Trisha Paytas & White Feminism is a website that combines illustration and interaction to create an immersive world where traditional feminine visual motifs have been subverted. Utilizing a maximalist and ornamental web design approach, the database is designed to guide the user through the learning experience about the online life of Trisha Paytas and examine how their journey to capitalistic success was reliant on the exploitation of marginalized peoples through a postmodern feminist lens.
The intention is to illustrate and draw attention to the fraught relationship between privileged white women and marginalized people, and it is depicted in media and online spaces. Trisha Paytas has simultaneously painted themselves as a victim and a self-made success story when in reality, they have attained their financial success through exploitation and bigotry, using harmful comments and rhetoric to garner exposure and clicks through controversy.
I like to think of my project as a rebuttal against white liberal feminism, that empowerment for feminine persons does not come through financial success and enforcement of strict gender binaries. The ideologies that I believe in and utilize our post-structuralist and intersectional feminisms serve to imagine a world where we empower ourselves through community, fulfillment without the need for capital, and genuine care for those around us. In a time where social media and online spaces churn out increasingly exploitative and reductive archetypes for feminine persons to attempt to box themselves into, I hope to portray the lifestyle and story that Paytas performs becomes doubly harmful and dehumanizing.