An Identity Remix

 

With recent war developments in Russia, a topic that has received a lot of attention lately is whether or not women should be drafted. Tiktok, Instagram, and other media platforms depict videos of females cleaning captioned with “me when WWIII starts.” This led me to think about my own response to a female draft. For this remix project, I took a WWII draft registration card and photoshopped it with my own information. All the information is accurate and completely my own. The process of creating the draft card is perhaps more meaningful than the project. On the line that asks for the name and address of someone who will always know your address, made me realize that that information was equivalent to an emergency contact. Who will know if I don’t return from war? Who needs a letter sent to them? The second image is my own grandfather’s WWII picture. I photoshopped my face onto his. Even though it is kind of funny looking, it adds onto this conversation of me following in his footsteps and what it would look like to be a woman in uniform.

Like Barney’s essay suggests, I did not “seek factual information” but instead sought “stories that relate to contemporary life in surprising or interesting ways.” It isn’t necessarily the draft I am interested in, but the conversation about women potentially being drafted today. This was a way for me to be “an artist not a historian” and to take real images from history and altar them to reveal my own message.