As an active member of the Women’s Equality Party I spend a lot of time trying to work out what I need to do, what we need to do, to actually achieve equality. I had for some time been thinking about male gender conformity – particularly in terms of clothing – and how that might be a barrier to equality (for all genders, including male). At the same time, in the process of moving house, I stumbled across a box of postcards produced by Penguin Modern Classics celebrating 100 Penguin Modern Classic authors (it was a gift). I was aware that I had never used the postcards and looking through them I could see why – at least 80 of them were white men, all of them posed to capture some aspect of ‘normal’ masculinity – mostly shirts and ties with the occasional more casually dressed person. I wanted to challenge this conformity and started recolouring the postcards to give them more a colourful and adventurous appearance. A selection can be found below:
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