How important is for a woman to stand for her own rights?

There are many contradictory opinions arising nowadays when people talk about feminism – So many girls out there say, ‘I’m not a feminist,’ because they think it means something angry, or disgruntled, or complaining, or they picture rioting and picketing on men. But feminism is NOT about that at all. It simply means you believe women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.

Liora K, the photographer, has gorgeously captured the issues related to individual rights of women. Liora began the project, titled “Feminism,” in 2012, after she moved to a Republican state for the first time and heard more about how proposed reproductive rights legislation that was detrimental to women.

“I was signing petitions and sharing articles, but it wasn’t really alleviating the anger I felt,” she said.

Liora decided to use her skills as a photographer to spread the message that women won’t stand for their rights being scaled back. To do this, she chose to speak to individual women about the topics that matter to them, and then photograph each woman with a message about feminism written on her body.

“When I started witnessing all the attacks on birth control, abortion rights, equal pay, and retractions of protections for survivors of domestic violence, I wanted to seek an artistic response,” Liora wrote on her website.  “I wanted to create a body of share-able and instantly understandable work that people could connect with and use to continue to spread the word: women’s rights are being sabotaged, but we are fighting back.'” Liora works with volunteers, all of whom are fully involved in conceptualizing their photo shoots and editing the images afterwards. Each session begins with a conversation about the issues important to each volunteer, the two collaborate to come up with a phrase or sentence that the subject would like written on their body. “When somebody volunteers their body, I would never want to remove their voice from the process,” “It’s very much about them” says Liora.

The resulting images show women pushing back against sexism, racism, transphobia, anti-abortion rhetoric, slut-shaming, sexual assault, domestic violence, victim-blaming, and a host of social ills.

Liora hopes that the images will inspire people already involved in the feminist movement to keep fighting against inequality.