Final Project - Jaime Jaget

Jaime Jaget

Women Media Proposal:

Everyday I struggle with loving my body. I struggle to see what is in the mirror and accept it merely because I was born with it. This has probably been my longest and most defining issue – I vividly remember before age nine looking in a mirror wishing to be prettier and thinner: wishing to be better without knowing why. Although with age and hard work this feeling is slowly becoming less, it is still a problem I wrestle with from the moment I wake up to the minute I fall asleep. I know I am not alone in this feeling. Each day, both women and girls wake-up wishing they could change a number on a scale or to be free from guilt when consuming something as small and deserved as cake on their birthdays.

For my final project, I plan to develop a project that fights this issue and empowers women. I plan to conduct a series of short interviews/conversations with women in my life to learn their stories and their relationships with their own bodies. These interviews will be recorded and assembled in to a short film to exemplify how body image in America may take different shapes, but defies race and ethnicity, as an epidemic that unifies all women.

I am a playwright and manage my own theater company that develops the voices of artists 18-28 by unifying voices from varying backgrounds. I plan to use for women from this community to interview and record via iPhone. For this semester, I plan to speak with four women who I already have on board. I believe for the first phases of this project it is important I speak with women who not only come from differing backgrounds and sexual orientations, but all whom I know have strong, educated opinions on this topic. These four women will be the focal points in the video and models for my work moving forward. Below is the list of women who I plan to speak with:

1.     Julissa Contreras, 24 – Bronx, NY

2.     Ren D Santiago, 23 – Harlem, NY

3.     Emily Daly, 28 – Westchester, NY

4.     Jenna Worsham, 28 – Cummings, GA

Ideally, after these interviews I would write a monologue for each of these women recognizing that their feelings are not only heard, but also internalized. I believe by empowering the voice of others through my own words support system with thus be developed. Down the road, I would love to develop this into a workshop series and use the video as a pitch to justify the project’s necessity. The workshops would allow me to speak with high school students on these issues, and challenge them to write for one another. I believe this project is important because I wish I had something like this as a teenager. I truly believe the younger we can start conversations and open a forum for discovery the more change we will see.

Time Line:

-       November 1^st – 9^th: Interviews and Conversations

-       November 10^th-25^th: Developing 5 Minute Video/Editing

-       Novemeber 26^th-December 7^th: I write for the women

-       December 8^th-10^th: Have participants read my writing, possibly record.