Designing Women (and Men, and Everyone in Between)
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Transcript of Designing Women (and Men, and Everyone in Between)
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Designing Women (and Men, and Everyone in Between)
Why Studying Gender Matters
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What is Gender?
• 1950s: biological attributes, sexual characteristics and social roles that characterize a person as male or female.
• 1960s: social movements begin to locate identity in systems of power; feminism centers ideas of oppression in sex itself
• “Women’s studies” and its various permutations give way to gender studies, recognizing role of the social, performance and art itself in producing gendered bodies.
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1948)• Men are human, women are “not
men;” they represent sex itself.• Women have no common past or
history, and thus no identity: it becomes the task of feminism to imagine all of these things.
• Men argue that women’s subordination is natural: but isn’t the status of this truth a self-justifying one? Relativism.
• Men and women are united in their mutual and unequal dependence: “To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste.”
• Men profit from inequality, and from controlling the terms of inequality
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Does visual art have a gender?
Women artists Male artist
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Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (1975), film and media studies, Birkbeck College, University of London• Psychoanalysis as a critical tool.• Scopophiia as a source of erotic pleasure that is
structured by gender.• Phallocentric society scripts women as the
passive, gazed-upon figure; men as active lookers. Because of how cinema is structured, the viewer always looks from a male perspective
• In modern film, there is a division of labor in which men act and women inspire action.
• Cinema structures the way women can be looked at.
• Three different ways of looking: the camera, the audience, and the way the characters look at each other within the frame.
• Women’s images have been “stolen” by traditional film, and only by destroying traditional conventions can women regain filmic agency.
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Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960• A woman• Naked• Terror• What is she looking at?• Where is she looking?• Her open mouth
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Christian Dior’s “New Look” Vogue, March 15 1947
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Case Study: Judy Chicago
• B. Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939• Rejected from Chicago Art Institute
in 1956; attends UCLA• 1970: begins teaching “feminist
art” at Fresno State, changes her name to Judy Chicago
• 1971: goes to Cal Arts, establishes Feminist Art Program.
• With Miriam Schapiro, launches Womanhouse as a women’s living and studio space.
• January 1972: Womanhouse opens to the public
• 1974-1979: Creation of The Dinner Party; tours 1979-1981
• Empowering: makes feminism popular
• Essentialist view of art that doesn’t take on questions of power
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The Dinner Party: Eleanor of Aquitaine
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The Dinner Party: Emily Dickinson
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Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)• Sex is not prior to or
independent of gender: sex and gender depend on each other.
• No gender can exist without cultural acts that make it visible
• Gender is unstable and performed
• Bodies have no identity without the scripts, rehearsals, performances and acts of interpretation that confer it.
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Why does gender matter to you, and what you study?
• Because space is gendered and gendering
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Why does gender matter to you, and what you study?
• Because everyone is understood through gender and the relationships of power gender signifies – and it’s complicated!
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Why does gender matter to you, and what you study?
• Because gender is a way to understand who and what is being looked at – and who is doing the looking.
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What can you do about it?There is a Gender Studies Course Book
• Foundations of Gender Studies• Performativity and Powerlessness• History of American Advertising• Design/History/Revolution• And many courses taught in Parsons as well
that are listed here!