Every month this website will feature a different cartoon topic.  March’s topic will be ‘Balance’.  (It’s an aspirational topic!)

If you would like to go on the mailing list to receive emails about the Topic of the Month and other things happening with Judy Horacek’s work, sign up at the chicken on your right.  Tell your friends.

Every month this website will feature a different cartoon topic.  As usual, there will be no January topic, but we’ll start the alphabet up again in February, with ‘Something beginning with A’.

If you would like to go on the mailing list to receive emails about the Topic of the Month and other things happening with Judy Horacek’s work, sign up at the chicken on your right.  Tell your friends!

The last opening is tonight, with two exhibitions of paintings- Ruth Waller and Waratah Lahy.  There will be a final sale of works at the Gallery from 14 to 21 December, including works by me.  Helen Maxwell Gallery, First floor, 42 Mort Street, Braddon ACT 2612.

Every month this website will feature a different cartoon topic. Next month’s topic is ‘Beginnings and Endings’ as befits a topic that has to cover both December and January.  (As usual, there will be no specific January topic).  The alphabet will begin again in February – I couldn’t bring myself to start with  A in December!

If you would like to go on the mailing list to receive emails about the Topic of the Month and other things happening with Judy Horacek’s work, sign up at the chicken on your right.  Tell your friends!

Good on the Swedish kids, and their teacher.  The whole passive princess stuff seems way out of control to me, along with the incredibly girly clothes marketed to young girls.  It seems to be so COMPULSORY.  Yes, little girls might well like pink a lot (although not all do) but do they need to be wearing clothing and shoes that they can’t run in or play in or do anything much in?  I see families out in public all the time where the little boy has sandals with buckles held safely on his feet, and baggy shorts and a t-shirt – all great for running around and exploring, while the little girl has ridiculous shoes that it takes all her energy to walk in, and is wearing some frilly garment that restricts her movements – too long, too short, too precious – suitable only for sitting there looking pretty.

Here’s the link to the F-work article, http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2009/10/swedish_schoolc   There is a link there to the original article in a Swedish newspaper.  I spent a while reading the comments on the original article  - it’s amazing how threatened so many people are by the suggestion that perhaps the gender roles shouldn’t be so rigidly described.  ”Boys and girls are different” they kept saying, which is true enough, but boys and boys are different, and girls and girls are different.

It’s astonishing to me that there are still lots of people out there who really seem to believe that advertising and marketing reflect neutral objective values.  They can happily claim that the influence the Swedish teacher may have had on the students was ‘indoctrination’, while seeing the behaviour of Toys R Us (a giant multinational driven above all by profit) is just innocent Nature in action.

Interestingly, lots of the complainants assumed the teacher was male, even though neither article gave the teacher’s gender that I could see.  Very few referred to the teacher as ‘he or she’, just ‘he’.   It seems that the people complaining that it is ridiculous to talk of gender stereotyping happen to be stuck in the assumption that authority figures like teachers, are always male.  (Am I surprised?).