Who's TANA?

The Courtauldian
Sep 24
2 min read

Emma Cormier

TW: WOMAN STRETCHING

Hi, my name is Emma, your fellow student, and perhaps foremost, an angry woman.

Since I couldn’t practise what might be referred to as public violence, I decided instead to create art. Today, I am bringing you my mini-series called ‘Who's TANA?’

For those who are not familiar with French pop culture, TANA is a SEXIST insult that translates to SLUT, and which has started to appear on social media in recent years.

Why not just call them SLUTS? Well, because the social media algorithm would detect it as a slur and de-activate your account. So you see, we just HAD to find another way to insult women online. If only we applied as much creativity to other issues, perhaps we'd have a cure for world hunger by now.

But we made the creative decision to stay on this project, and so here we are. A woman can qualify as a TANA if she is considered vulgar, i.e., wearing revealing clothes, flirting or engaging in sexual relations, or even by simply existing in a way that is unsuitable to certain groups of the population (mostly men).

But women online did not stay quiet in the face of this new insulting vocabulary. Instead, we re-appropriated the insult, wearing it as a badge of pride. Slogans such as ‘TANA et fière de l’être’ (TANA and proud to be) show the successful transformation of TANA into a feminist claim. Because what being a TANA truly means is that we were loud enough, pretty enough, or simply independent enough to trigger and disrupt the peace of misogynistic people online. We even took it a step further by creating TANALAND, a space where there would be no men: women would be free to wear whatever they wanted, without the fear of being harassed or assaulted.

What they wanted us to feel insulted by, we claimed as our own to wear with pride. Because the worst thing women can do is carry shame.

This photographic series aims to comment on this phenomenon and to visually reclaim what being a TANA means. It also aims to call out the sheer ridiculousness of what being a TANA is, i.e. existing within our bodies.

A special thank you to my friend Louna, who agreed to help me out on this project, and to her friend, who wished to remain nameless.

A trigger warning for extreme sluttiness.

TW: WOMEN EXISTING