Gender Issues
There seems to be cultural standards and roles
to which both genders are expected to conform.
Society dictates and constrains acceptable behavior for men & women.
Art from different eras and cultures
often give clues about these social restrictions.
Grant Wood
American Gothic 1930
An appropriation changing
the gender roles
Gender Issues This well recognized painting clearly shows the differences in gender roles.
What do you notice that indicate social restraints?
Edward Hopper
Room in New York 1932
Night
Windows
1928
Office at
Night
1940
Hopper’s paintings suggest a narrative and allows the
viewer to complete the story.
His many paintings focused on life in New York City
and gender roles he observed.
What roles can we see being played here?
Cindy Sherman photographs herself in stereotypical roles of
women seen in film.
Are there different attitudes in each women here?
How could you describe the role of each women?
Untitled Film Still # 35 1978
Untitled Film Still # 3 1977
Gender Issues
Cindy Sherman
Gender Issues
Cindy Sherman
Untitled 2000
Untitled 2000
Untitled #74
1980
Roy Lichtenstein
used a comic imagery, since it was
popular and
for its ability to convey social
and gender issues.
The Refrigerator 1962
Blonde Waiting 1964
Forget It! Forget Me!
William Wegman utilized his Weimaraner dogs,
posing them in gender roles as seen in society.
Cinderella
1994 photograph
Lolita
1990 photograph
Gender Issues
William Wegman
Explorers 1990s Jock 1990
Gender Issues
Man Ray
Rrose Selavy (Marcel Duchamp)
1922
Yasumasa Morimura
Doublonnage (Marcel)
1995
Gender Issues
Yasumasa Moirmura photographs himself as famous females from Western art
as a way to question gender roles. He was an apprentice to Cindy Sherman.
Yasamasa Morimura
An Inner Dialogue with
Frida Kahlo (Skull Ring)
2007
Self-Portrait (White Marilyn) 1996
Self-Portrait after
Marilyn Monroe
1996
Yolanda Lopez
Portrait of the Artist as
the Virgin of Guadalupe
1978
Lopez embraced her culture and did a series
of paintings “sanctifying” average Mexican
women, who were usually depicted performing
domestic and other labor.
Critics, particularly devotees of the Virgin,
objected to the series, which they viewed as a
sacrilegious debasement of a holy image.
What might be your feelings about this idea?
Judith Baca
Las Tres Marias
1976
Color pencil drawings & mirror
Wangechi Mutu takes influences from her homeland of Kenya
and from images seen in mass-media
creating large-scale collages about women.
She transforms imagery into plant-like or animal-like elements
and intertwined abstract patterns that merge the organic
and the surreal with human forms.
Her work is both exotic and erotic.
100 Lavish Months of Bushwhack
2004 The Rare Horn - Hair Thought
2004
Wangechi Mutu
The Bride Who Married a Camel Head
2009
Mask 2006
Judy Chicago
The Dinner Party
1974-79 mixed media
48’ x 42’ x 36’
Gender-based Art
Detail of several
plates and settings
Sappho plate
Hatshepsut setting
Sojourner Truth setting
Critiquing Gender Roles
In many cultures, people change their bodies to enhance
their femininity or masculinity, such as through
dieting, plastic surgery, implants or scarification (tattoos & body piercing).
Various bindings that mold body parts – skulls, necks, waist and feet
or genitalia mutilation (removal of the clitoris).
These practices can be widely accepted at times.
During cultural change, these practices can become more controversial,
where art will confront the status quo.
Since the 1980s, female artists fight to be exhibited equally with male artists.
The Guerilla Girls have become the conscious of the art world.
Hung Liu
Trauma 1989 Ink on plywood cutouts, acrylic on wall,
felt cutout and wooden bowl 108” x 52” x 26”
Three Fujins
(Emperor’s concubines)
Oil & bird cages
1995
In critiquing Gender Roles,
Hung questions the practice of foot binding in her culture and
the treatment of protesters.
Asian foot-binding
Asian foot binding
Sepik people
of New Guinea
Waupanal
A men’s cult house
1973
The Sepik men build cult houses for ritual in an A-frame
style using ridgepoles as phallic symbols and the
interior as the belly of a woman or genitalia.
The cult house is a reenactment of fertility and creativity
of the sexual act that results in birth.
These cult houses are difficult and dangerous to build
and seemed miraculous even to those who build them.
The men believed that the spirits accomplished this feat
and affirms the men’s own strength, creativity and
domination.
Longneck woman
Karen Paduang tribe, Burma & No. Thailand
Young Mursi tribal woman
Ethiopia, Africa
Chris Rainier documented various practices
in the world of body alterations.
Female child,
Karen Paduang tribe
Jean-Léon Gérôme
The Slave Market 1884
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Phryne before the Areopagus 1861
Mnēsarétē was a well-known courtesan in the 4th Century BCE in Athens.
She is nicknamed Phryne (toad) for her yellow complexion and was accused of impiety
(a lack of proper respect for something sacred).
Defended by the orator, Hypereides, who was one of her lovers, he bares her body to
the jurors to arouse their pity. How could they condemn a prophetess and priestess of
Aphrodite to death? The jurors acquitted her.
Gender in Art
Two paintings representing the selling or treatment of women,
especially fair-skinned women as a commodity.
European men painted images of their fantasies.
John Frederick Lewis
The Reception 1873
Louis-Robert Cuvillon
Harem Woman with Ostrich Fan 1892
Adrien-Henri Tanoux
The Harem Beauty 1918
Eugene Delacroix
The Women of Algiers
1834
Lalla Essaydi
Les Femmes du Maroc #1
2005
Lalla Essaydi’s photographs are an attempt
to better understand the oppression of
Arab women in today’s culture by utilizing
past representations of Arab women in
past European paintings of fantasies by
men, which may not represent a true
picture of a culture.
Lalla Essaydi
Harem Revisited No. 47
2014
Lalla Essaydi
Bullet Revisited No. 37
2010
Lalla Essaydi
Bullet Revisited No. 20
2010
Louis-Robert Cuvillon
Harem Woman with Ostrich Fan 1892
Adrien-Henri Tanoux
The Harem Beauty 1918
Images such as these were painted from European men’s
fantasies about middle Eastern Women.
Jean-Léon Gérôme
La Grande Piscine de Brousse
1885
Jean-Léon Gérôme
The Slave Market 1884
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Phryne before the Areopagus
1861
Orientalism was a term used by scholars in art history, literary,
geography and cultural studies for the depiction of Eastern, that is
"Oriental" cultures in the 19th Century.
It included Middle Eastern, South Asian, African and
East Asian cultures, done by writers, designers
and artists from Western Europe.
Critiquing Gender Roles / Video Art
Shirin Neshat’s work refers to social, political, cultural, psychological and religious codes of
Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as between men and women
in contemporary Islamic societies. She often emphasizes themes in two or more coordinated
films shown concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts.
Rapture
(production still of men) 1999
Rapture
(production still of women) 1999
Shirin Neshat
Film stills from
Rapture
1999
Shirin Neshat
Speechless 1996 Henna Hands
Guerilla Girls
1986 street poster
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Grande Odalisque
1814 Oil
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of female artists who
protest galleries and museums where there is a lack
of females as artists being represented.
They wear guerilla masks to hide their identity and
take names of famous female artists.
They wanted to be the conscious of the art world and
continue to fight for equal recognition and pay versus the
disparity which still exists today.
Critiquing Gender Roles
Guerilla Girls poster 1980s
Guerilla Girls poster
Guerilla Girls poster 2003
Favianna Rodriguez
Movies about the treatment of women through various practices, customs
and their struggles in a male dominated world.
Desert Flower
The Stoning of Soraya M.
Caramel
