Overview
In many cults, women have been exploited for numerous reasons, especially those that pertain to their sexuality. At a very young age, especially those who are born into or raised in a cult environment, girls are exposed to very mature and explicit materials meant for young women, not young girls. Also, there is this challenge in cults to see which woman can make it to the stop, and women, to please the leader of the cult, will abandon any sense of morals and ethics to survive in their patriarchal cult. These people are also the operators of the machines that the cult leader takes credit for. In this project, I have wanted to look into how women’s perceptions are not only altered going into the cult but how they are also raised to believe this way in the 20th-21st century. Additionally, I looked at how different cults treat women, though many of them have a very misogynistic viewpoint of women, many do treat women with more leniency because of what they do for men and how they please the male gaze. In this project, I endured simply what was being exposed to the outside viewpoint of women in cults, but I can never truly understand how much these girls and young women go through in such traumatic and toxic environments.
Self in Modern WorldIn Self in the Modern World, I planned to look at one end of the spectrum of this cult mentality where the whole cult is also recognized as a religion. This ties into the purpose of my research which is to understand what it is like to break off those cultish ties and how ingrained it is into your very being. Especially for women who’ve been branded (mentally or physically) with the burdens of the cult, but also who's been abused (physically and sexually) since they were young girls. The purpose of my product is to show the perspective of a woman (either in powerful/non-powerful positions in the cult) and unveil what caused that instance of breaking their silence and creating their own life free from the cult. This also entails the power of Scientology as an organization and how vast its influence is and how this affects the person breaking the silence. In this product, I delved into both perspectives of an outsider and an insider (victim) to show the contrasting behaviors of two people in the same world who were taught very different ways to survive. In my product, I showed some email correspondence between a producer of a Netflix documentary (based on Leah Remini’s docuseries) and a girl in Scientology.
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ArtIn art, I plan to look at the opposite end of the spectrum where the people of the cult are not recognized not as a religious group, but as a cult by the exact dictionary definition of a cult. The purpose of my research is to look at the “loyalty” that young girls have in the ongoing presence of the cult leader when they’re a part of that environment. Specifically, I would like to engage myself in looking at the true trauma that young girls endured in the Waco Branch Davidians. The purpose of my project is to embrace the visual aspects of writing to bring forth the emotion and the best depiction of what life was like for these girls in the group from the perspective of a psychologist/psychiatrist who is helping these survivors to overcome their struggles and PTSD with this event. This is probably the more aggressive topic I’ve had to come to face concerning writing as the topic entails such a heavy burden and weariness. In the end, however, I think it was important to fully develop these uncomfortable ideas fully as means of learning and allowing others to see the facts in a more digestible light.
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