to expelmpfy the dangers unleased once women entered the public relms.” However, and very rarely, some key figures have been able to transcend the norm in some regards and be praised for her actions for centuries, such as Jeanne Hachette. Melissa Hyde reasons this phenomenon and thier subsquencent represenation in art, because “certain models—in particular, the so-called femmes fortes—performed virtuous military feats thought to be outside the reach of their sex”. Le Barbier’s drawing Jeanne Hachette at the Seige fo Beauvais (1784, Fig. 1), documents, or perhaps idealizes, Laisner’s …show more content…

Despite her gender, she was glorified and became an allegory for the public to admire. However, every teenage girl fighting for justice meets the same fate. Emma Gonzalez, a student turned activist for gun-control after surviving the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February 2018, has been demonized by the media and far-right extremists in order to discredit the Never Again movement. Speaking out against the government and the National Rifle Associatiion, henceforth the NRA, Gonzalez and other students have made headlines, news appearences in interviews to discuss social change in regards to stricter regulations on gun-control. In a March interview with Teen Vouge, a still frame from Why We March (2018, Fig. 2) of Gonzalez was doctered, which created a firestorm of hate towards her and the movement by some people and organizations on various social media

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