For this assignment, I decided to reorder five songs from the Burlesque soundtrack to reflect one woman’s journey towards embracing her womanhood – including an internal battle over appreciating and expressing her sexuality, finding a sense of empowerment in her femininity, further exploring her own personal style and manner of expressing herself, and finding a new kind of confidence and personal empowerment from these facets of her personal growth.

The movie Burlesque does kind of touch on some of these topics, but the soundtrack is set up to reflect more of a pursuit of a romantic relationship and career opportunities. I wanted to use this assignment to draw more focus to the notion of personal growth surrounding the modern woman’s need to embrace her own sense of sexuality, womanhood, woman-ness, and femininity in a world where we are so often criticized, degraded, overlooked, and unfairly scrutinized for these things from all angles. I wanted this project to reflect the questions many women are prompted to ask surrounding the perceived relationships between their worth or intelligence or morality and their self expression, sexuality, and aesthetic.

Burlesque is a ridiculous film, but what makes it so great to so many people is how the main character over the course of the movie becomes this strong, confident person who finds a deeper appreciation for herself by embracing her femininity and personal brand of beauty and demanding that everyone around her respects that. In many situations, women are often prompted to behave less feminine in order to be perceived as smarter, more professional, and more deserving of respect. The goal of this project is to illustrate how much better life would be if the world were to embrace the modern woman in all of her forms; including refraining from shaming women for being sexual at any measure in social or personal situations, working to embrace femininity in the workplace until it is as culturally accepted as traditional masculinity and anywhere else on that scale, and to encourage women to find a sense of empowerment through self expression by working to break down unfair aesthetic standards and degrading rhetoric surrounding damaging cultural expectations of womanhood.