Trigger Warning for Content - Topic and Images


My project bears the witness of the unheard victims from domestic violence, which our patriarchal society chose to deny and neglect due to the lack of empathy, education, and collective awareness from the mainstream media. I selected video essay as my particular media framework and employed music, statistics, intellectual knowledge from my interviewer, performance art, and revivification of how violence took place in domestic places from films on both Chinese and U.S. media platforms. My selected media played a role in narrating the universal nature of this issue, and provides the audience with both experiences of learning and witnessing, thus calling for change.

Praxis 2 has been a challenging project for me to conduct emotionally, because the topic of domestic violence and the process of going through violent scenes repetitively during the editing process reminded me of my traumatic experiences from my childhood, and pushed me to face every of my deepest fears in my life. I cried multiple times editing the video and also while writing this reflection, but I believe that it is my mission and responsibility to use my talent and educational opportunities to heal myself and my family, to be a part of the solution of domestic violence, and to deliver the greatest hope to the audience from my darkest nights. I am beyond grateful to have the chance to initiate and get a start with the issue that I care about the most from IML295 and to speak with an academician about the intellectual aspects of gender studies and the intersectionality of this issue. Another major challenge I have encountered is to trim a three-hour-long interview into a four-minute video essay. I rethink the themes of my project and the central message during the cruel selection process. I am eager to learn more about how to present an appropriate amount of information to the audience within a limited time frame effectively.

I learned from my interviewer that artists need to be aware of certain practical considerations for audiences' responses during the creative process. To be more specific, audiences feeling irrelevant to the issue may refuse to witness the pain and violence from the reality of the social issue, and victims of the social issue may be mentally triggered by witnessing the violence as a second-hand trauma. Reactivated memories of domestic violence can cause further harm linked to long term mental health issues on the audience, so it is important to write stories that not only witnesses but also provide courage and faith for the victims to overcome fear and embrace self-love. These suggestions from my interviewer sparked me to question my storytelling strategies: how do you lead the audience to witness the violence and reality of the society, and to be in the lives of the most vulnerable people in the society when you are feeling irrelevant? How do you bring hope and love to the victims of domestic violence without causing further harm to them? During the planning and editing process of my project, I realized that my challenge is to lead the audience to witness the violence, and to create bridges that allow the audience to walk in the cruel reality with curiosity and patience. There are still areas of growth for me to narrate stories and utilize media, and I acknowledge that I can do better by managing my time on the project more wisely and includes my metaphor regarding this issue. During the brainstorming process, I came up with a metaphoric story: “A woman in jail will see her daily meals as the only warmth, even if it comes from the devil who jailed her. A devil was never born a devil, but a child in a classroom where the teacher rewards him with candy, wrapped with the word “love”, and the taste of power every time he dominates other girls. The little boy seeks for the nicely wrapped candy in the word of love, which he did not understand yet, but became obsessed with the falsely marketed taste of power inevitably and involuntarily”. I may take this concept as a rhetorical story setting in my future filmmaking career.

I also learned from my interviewer that the issue of domestic violence is not only a gender issue on patriarchal norms but is also an issue that intersects other social topics including poverty, immigration, health, class, and racial inequalities. To reflect on the intersectionality of this issue and the discussion of power dynamics from Hook’s All about Love, I recognized that violence as a tool to make individual feel powerful by penetrating fear and dominating others arise from the patriarchal societal norms that force us to put on the false mask and ignore the power of love. When intimate connections that we humans instinctively seek are depicted as violence, manipulation, and domination — We become fearful of love, and we will take these inhumane concepts like love. 

I focused on informing the issue from a global perspective and collected the statistics of the affected population from both the Chinese and U.S. media. In the current globalized age, increased interconnectivity allows media makers to use the internet as a digital platform to inform the general public of certain issues. Despite the language barriers, I discovered the universal nature of the issue by discussing the formation of patriarchal norms with my interviewer and reflecting upon the intersectionality of the issue within the two distinct cultures. My interviewer, Ying taught me that “Censorship can kill anyone, but creativity can survive anywhere...It would be ideal if we have something intellectually stimulating and socially progressive”. The potential solution calls for all forms of intervention, and most importantly a sustainable environment that cultivates loving cultures, education of domestic violence, and open communication that provide everyone faith, courage, and hope to move past fear and demand change. As Hooks points out in All About Love, we can only love if we surrender the will to power, and “[w]e move away from this worship of death by challenging patriarchy, creating peace, working for justice, and embracing love ethic” (Hooks 193). To love myself dearly, I let go of the fear of telling stories that once haunt me; To love my audience authentically, I let go of the fear of being oppressed in a patriarchal society and inspire them past fear with my love and courage.