Brazil... photography... China... gender...

I normally don't post about photography-related things, but since I spend a lot of time taking photos and looking at photos, I'm going to make an exception now for a really cool photography exhibition. French photographer JR , has an awesome public photography exhibition in Rio de Janiero on women. Yes, he's too cool to have a real name, apparently he's an "underground" photographer that first gained fame (or notoriety?) through his illegal exhibition of mural-sized photos in public spaces; later, his stuff became recognized and received positive reviews. The exhibition displays blown up portraits of women in Brazil's notorious favelas -- slums or shantytowns within Brazil's big cities such as Rio and Sao Paulo. Favelas are infamous for their high murder rates, drugs, and poverty.

Although I haven't seen any of JR's stuff in person, it is really impressive; it is socially-conscious photography that is made even more impressive by its public, mural-sized exhibition. The first stuff that I saw was a series of portraits that he took following last year's riots in Paris's banlieues, which were then exhibited as large mural-sized photographs around Paris. You can see an awesome short film on the project, I highly recommend viewing it on youtube here:
The 28 millimeter project

I hope the exhibit might still be up in Rio when I make it to Brazil. You can see photos of the exhibit here at the photography website Lensculture.

Here's a photo of the favela at night:
On gender

On a similar note, I first became fascinated with gender equality in college in my development-related classes, and reading about the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen bank's microlending to Bangladeshi women. The Grameen bank famously found that women were much better clients for loans -- they used money more wisely, and also contributed to many beneficial externalities (better child health, education, etc...).


A woman's position in society is not only a good index of a country's economic development, but also a good index of it's social development as well. My own thesis work also examined gender equality initiatives under China's communist government, which found a positive relationship between political emphasis on gender equality and improved child health. But I was also disturbed by the phenomenon of China's missing women: the phenomenon that since economic reforms began in 1979, the sex ratio of China's population has become far more biased toward males. For instance, in most normal populations the sex ratio at birth is about 105 to 107 male births for every female births. In China this has increased to about 116 male births, and this bias is pervasive in other cohorts as well.

In fact, many Asian and Muslim countries have this problem, including economically developed countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The most basic explanation is that in these countries male children are more valued than female children, and hence practices such as sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and selective neglect has lead to imbalanced sex ratios within these societies. Strangely, Latin America doesn't seem to have the problem of sex ratio, despite being an infamously "macho" society. I would hypothesize that this might be partially due to the cultural and religious abhorrence toward abortion; of course, this doesn't explain everything. Anyways, this is a subject that I have found fascinating, and I still do not fully understand the underlying reasons.

Another phenomenon is that of China's extraordinary rate of female suicides: in most countries, the male to female suicide rate is about 4:1, in China, it is 1:1. What is driving China's women to commit suicide at such an alarming rate? Are the pressures China's women (or for that matter, East Asian women) face similar to those among Chinese women abroad?

Consider this an introduction to a future post about my observations on gender within Paraguay's Chinese community.