The Bechdel Test and Mako Mori Test are tests that measure the gender diversity and/or treatment in movies. The Bechdel test consists of three questions for any chosen movie:  (1) Does it have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man? If the answer isn’t yes to all three questions, the movie doesn’t pass the test. This test mainly focuses on whether or not the female characters within the movie have senses of self and value their individuality apart from the men in their lives. The other test, the Mako Mori test, also asks three simple questions of a movie: (1) Does it have at least one female character; (2) who gets her own narrative arc; (3) that is not about supporting a man’s story? Like the Bechdel test, the movie must pass all three questions in order to pass the test. This test is a measure of whether or not the movie lends its female characters the development and narrative that the male characters receive. These two tests test whether or not a movie displays gender diversity and whether or not it portrays women well enough. They both help us get a gauge on whether or not a movie includes strong women that have lives outside of the male characters. Meeting the criteria that these tests demand is important so that impressionable young (and older) women get to see strong role models in movies to show them that they’re capable and have potential.

The first movie I’ll be reviewing is called Ratatouille. Ratatouille is a well-plotted Pixar movie about a talented rat who loves to cook. Remy the rat is born into a rat colony surrounded by other rats that have no appreciation for divine cuisine. Remy feels like an outsider. He’s pressured to live his life a certain way. He has dreams to become a chef, but his family doesn’t approve at all. He’s pressured to live his life the “rat” way and eat trash instead of cooking. One day, Remy’s rat colony invades a Paris townhome. They get chased away and into the sewers by an old woman. In the panic, Remy gets separated from his family and ends up alone in the sewer. While trying to find his way out, he comes across a window above an extremely fancy French restaurant, which he learns is the restaurant of his late idol, Auguste Gusteau. Remy sees a garbage boy, Linguini, ruining a soup from the window, so he scurries in to fix the soup. The soup ends up getting served and the guests love it. Linguini confronts Remy, making a deal with him that he’ll let Remy cook as long as he gets the credit and Remy hides. Remy ends up hiding underneath Linguini’s chef hat and pulling his hair to control his hands and cook. After they begin to cook together, Linguini realizes that he has control of the restaurant since he’s Gusteau’s son, and he takes the restaurant as his own, kicking out the current owner. Then, a renowned food critic announces he’ll be coming to the restaurant to review it. With the help of his rat friends, Remy cooks Ratatouille for the food critic and he ends up loving the dish. They reveal to the food critic that Remy was the one who cooked his meal. The food critic builds Remy and Linguini their very own restaurant and they both pursue their careers together. As much as I enjoy Ratatouille and remember it fondly from my childhood, it in fact does not pass the Bechdel test. There are two named women in the movie, Collette and Renata. Collette is a chef from Gusteau’s restaurant and Renata is Linguini’s mother, but the two never speak. I think this movie could have passed the Bechdel test by adding another female chef to work alongside Collette. This would have provided a lot of non-man conversation between the two. Ratatouille, however, does pass the Mako Mori test. Collette is a female character who gets her own narrative arc. She grows as a chef and at the end of the movie she gets to work an upgraded main position in a new restaurant.

I made a test that is going to measure the LGBT diversity in movies. My test will consist of two questions: (1) Does the movie have at least 1 canonically LGBT+ person? and (2) Is the movie about said person’s sexuality? An important note about my test is that to pass it, the answer to the first question must be yes and the answer to the second question must be no. I think having diversity within sexualities in movies is very important because it provides role models and exemplars for LGBT youth. I added the second question because I think while sexuality can be as important and unimportant to someone’s sense of self as they want, it’s important to recognize that there’s more to a person than just their sexuality. The movie I chose that passes my test is The Way He Looks. The Way He Looks is a Portuguese Netflix movie about a blind Brazilian boy named Leonardo. Leonardo’s daily life is very simple but difficult as a blind teenager. Every day, his best friend, Giovanna, walks him to and from school. One day, a new boy named Gabriel shows up to Leo’s class. Giovanna and Leo befriend him rather quickly. Soon, Leo takes a romantic liking to Gabriel, and they become closer with time. Gabriel becomes very helpful in assisting Leo considering his disability and protects him from bullies that pick on him for being blind. Eventually, Leo can’t hold back anymore confesses his love for Gabriel to Giovanna, who supports him and encourages Gabriel to go confront Leo. This confrontation results in the start of a relationship. This movie has in fact two canonically LGBT characters (who are both Brazilian which is a bonus for diversity). While this movie is advertised as a romance movie, it mainly focuses on navigating adolescence and love while having a disability. This movie includes two LGBT characters and it isn’t a movie solely about sexuality.

The Stonewall Riots were undoubtedly one of the most poignant events in the history of LGBTQ+ liberation. The bravery and perseverance of those who fought for their rights during this time period was unprecedented. If modern day life as an LGBTQ+ person seems hard, life in the 1960s was impossible. It was illegal for gay couples to publicly engage in any sort of display of affection. In New York City specifically, people could get arrested if they weren’t wearing at least three items of clothing that was deemed to match their gender. Life as an LGBTQ+ person was strenuous, but they did have sanctuaries to retreat to such as gay clubs and bars. Here, they could express themselves freely and converse without judgement.

One of these bars, called the Stonewall Inn, was a bar bought and advertised as a “straight bar” only to be later renovated and remodeled into a gay bar. This particular bar welcomed homeless LGBTQ+ youth, drag queens, and runaways. Raids were common but no consequences followed as the police were often bribed to keep quiet about the activities taking place within the bar. On June 28th, 1969, there was a raid that caught the entire bar off guard. Police barged in and began to patronize everyone inside. Two of the women inside the bar this night were Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both trans women of color. It is unclear but likely according to many survivors that Johnson was the first to fight back and spark the riot. Essentially what happened that night was the police raided the bar, violently manhandled the people inside, and the crowd decided to fight back.

So here’s the issue: the most impactful and powerful members of this fight are being left out of the picture. Courageous souls such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are glossed over as if they weren’t even in the movement to begin with and are painted over as white cisgender men. It seems obvious that these people should be receiving the credit that they deserve, but that’s not the case for everyone, especially in Hollywood.

In the movie Stonewall directed by Roland Emmerich, the main character is a white and cisgender gay boy named Danny. After the trailer for this movie was released, countless members of the LGBTQ+ community became outraged at the noticeable lack of representation in the movie. Essentially what they were saying was that the movie was too white for what the Stonewall community was actually like. Even some survivors of the riots spoke up. According to Titus Montalvo, a survivor of the riots, about 70% of the crowd at the Stonewall was of color.

The most treasured fighters from this time period were trans people, people of color, etc. This whitewashed and erasure-packed movie completely and unjustly strips the beloved martyrs of this movement of their title and their courage. To essentially erase a trans woman of color, who had to fight 10x as hard as a white cis gay boy and paint him in her place is damaging and painfully disrespectful. They did include a minor character to represent Marsha Johnson, but she was played by a cisgender man which perpetuates the transphobic notion that Marsha was simply a man dressed up as a woman rather than a real woman. The point of dissecting this film is not necessarily to belittle the true pain and ignorance people like the main character had to endure, but rather to analyze the privilege that comes with that experience and how it compares to those less fortunate.

How does this apply to today’s trans population of color? Trans people of color know erasure and discrediting all too well. To them, movies like this make them feel like they just can’t have anything. These people already have to endure battles every single day just for existing, and erasure like this invalidates and simultaneously adds to their struggle. Having to speak up and say “actually, it was my people who won those battles for all of you,” isn’t something they should have to deal with. Additionally, a lot of the white and cis people at the forefront of LGBTQ+ movements are notorious for dissing people of color and trans people, even though those are the people that caused for gay men to even be allowed to show themselves in public. Essentially, the Stonewall Riots erasure is only contributing to the challenges that the people involved have to face nowadays.

Obviously, my name is what I think represents me the most. I say it and hear it more than any other word. My name was one of the first words I wrote down during the brainstorming. Because of this, I decided to choose my first initial to be part of my stamp. At first, I chose a design that had a lot of lines that would be impossible to cut out because there was no negative or positive space. I had to start over. The importance of negative and positive space is so that the design can really pop out, and I think my cutout represents that well. Like I mentioned earlier, my original stamp was all lines. That was hard for me to cut out because when you draw lines, there is no negative space. Once I started to understand this, I realized it would be best if I started over and that’s how I ended up with this design.

Negative space is the space in a picture that surrounds the focal point of the drawing. For example, in my cut out, the house is the focal point. The blue space surrounding the house in the left side is the negative space in the photo. To find negative space in my cut out, I first had to cut out the outline of my house. Once that was done, I had to locate the other positive space within the photo and cut around it.Seeing in negative space helps an artist because it draws the focal point of a drawing out, it makes it really pop in a sense. Seeing in negative space also enhances a drawing because of this.

Printmaking is a form a visual art that involves creating prints of an image by forming the image on a surface or matrix. There are many different variations of printmaking such as relief printing, Intaglio, mono-printing, lithography, etc. The invention of printmaking supposedly originates from China, although the roots of printmaking remain up in the air. The invention of printmaking was revolutionary at the time because it allowed for multiple prints of the same image to be produced from just one matrix of a material such as wood or metal. Additionally, with the invention of printmaking came the first printed books.

The print I chose is “ESSEBI” by loose-ends (Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8799416@N05/2480207499). This print is the profile of (seemingly) a woman with rather long hair flowing behind her. She doesn’t seem to be wearing clothes. Her eyes are open, staring straight ahead. The background of the print is yellow, along with the outline of the woman. This print has plenty of contrast considering the only two colors used are black and a bright shade of yellow. Most of the space in the print is taken up by the hair, which is the focal point of the print.  I notice that the artist uses both thick and thin lines to draw the hair. Personally, since the person in the print seems to be a woman, this print screams empowerment. I think her hair flowing behind her portrays her as heroic and/or almost god-like. Additionally, she is the only object in the photo which I interpret to be a symbol of independence. I wonder whether or not that was the artist’s intention. I like the photo a lot because of this. I also think the yellow and black contrast is lovely. The swirls and waves of the hair are very pleasing.

I learned a lot during this process. I learned that sometimes taking the simple route truly does make everything easier. I also learned that a lot of thought goes into slide design, and I never knew that it was so complex. Most importantly, I learned that it is important to do the research your teacher provides you with, because they’re giving it to you for a reason. When I went into creating my slide, I really tried to take into account the tips that the websites gave us. I decided to change everything about my slide. I chose a more inviting background and really made an effort to incorporate symmetry into my slide.

This is my slide. I chose to make the background yellow because yellow is my favorite color, and it gives the slide a soft-looking appearance. Here I wrote about a few of my interests and/or “likes”. Notice how I underlined Likes. I did this so it would add emphasis. If I were to leave it like the rest of the words, it would be hard to tell that that’s the aspect of the slide that I’m trying to focus on if that makes sense. I feel like this is a great way to describe who I am because it lists things that I enjoy. I decided to use a nice readable font because it gives the slide a simplistic vibe and balances out with the yellow. Now I have a list of a few of my hobbies. This reveals a lot about me because it shows what kind of things I like to do outside of school. I included this photo of me of me because I think it’s a nice picture and it flows with the rhythm of the slide while also adding contrast to the soft yellow with some bold colors. My slide is very calming in texture yet bold overall.