Kristen Visbal\u2019s 250lb \u201cfearless girl\u201d sculpture\u00a0recently won\u00a0three Grand Prix and 18 Lions in all, making her the biggest winner in the history of the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity. The awards and accolades have credited her with challenging gender equality on Wall Street.<\/p>\n
The statue, which was placed in front of\u00a0Arturo Di Modica\u2019s iconic \u201ccharging bull\u201d\u00a0\u2013 a minimalist three-and-a-half tonne bronze sculpted bull that marks New York\u2019s financial district that is also the most photographed art object in the city \u2013 on International Women\u2019s Day, has been at the centre of debates ever since. Their juxtaposition has spurred discussion about workplace gender equality as well as art that mostly ignore the political economy of the surrounding financial institutions that directly and indirectly brought them together.<\/p>\n
The newcomer was enthusiastically embraced and commentators see her as\u00a0challenging Wall Street\u2019s gender gap salary ceiling, implying that the bull is a symbol of patriarchy and capitalism gone wild, antagonist toward female leadership in business.<\/p>\n
Writing for The Conversation, Dr Peluso<\/a> argues that\u00a0the creation of the Fearless Girl was orchestrated by a financial institution that is emblematic of the type of power structures that impede such emancipation. The piece was\u00a0commissioned from McCann advertising agency\u00a0by State Street Global Advisors, a firm managing US$2.4 trillion in assets, as a means of positive publicity. State Street was aiming to rehabilitate its brand image, particularly in a climate of past allegations of misconduct and as a turnaround celebration of its\u00a0SPDR Gender Diversity Index, which trades under the symbol SHE. Indeed, the Fearless Girl\u2019s plaque (now removed) reads: \u201cKnow the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n Equally objectionable is how the juxtaposition of the girl and the bull restate conservative gender images. This deliberate casting of outdated conventional gender stereotypes \u2013 the brave little girl vs the big bad male bull \u2013 is belittling. Gender discrimination and the corporate sidelining of women assume more nuanced and insidious forms, which such simplistic images obscure. Might not women and girls be the bull or charging alongside it?<\/p>\n The full article can be read here<\/a>.<\/p>\n (Image kindly provided by Florence Buchanan.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kristen Visbal\u2019s 250lb \u201cfearless girl\u201d sculpture\u00a0recently won\u00a0three Grand Prix and 18 Lions in all, making her the biggest winner in the history of the Cannes … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":2398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124,70,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2399,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions\/2399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}