What does feminism look like? If you identify as a feminist, you probably feel trained to not care about appearances and encourage others not to as well. But maybe you still wonder: What does my appearance tell the world about who I think I am?
The truth is we all judge people based on what they look like and they judge us, too. Shugs & Fats, the new comedy web series created by Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz, is all about acknowledging this and dealing with it through irony and laughter. Doing so, their humor suggests, not only makes us feel better but also helps us understand why our preconceived assumptions are problematic in the first place.
Manzoor and Vaz — as South Asian, female comedians — also use comedy more specifically to reflect on their experiences as women who live in bodies our culture often treats as invisible, and rarely would consider “feminist” at first glance. The duo questions just how empowering or marginalizing this experience is by taking to the streets and initiating conversations about feminism with passers by. They take the question “What do feminists look like?” to the streets, asking everyone and anyone about their preconceptions of feminists in order to reach a deeper understanding about feminist stigmas that still pervade society.
Some of the answers are surprising, others are exactly what you’d expect. But Manzoor and Vaz, because they do not look like the stereotypical feminists to most of the people they approach, catch interviewees off-guard and provide an opportunity to not only expose the comical aspect of their ignorance but to further raise awareness about feminism.
Shugs & Fats explores this in more in the first season of their show and their work is definitely worth checking out. Hopefully, they’ll continue to push back on people’s preconceived notions of feminism in order to expose the truth at the heart of the movement: equality for everybody, no matter what they look like.
