She Speaks Back 2026
This project re-enters the visual language of old American advertisements through performance, photography, and self-representation. By embodying the women historically presented as silent housewives, objects of desire, obedient mothers, and idealized bodies, I investigate how media has long constructed femininity through control, beauty, race, labor, and submission.
Using my own body as an Arab woman wearing a headscarf, I recreate and disrupt these images to challenge the narratives they promoted. The work shifts the female figure from object to voice, exposing the systems of gender, visibility, identity, and power embedded within popular culture.
At the same time, the project reflects on the present moment and the repetition of these structures through social media culture. Today, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok continue to shape impossible standards of beauty through filters, cosmetic procedures, performance, and curated identities. Behind the camera, women are still often expected to perform perfection, domesticity, desirability, and care, from beauty rituals to cooking tutorials , while many continue to struggle for basic rights over their own bodies, autonomy, and reproductive freedom.
Through repetition, reenactment, and reconstruction, She Speaks Back connects past and present, revealing how the language of control simply changes its form. The advertisement becomes not a tool of representation, but a space of resistance.
Using my own body as an Arab woman wearing a headscarf, I recreate and disrupt these images to challenge the narratives they promoted. The work shifts the female figure from object to voice, exposing the systems of gender, visibility, identity, and power embedded within popular culture.
At the same time, the project reflects on the present moment and the repetition of these structures through social media culture. Today, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok continue to shape impossible standards of beauty through filters, cosmetic procedures, performance, and curated identities. Behind the camera, women are still often expected to perform perfection, domesticity, desirability, and care, from beauty rituals to cooking tutorials , while many continue to struggle for basic rights over their own bodies, autonomy, and reproductive freedom.
Through repetition, reenactment, and reconstruction, She Speaks Back connects past and present, revealing how the language of control simply changes its form. The advertisement becomes not a tool of representation, but a space of resistance.