Big Sister Is Watching

by Lainie Knox and Greg Elmer

The Women's Action Coalition (WAC) is a political organization which aims at politicizing dominant cultural signifiers with the use of political and cultural oppositional signifieds.

WAC, counts among its members many big name artists such as Laurie Anderson, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman who are among the 2500 plus women involved in WAC/ New York as well as the other thousands of (WAC) women working across Canada, France and the U.S.

Kate Linker (1990) describes WAC as a grassroots organization which aims to "erode the impassivity engendered by the imposition of social norms." (p.28) The consumption of images serves to maintain a status quo which undermines the autonomy of women. Ideas about women are "sold" and reinforced through the repetition of these signs. WAC repositions these images by questioning both their applications and their "ownership".

The paradoxical use of commercial and commodity advertising's signifiers and conventions, to create oppositional meanings is best described by John Fiske (1989) in his examination of popular resistance to dominant cultures. Fiske calls this process "excorporation", i.e.: "the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system..." (p.15)

WAC's logo provides us with a useful example of the excorporation of the corporate logo, serving as a universal sign of WAC's mandate. A wide open eye within a blue dot, appropriated from the "anonymous" dot used to cover the face of women in rape trials, signifies WAC's "active watching". The popular resistance of excorporation is achieved through the transformation of signifieds - the Orwellian "big brother" (or state totalitarianism) into women's reproductive, social, economic and political autonomy.

Images and symbols for woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman....It is, the representation of feminine sexuality...which conditions how it comes to play. --Jacques Lacan

In Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, art historian Norman Bryson argues that in Western societies based on visual culture, physical control is an infrequent mode of subjection; authority is invested in the signifier or sign, and recognition becomes the central mode of interaction. WAC's advertisements, drawing upon previously outlined conventions of simplicity and universal symbols and signs, complement each other forming a larger cohesive political message on women's issues in contemporary society.

WAC's advertisements are, therefore, not a simple communications campaign, but rather a part of a greater political agenda which incorporates advertising with "direct" organizing. Their overall mandate, complimenting its advertising campaign, includes: organizing women; alerting the media; persuading mass audiences of the need to provide economic and social justice for women and mobilizing the "twenty-something" population (Jacobs, 1992).

Guerrilla postering is a strategy of the powerless.

"Political posters can be read as an expression of frustration from artists, designers and regular people trying to transform a political system that seems thoroughly insulated from individual action, a system that seems moribund" (Jacobs, 45).

WAC does not solely direct their messages to the mass media; they also seek to directly reach (without the "filter" of the mass media): political leaders and other key decision makers; participants and bystanders at rallies and demonstrations; the media who report on such events as well as the larger media audience. Many of WAC's advertising campaigns are, subsequently, enacted during large demonstrations and events which are attended by their audience first hand.

Through visual devices, WAC's campaigns intervene in stereotypical representations: they disrupt power and displace their hold, creating a space for enlightened awareness.

In constructing an oppositional advertisement WAC is relying upon the audience's ideolect, while using simple, direct and universal signs to subvert clichés into new metaphors. This "public acknowledgment of consensual fictions" is central to the "stability of the social norm." (Bryson, 159).

WAC thereby exemplifies Strategic Interventions by effectively incorporating the feminist lexicon into a political agenda, challenging signs which deeply affect our structures of belief and everyday lives.

Cited readings

Bryson, Norman. (1983) Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. Cambridge: Unwin Hyman.

Jacobs, Karrie. (Dec, 1990). I.D. "Graphic Action"

Linker, Kate and Barbara Kruger.(1990). Love For Sale. Japan: Times Mirror.