Psychology of Space

Gendered Space

Dr. Tina Kinsella

SEX & GENDER

―Sex‖Is a word that refers to the biological difference between male and female: the visible differences in genitalia, the related differences in procreative function.

―Gender‖ Is a matter of culture; it refers to the social classification into ―masculine‖ and ―feminine‖.

‗In analysing gender identities, we use the term ―gender conventions‖ to refer to the social and cultural expectations of behaviour, clothing and images that have divided men and women into separate spheres.‘

Ann Oakley, 1972

THE GENDERED SPACE

& OF THE CANON

LINDA NOCHLIN

Q. Why have women not figured significantly in traditional/canonic

histories of art?

Q. Why had women apparently not been able to achieve success as

artists since the Renaissance?

Linda Nochlin, ‗Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‘

in ARTnews, January, 1971

Self-Portrait

Sofonisba Anguissola c. 1532

Family Portrait

Sofonisba Anguissola c. 1557

Minerva Dressing

Lavinia Fontana 1613Newborn Baby in a Crib

Lavinia Fontana c. 1583

Portrait of a Physician

Fede Galizia 1600-1605

Judith with the Head of Holofernes

Fede Galizia 1596

Sleeping Venus

Artemisia Gentileschi 1625-30

Judith Slaying Holofernes

Artemisia Gentileschi 1614-20

Latona Giving Birth to Diana and Apollo

Diana Scultori

Madonna Della Cesta

Diana Scultori

The Proposition

Judith Leyster 1631

Portrait of a Man

Judith Leyster

Nativity of Jesus

Josefa de Óbidos 1669

Santarém

Josefa de Óbidos c. 1679

The Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci

1498

Some Living American Women Artists

Mary Beth Edelson

1972

Sick Bacchus

Merisi de Caravaggio

c. 1593

Untitled #224

Cindy Sherman

1988-90

Untitled #205

Cindy Sherman

1988-90

La Fornarina

Raphael

1518

LINDA NOCHLIN

• Revisionism: The recuperation of lost production and lost modes of

productivity which has its own historical validity

• Revealing the structures and operations that tend to marginalise certain kinds

of artistic production whilst centralising others

• Critique of public social structures rather than an analysis of the activity of

private individual artists

• The viewpoint of the male critic is unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of

the art historian

LINDA NOCHLIN

... impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on

the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so called

talent or genius ... ‗... not merely on moral or ethical grounds, or

because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones ... the feminist

critique ... lays bare its conceptual smugness, it metahistorical naïveté‘

‗Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?‘

in ARTnews, January, 1971

Portrait of Mary Moser

George Romney1770

Summer

Mary Moser c. 1780

Self-Portrait

Angelica Kauffman 1741-1807

Sappho Inspired by Love

Angelica Kauffman 1775

Academicians of the Royal Academy

Johan Zoffany 1771-2

There is no place for the female academicians in the discussion about art which is taking place here

Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, 4th edition, Thames & Hudson, 2007

The Balcony

Edouard Manet 1868-9

One gets a clearer idea of the

emotional coolness of Manet‘s art

when one considers his major

paintings in the late 1860s. In The

Balcony the two couples are held

enmeshed in the very complexity of the

composition – a pattern of elongated

rectangles with crossing diagonals,

announced in the railings of the

balcony itself, and repeated in the

shutters and in the fans held in the

gloved hands. The two women are the

Oriental looking Jenny Class and the

beautiful Berthe Morisot, for who

Manet had more than passing

affection; their withdrawn expressions

suggest depths of hidden feelings

Alan Bowness,

Modern European Art,

Thames and Hudson

FEMININITY AND

THE SPACES OF MODERNITY

Children Playing on the Beach

Mary Cassatt 1884

On the Beach

Eduouard Manet 1873

For a woman to become a ―serious‖ artist then, a transgression of

contemporary ideals of femininity was implied; yet if she kept to the

―safer‖ subjects of domestic scenes, flower paintings or landscapes,

she risked relegation to the secondary status of ―woman‖ artist.

‗How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne

Valadon‘ in Hilary Robinson ed. Visibly Female: Feminism and Art

Today, Camden Press, 1987

WOMEN‘S SPACE

The Boating Party

Mary Cassatt 1893-4

Boating

Eduouard Manet 1874

Camille Monet at her

Tapestry Room

Claude Monet 1875

Lydia at the Tapestry

Mary Cassatt c. 1881

Susan Comforting the Baby

Mary Cassatt 1881

Children Playing With a Cat

Mary Cassatt 1908

In the

Dining Room

Berthe Morisot

1886

The Tea

Mary Cassatt 1880

Woman Reading

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1875-6

Woman Reading in a Garden

Mary Cassatt 1880

Auguste Cézanne Reading L‘Evénement

Paul Cezanne c. 1886

Reading ‗Le Figaro‘

Mary Cassatt 1883

La Loge

Mary Cassatt 1880La Loge

(The Box at the Opera)

Auguste Renoir 1874

At the Opera

Mary Cassatt 1879

SPATIAL ORGANISATION OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

‗... phases of women‘s lives and the social and ideological constraints

in which they lived‘

Griselda Pollock & Roszika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and

Ideology, Fred & Orton, 1991

‗inscribed at the level of both what spaces are open to men and women

and what relation a man or woman has to that space and its occupants‘

‗... shaped within the sexual politics of looking they demarcate a

particular social organisation of the gaze which itself works back to

secure a particular social ordering of sexual difference‘

Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the

Histories of Art, Routledge, 2003

The Harbour at Lorient

Berthe Morisot 1869

On the Terrace

Berthe Morisot 1874

On the Balcony

Berthe Morisot 1871-2

Salon Rue

De Moulins

Henri

Toulouse-Lautrec

1894

The Medical

Inspection

Henri

Toulouse-Lautrec

1894

‗The encounters pictured and imagined are those between men who

have the freedom to take their pleasures in many urban spaces and

women from a class subject to them who have to work in those spaces

often selling their bodies to clients, or to artists‘

Griselda Pollock,2003, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity‘ in

Vision and Difference

Children‘s Games

Dorothea Tanning

1942

Then at one point, I

did not Need to

translate the

notes; They went

directly to My hands

Francesca Woodman

1976

Space 2

Francesca

Woodman

1976

GENDER, GAZE

& THE SPECTACLE

Untitled

Barbara Kruger

1982

Untitled

Barbara Kruger

1989

Barbara Kruger1989 pro-choice March on WashingtonPoster adapted for women’s rights marches in other countries

David

Michaelangelo

1501-4

Saint Sebastian

Guido Reni 1620

Saint Sebastian

Carlo Saraceni

1610-16

Saint Sebastian

Guido Reni 1620

Film Stills

Cindy Sherman

Film Stills

Cindy Sherman

Lolita

1962

Lolita

1997

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aUTdYsZda8

The Lolita Effect?

Sleeping Venus

Titian 1510

Venus of Urbino

Titian 1538

‗The female body - natural unstructured -represents something which

is outside the proper field of art and aesthetic judgement but artistic

style - pictorial form - contains and regulates the body and renders it an

object of beauty, suitable to art‘

Lynda Nead, ‗Art, Obscenity and the Female Nude‘

The Rokeby Venus

Diego Velázquez 1648-1651

Grand Odalisque

Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres

1814

Guerilla Girls

1989

Film Stills

Cindy Sherman

Film Stills

Cindy Sherman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9WOMDsMy78https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf02wZ_Okw8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R57cfRscNyM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taEaSfPtbYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_LaVvSIT_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bI-uKniXpE

Made in Patriarchy?

‗The practice of defining women‘s design skills in terms of their biology is

reinforced by socially constructed notions of masculine and feminine,

which assigns different characteristics to male and female. Sonia

Delaunay, the painter and designer, is noted by historians for her

―instinctive‖ feeling for color, whereas her husband, Robert, is attributed

as having formulated a color theory. Robert embodies the male

stereotype as logical and intellectual, Sonia embodies the female

stereotype as instinctive and emotional. To compound this devaluation of

women designers‘ work, designs produced by women in the domestic

environment (their natural space within a patriarchy) are seen to

represent use-value rather than exchange-value ... At this point

capitalism and patriarchy interact to devalue this type of design;

essentially, it has been made in the wrong place — the home, and for the

wrong market — the family.‘

Cheryl Buckley, ‗Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of

Women and Design‘, Design Issues, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1986).

Sonia Delaunay

Fabric pattern

Sonia Delaunay

Coat made for Gloria Swanson, 1923-1924

Sonia Delaunay

Block-printed crepe de chine, 1928

Sonia Delaunay

Beach proposals

Sonia Delaunay,

Rythme, 1938, oil on canvas,

182 x 149 cm,

Musée National d'Art Moderne,

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Robert Delaunay, 1938,

Rythme n°1, Decoration for the Salon des Tuileries,

oil on canvas, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris8

Robert Delaunay

Propeller 1923

‗suggest that memory itself might be an edited version of a picture

never made. Alluding to a well-known image, either in celluloid or paint,

Sherman‘s photographic performances are never exact replications.

Altered, distorted, theatrical, her photographs return to events that did

not occur in empirical history, yet somehow possess the charge of vivid

memories‘

Peggy Phelan, 2001, Art and Feminism. Phaidon

Le Violon

d'Ingres

Many Ray

1924

In the Box

Ruth Bernhard 1962

Fränzi with Doll

Erich Heckel 1910

The Cast-Off Doll

Suzanne Valadon

1921

Masculinity/Masculinities

‗Masculinity is the set of social practices and cultural representations

associated with being a man. The plural ‗masculinities‘ is also used in

recognition that ways of being a man and cultural representations

of/about men vary, both historically and culturally, between societies

and between different groupings of men within any one society‘

Pilcher and Whelehan, 2004, p. 33

Masculinity Studies and Gender

‗... Arising out of men‘s pro-feminist politics, there began to develop in

the 1980s a body of knowledge and theorising around men as ―men.‖

Consequently, books (both popular and academic) on men and

masculinity proliferated in the 1990s, to the extent that ―men‘s studies‖

is now recognised as a specialist area of academic focus. ―Gender

studies‖ is seen by many to further open up the field of women‘s

studies, beyond its beginnings in the politics of the Women‘s Liberation

Movement‘

Ibid, p. xi

David

Michaelangelo

1501-4

Le Berger

Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais 1787

Study of a Male Nude

Pulling a Rope

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault

c. 1816

Saint Sebastian

Guido Reni 1620

Saint Sebastian

Carlo Saraceni

1610-16

―Gender Hierarchies‖

According to Connell, masculinities occupy a higher ranking in the

―gender hierarchy‖ characteristic of modern Western societies:

―hegemonic masculinity

―complicit masculinity.‖

―subordinated masculinities‖

―emphasised,‖ ―compliant‖ and ―resistant‖ femininities.

See Raewyn Connell, 1995, Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press

―If masculinity is fluid, then ...‖

According to MacInnes, definitions of masculinities are vague, confused and contradictory. If conceptualisations of masculinity/masculinities are so fluid, he argues, then what makes the category of masculinity identifiable at all?

MacInnes suggests that masculinity should be understood as an ideology developed by men and women to make sense of their lives.

See John MacInnes, 1998, The End of Masculinity. Buckingham: Open University Press

Father Knows Best, 1954

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuwh4t_wMh0 Leave it to Beaver, 1957

‗The realization that who we are as individuals constitutes a political construction, coupled with the creation of consciousness-raising groups, inspired a crucial change in the relationship between feminism and men in the 1960s and 1970s. At that historical juncture, feminism became more a critical perspective through which men could scrutinize masculinity, and less a call for men to act solely as advocates for women‘s causes (though the latter remains an important component of the ‗pro-feminist men‘s movement‘, with men organizing against pornography, violence against women, rape, and gay-bashing) [...] Beginning in the 1960s, men start to apply feminism to an examination of their own lives as men in a patriarchal society‘

Peter F. Murphy, 2004, ‗Introduction‘ in Murphy, P. F. (ed.) Feminism and Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.9

‗Male liberation calls for men to free themselves of the sex-role

stereotypes that limit their ability to be human. Sex-role stereotypes say

that men should be dominant; achieving and enacting a dominant role

in relations with others is often taken as an indicator of success.

‗Success,‘ for a man, often involves influence over the lives of other

persons. But success in achieving positions of dominance and

influence is necessarily not open to every man, since dominance is

relative and hence scarce by definition. Most men in fact fail to achieve

the positions of dominance that sex-role stereotypes ideally call for.

Stereotypes tend to identify such men as greater or lesser failures, and

in extreme cases, men who fail to be dominant are the object of jokes,

scorn, and sympathy from wives, peers, and society generally [...] Male

liberation seeks to aid in destroying the sex-role stereotypes that regard

‗being a man‘ and ‗being a woman‘ as statuses that must be achieved

through proper behavior. People need not take on restrictive roles to

establish their sexual identity‘

Jack Sawyer, ‗On Male Liberation‘ in Murphy, P. F. (ed.) Feminism and

Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 25

‗With his unsteady fluctuations between violent rage, dope-fuelled camaraderie, authoritarian polemic and childish tears, Combo‘s behaviour in This is England typifies the deeply troubled and psychologically divided terrain of masculinity in Meadows‘ work. Consistently emphasising the fragmentations of a post-industrial neoliberal Britain, Meadows‘ tales of beset menfolk register the psychosocial continuum between social deprivayion, poverty and mental instability. Moreover, Meadows‘ investigation of the failings of his male characters dependably highlights paternal failure as its most persistent motif‘

Martin Fradley and Seán Kingston, 2013, ‗What do you think makes a bad dad? Shane Meadows and Fatherhood‘ in Fradley, Godfrey &

Williams (ed.) Shane Meadows: Critical Essays.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Crisis in Masculinity?

http://everydaysexism.com/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/UCC-Bird-of-the-Day/616084448429962

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/05/15/diane-abbot-masculinity-crisis_n_3277154.html