One of the most common questions feminist activists get asked, especially after the series of scandals behind the #MeToo movement, is, “why are you so angry?”
I recently read a conversation on Twitter that began precisely like this: “Why are women so angry?” The woman who replied said: “9 women are killed everyday, I have to think about what I am going to wear every day before I leave home, so I am not harassed in the street, I have been raped, I have been molested. I always wonder if I am going to come back home alive. Obviously, I am angry.” She was talking about Mexico, after a recent series of kidnappings of women in very public areas of the city, but the sentiment is shared by many women all over the world.
We get killed, we get harassed, and we get beaten just because we are women. Our rights are trampled every day in a myriad of ways, and many people act like the things we have won, equal rights and equal freedoms, are somehow a gift that we should be thankful for.
But women are angry because this has taken so long and because it is a daily struggle to make sure these hard-won rights are respected.
Camila Rosa is an artist from Brazil who is not afraid to tackle this question. Originally from Sao Paulo, this 29-year-old illustrator lived and worked for a while in New York and is now back in her native Brazil, working and creating.
On both sides of the continent, her work has been providing political and social movements with illustrations and other materials based on her characters: angry, colorful, and strong women who open their mouths wide and who will not be silenced.
Her drawings, depicting women of all colors -pink, yellow, orange, and blue- are strikingly bold and loud: “it is important for me to show in my drawings that there is not one single type of woman, I try to show that all women have their own characteristics and differences.”
Although her illustrations show mostly angry women, her art is not angry at all. If anything, it’s very playful and full of life. The angry women are not sulking, but are out there, making the world a better place and showing anybody who dares to stand in their way that they are here to stay, and that this world has changed and will keep changing.
For her illustrations, she draws inspiration from nature (she is vegan and is a passionate nature lover), her urban surroundings (her first artistic endeavors were in an urban art collective whose members drank tea and went out to do street murals), and many other things: “walking down the street is an inspiration. Listening to music is an inspiration. I get a lot of inspiration from the punk scene, from Brazil, from groups like Women’s Resistance. Feminism, LGBTQ, veganism…”
Follow Camila Rosa on Instagram and be inspired by these angry women full of color who are changing the world.
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