Final Report Summary - PICTURING GENDER (Visual translation, popularisation and contesting of a key discourse in the New Europe)
In recent decades, 'gender' has had a major institutional success: it has become a central issue for social reform programmes on a regional, national and global level. But even if concepts of gender were quickly picked up by several social agents in order to address the social becoming of women and men, they still remain the subject of intense discussion in scientific as well as in broader political discourse and are often contested. In parallel, however, concepts of 'gender' have been adopted by political grassroots movements and have inspired artistic creation.
The project PICTURING GENDER tracked the progress of concepts of 'gender' through the public sphere. It investigated art and popular visual culture that have been stimulated by concepts of 'gender'. Examples of visual culture, the arts, performance, dance and film have been examined in relation to the visual output of official gender mainstreaming strategies as well as of third-wave feminism and queer groups, who also 'translate' gender concepts into images - in the form of web-pages, fanzines, video and multimedia productions or spectacular party events.
In analysing these pictorial figurations, it was detected that the following body-figurations prevail in relation to 'gender': the singular body, combining male and female attributes; representations of a 'patchwork-self' composed of body parts that usually do not belong to each other; emphatically staged body-transformations; figurations that reject body norms; pronounced symmetrical male and female bodies and bodies involved in family or clan life characterised by a dissolution of 'classical' models.
Usually, contemporary cultural and gender studies focus mainly on the codifying force of images - with most approaches refraining from explicitly analysing the effects that the instance of the image exerts in relation to our formation as sexual beings. In contrast to this, the project focused on particular on the popular appeal of images and visual culture and on their disseminating as well as promotional, founding, activating and authenticating force. This focus on the specificity of the communicative powers of images made it possible to access the complex reworking of the imaginary that accompanies the dissemination of gender discourse. In this way the more involuntary creations of meaning concerning 'gender' as well as unintentional linkages with other popular discourses (for instance concerning a self in transformation, a 'neutrality' of social reform, parity and symmetry), which remain closed to other perspectives, became graspable.
Summary description of project context and objectives
In recent decades philosophical and sociological concepts of 'gender' have had major institutional success. However, 'gender' was often officially adopted only after heated struggles. For instance it was chosen by the European Union (EU) officials in the mid-1990s as a kind of compromise to sidestep positive action programmes that could not achieve a majority. And at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Vatican as well as queer groups voted for the use of 'sex' instead of 'gender'. However, 'gender' was further disseminated with the proclamation of 'gender mainstreaming' as an official goal of the equal opportunities politics of the EU in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. Some local traditions of dealing with women's emancipation have seen themselves being marginalised by the spread of this concept. Other and especially younger generations of political grass-roots movements, however, have embraced the concept of gender. Political groups of 'third wave feminism' such as the 'Riot Girrl movement' and the 'lady-fests' have converted gender concepts into music, fanzines, film or multimedia festivals or into spectacular party events. And queer or transgender groups started to oppose 'gender' and to create self-images featuring 'sex'. In parallel, artists in various ways have played with self-performances and their potential to exhibit sameness and difference.
The PICTURING GENDER project was designed to investigate art and popular culture that were stimulated by philosophical and sociological concepts of 'gender'. Hence it handled 'gender' as a concept that fascinates and shapes the political imagination as well as being rejected, being heatedly debated and being confronted with other concepts and images. The fresh viewpoint the project adopted lay in the fact that it did not engage in finding a single 'correct' and applicable definition of 'gender' but that it tracked the travels of the concept through the public sphere. It dealt with 'gender' as a concept that animates the political imagination and triggers the creation of - sometimes very unusual and provocative - pictures and visual worlds.
The PICTURING GENDER project was carried out at the philosophy department of the University of Verona, Italy, which is internationally well-known for practising political philosophy as related to questions concerning the body and sexual difference and for research on concepts of the image in contemporary philosophy. Within a period of 24 months, the researcher Dr Anna Schober, who had already extensive experience in analysing visual culture and its impact on the public sphere analysed examples of adopting philosophical concepts of 'gender' into popular visual culture in various European cultural milieus.
PICTURING GENDER carried out a pronounced interdisciplinary investigation that combines philosophy, aesthetics, political sciences, art history and visual culture studies and research regarding gender and the body. Since the promotion of concepts of 'gender' is one of the main goals of current equal opportunities policies of the EU, an investigation into the meaning iconic figurations created in connection to 'gender' disseminate and a re-evaluation of their public effects is able to support a critical development of future emancipation strategies in Europe. In addition, the project's results are relevant for cultural studies, which tend to neglect the specificity of the powers of the image. And in particular it is important for the growing field of gender studies, since it contributes to a scientific practice that pays attention to its own history and especially to the history of its popularisation.
The main objectives of the project have been the following:
(a) To collect a stock of visual sources by researching visual figurations of 'gender' in art and mass culture (film, video, the internet, exhibitions etc.), created by public reform strategy as well as by grassroots political tactics. Examples since the 1980s in various northern and southern European countries have been considered. This collection also documents a quite solid trans-national network of artists, film- and video-makers, political activists as well as festival and exhibition organisers that emerged across Europe around notions such as 'gender', 'queer' and 'new identities in construction'.
Various media channels and archives have been consulted.
(b) To analyse these images with respect to the meanings staged in them and how they interlink with meanings created by visual culture, set in motion by other social agents (for instance by advertising, plastic surgery, social reform agents, political parties, self-culture). This included the selection of some especially interesting and representative examples and exemplary case studies.
(c) To investigate the processes through which individuals and groups are empowered to respond to these images or not, i.e. some particular reception histories and struggles these images set in motion have been tracked. As part of this, several interviews and conversations with political activists, artists or key public figures have been conducted in order to gain access to the intentions connected to the various image-creations.
(d) To compare examples in various southern and northern European countries. On the basis of the stock of visual examples and interviews produced in the first year of research, it was decided to focus the project on a comparison between processes of PICTURING GENDER in Italy and Germany.
In pursuing these objectives the project has elaborated a pronounced new interdisciplinary methodological approach of linking 'gender' and an analysis of images. Usually, contemporary cultural studies or art history informed by gender discourse sets out to analyse how images and visual culture in general - together with other social institutions such as education, the family or a divided labour market - contribute to the fixation of specific subject positions for women and men. They see images as active agents that work to create and enforce social norms, including gender norms. In contrast to this approach, this project focused in particular on the popular appeal of images and visual culture, on their disseminating force as well as on their role in processes of conversion from one body regime to another. In this way it paid attention to the fact that images are not only agents to create and enforce social norms, but are also able to cause a crisis of norms and existing concepts and to initiate processes of 'conversion' and of 'passage'.
The methodology used for the investigation combined political theory with methods of visual culture studies, film and cinema studies and art history. For reflections on the specificity of the image and its impact on the viewer the investigation referred to works of contemporary philosophers such as Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Didi-Huberman. According to these scholars the peculiarity of images and pictorial worlds consists in the promotional, founding and authenticating force that images exert by combining a productive agency with a representational effect. In addition, images and visual representations are characterised by the fact that they expose elements and tendencies that often remain unarticulated in what is explicitly the subject of public negotiation. They thus show a certain 'over-determination', i.e. similar to dreams, they stage wishes, fears and desires in an alienated, transposed form.
PICTURING GENDER paid particular attention to processes of conversion and of passage from one visual regime to another one. In order to investigate such processes of 'passage' or 'conversion' the project referred to the concept of 'imagination' coined by Cornelius Castoriadis and to concepts of the aesthetic 'event' coined by early scholars of visual culture such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes as well as on the further development of their concepts in recent literature. In order to grasp these processes some works of artists who are linked to 'gender' discourses in an outstanding way, such as Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie and Jenny Saville have been investigated, and in particular the reception and adoption histories their art has given rise to in the work of a younger generation of European artists.
Description of the main scientific results
PICTURING GENDER focused on the double-edged role that images perform in the course of generating a public life for 'gender': On the one hand they increase the public presence of 'gender' as a reflexive theory, but on the other hand figurations of 'gender' through visual culture also hold another - somehow antidromic - tendency. Visual worlds expose traces and evidence that have the capacity to throw political, philosophical, and sociological concepts and definitions into crisis. They are linked to processes of conversion and - as part of them - to experiences of what can be called 'authenticity' and the 'incontestable' - which often comes into conflict with the knowledge produced by culturalist constructivist discourses such as gender studies.
Remarks on the historical-political framework in which the institutionalisation of 'gender' as a key discourse of contemporary emancipation strategies occurs
Since the late 1980s, a 'rearrangement of the scenery' can be observed in the ambit of the political creation of European society (Hark, 2005: 37f.). An emancipatory discourse promoting 'women' has been replaced by one that features 'gender'. This notion has - as was formulated in 1995 by the Contact Group on Gender during the United Nations Meeting on the Status of Women in Beijing - 'evolved as differentiated from the word 'sex' to express the reality that women's and men's roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change' (quoted in Butler, 2004: 182). But even if such concepts were quite quickly adopted by social agents as a way of addressing the social construction of women and men, until now this remains an intensely debated subject in scientific as well as in political discourse and is often contested. At the UN Meeting in Beijing, for instance, the Vatican as well as queer groups voted for the use of 'sex' instead of 'gender' (Butler, 2004: 183). But even within the EU the adoption or rejection of 'gender' was debated on various fronts (Stratigaki, 2005). In particular, the fact that concepts of gender as well as the bulk of scholarship accompanying them originate mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world and have been somehow 'imported' from the US context led to clashes with many European feminist cultures (Braidotti, 2002).
Nevertheless, such concepts were further disseminated with the proclamation of 'gender mainstreaming' as an official goal of the equal opportunities politics of the EU in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 (Shaw, 2002) - which enhanced the need to 'translate' what is meant by 'gender' into attractive figures in order to bridge the gap between the scientific-political discourse and the wider public. Some local traditions of dealing with women's emancipation have become marginalised by the spread of this concept - such as Italian feminist groups that strengthened the concept of 'differenza sessuale' (sexual difference) around which they have emerged and which have in the 1990s increasingly closed themselves off from diverging feminist discussions (Putino, 1998). Other and especially younger generations of political grassroots movements, however, have embraced culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender' and 'sex-gender'. Especially political groups of 'third wave feminism' such as the 'Riot Girrl movement' and the 'lady-fests' showed themselves as being inspired by 'gender' and 'translated' these concepts into music, fanzines, film and multimedia festivals, or spectacular party events. And in the 1990s artists stimulated by culture-oriented, constructivist interpretative models also began to invent unusual figurations in relation to the body and our life as sexual beings or to relate to other art that evolved around notions such as 'gender'. In parallel, queer or transgender groups started to oppose 'gender' and to create self-representations featuring 'sex'. Such a re-arrangement of the scenery is however never complete, nor does it proceed in a homogeneous way. On the contrary, usually various political positions, different artistic and media initiatives or reform strategies in respect to parity or issues such as sexuality, the family and work conditions simultaneously compete in attracting an audience. What changes is the dominance these initiatives may gain in their hegemonic field.
Images and the transition from one regime of certainty to another
PICTURING GENDER referred to a notion of 'certainty' Linda Zerilli has adopted from works by Ludwig Wittgenstein. She points out that our relationship towards our own sex or towards that of others is one of certainty, conviction, and passionate practice (Zerilli, 2005: 38f.). This relationship has less to do with knowledge, in the sense that we are searching for proof to justify our actions as sexual beings and thus cannot be easily influenced by propositional statements. For example, today we know that there are no ultimate criteria for establishing a gender difference: the Olympic committee, for example, changed from a naked inspection to chromosome tests and back to a naked inspection. However, in most cases we usually have no doubt with regard to the sex of a counterpart or of our own sexual identity. Certainty, according to Wittgenstein, is a doing not a knowing (Wittgenstein 1984: 127f.). Pictorially speaking we inhabit a house in which the existence of two sexes is backed by various details of daily life practice. We are guided by certainty and passion without analysing every move we make or constantly questioning our actions. Hence, the general framework of the game we are playing in this house is certainty not knowledge.
In recent decades an enormous production of knowledge with regard to masculinity and femininity has been counter-posed to this matter-of-factness and the connected myths. It seeks to demonstrate that 'gender' is a becoming, a collective, constantly repeated, and thus transformed construction, etc. The question, however, is: How can this knowledge affect the certainty that guides our everyday actions and the passions and drives connected to them? Because to detach oneself from the certainty and the matter-of-factness that guides our practices in everyday life and to assume other ones constitutes a conversion - comparable to abandoning religious or ideological beliefs and assuming others. This process usually involves being profoundly touched, taken out of oneself, fascinated and involved, rather than critique, explanation, and demonstration. Hence, there is also a gap between the certainty of the everyday and the knowledge of gender studies, even if passionate involvement and rational judgment are not mutually exclusive, as some traditions of political science would have us believe, but rather reciprocally inspire and motivate each other.
This gap between the certainty of everyday life and knowledge also has to do with the fact that myths cannot be conquered by argument, for instance by exposing them as 'groundless illusions' or by showing that what they tell is 'wrong'. Myths are composed of a multitude of mutually reinforcing narratives and a variety of often very seductive details that have the capacity to accommodate our wishes, fears or desires. These narrations exist and circulate without having to be justified and are able explain and give sense to most of our actions. Nevertheless, myths do transform themselves: we are involved in a more or less constant innovation of the mythical (Schober, 2001 40f. and 158f.), with some myths that no longer correspond to what we experience losing their importance and even being abandoned and others being revised, fused, or even revitalised or reinvented. Hence the main question formulated in PICTURING GENDER concerns which innovations in our mythical frameworks related to 'gender' can be detected and how this is tied to processes of figuration and image acts.
Imagination and experiences of authenticity / the incontestable
In turning the attention towards these processes of innovation and conversion from one mythical world to another, a particular faculty comes to the fore that in a very eminent sense is responsible for them: the faculty of imagination, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) calls it. According to Castoriadis, this faculty allows us to generate forms and figurations that are not already given by experience or the existing order of things. Such 'innovative' figurations are capable of fascinating, involving, and affecting others and can in this way transform institutional society through captivation and conviction.
Connected to such processes of conversion is also an experience of what can be called 'authenticity' or an experience of the incontestable. In today's constructivist approaches 'authenticity' is mainly used as a core target for deconstructivist efforts. These approaches usually set out to demonstrate again and again that such claims for authenticity are political and ideological representations serving particular parties and emerging in certain milieus. But as anthropologists such as Mattijs van de Port (2004) have shown, the constructedness of life-worlds and their historically contingent becoming usually goes along with processes of authentication, i.e. we usually manage to transcend the constructedness of our life-worlds. Events of conversion are thereby in particular linked to an experience of an incontestable that is then usually 'translated' into new lifestyles and their iconic representation. Hence the focus on the make-believe does not necessarily go along with a devaluation of the act of believing. The realm of the sexual, the erotic and the body and its sensorium as well as its materiality emerge in post-1968 cultures in particular as realms where processes of differentiation of life-worlds and self-authentication occur. It even seems that the more existence is seen and experience as uprooted and in transformation, the more a demand for acts of authentification rises too. Also in this respect a gap between processes of self-authentification (for instance via sexuality, body-modification) that characterise our life-practice and the knowledge-production of gender studies can be witnessed.
The epistemic framework of PICTURING GENDER
This role of images in setting existing convictions, norms and everyday certainties into crisis and causing transformations in the realm of imagination as well as of social practices was recently highlighted and analysed by the new discipline of visual culture studies (for instance by Mersch, 2007: 66). Louis Marin, whose writings are a central reference point for this kind of research, has directed our attention in particular toward the founding, promotional, activating, challenging and authenticating force that images embody by combining a productive agency with a representational effect (Marin, 2007: 12f.). PICTURING GENDER demonstrates that this force of images can be measured by paying attention to events of transition, by tracing reception histories and processes of adoption and by studying where visual worlds become issues or even sites of struggle.
These methodological reflections provided by visual culture studies show that images are not a second hand representation of something primary but a generating force. At the same time, they again point out that images cannot only be seen as active forces that work to strengthen social norms but can also become agents causing a crisis of norms and political concepts.
In contrast to this, gender studies, which started to spread in the 1990s, is characterised by the fact that it is usually engaged mainly with norms in relation to the body and its social performance. Consequently, most of gender-studies approaches also conceptualise images as active agents in enforcing social norms, including gender norms. The second tendency of images to throw existing norms and concepts into crisis was largely ignored. A further effect of this is that popular (and artistic) image-making is often discussed in binary models: either they are seen as maintaining or enforcing gender norms or they are judged as 'subversive' or even 'critical'. As an effect, the dissolution of norms that characterise 'late' or 'post-modernity' (Hegener, 2009: 132) as well as innovations in mythical explanations and events of conversion between belief systems recede into the background.
PICTURING GENDER integrated visual culture studies for the analysis of the public life of 'gender'. Consequently, the investigation focused not on the image as product but as an act that triggers processes of reception or becomes a site of struggle and on how pictorial worlds are linked to those passages in the mythical and ideological realm by which people make sense of their lives. Furthermore, the project analysed how this change, in turn, is reflected, negotiated, and contested by the production of new and pronouncedly 'different' images concerning masculinity, femininity, androgyny, sexuality, the family and genealogy. The investigation thereby counteracted the usual practice of fixing the meaning of 'gender'. In contrast, the PICTURING GENDER project focused on how concepts of 'gender' have been adopted for the creation of a huge variety of image productions within various European milieus through which they have passed in recent decades.
In doing so, PICTURING GENDER operated with the following conceptual definitions. On the one hand 'gender' is seen as a very specific concept that in itself already contains a set of preliminary considerations: it opts for a societal analysis; it reanimates the dichotomies 'nature: culture' or 'biology: society'; it renounces the representation of sexual relation and its conflicts in favour of a voluntary abstraction; it constitutes a subject of thought that seems to have a certain autonomy (Fraisse, 1996: 53f.). But on the other hand, 'gender' is perceived in its function as a 'figure of the newly thinkable' in terms set out by Cornelius Castoriadis (1997). As such, 'gender' concepts animate the political imagination, which leads to collective bricolage and to vivid processes of iconic figuration. The images and visual worlds created in this way disseminate and popularise this concept further throughout the public sphere.
However, if 'gender' or 'sex-gender' are in this way seen as particular figures of thought able to trigger imagination and action, they cannot be used simultaneously as an epistemic category (Zerilli, 2005: 59f.). Hence, on an epistemic level rather than using the 'sex-gender' distinction, the concept of 'difference' is used, which does not propose an absolute difference but operates on the assumption that men and women (as well as transgender persons or other representatives of different identities) are different and equal at the same time - something that needs no further definition because any definition will set new social norms (Fraisse, 1996: 135f.).
Image clusters
Iconic figurations of culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender' are usually characterised by a particular tension: on the one hand there is no ready-made iconic tradition available for the act of figuration to link itself up to, i.e. an iconic tradition in relation to such new philosophical and sociological concepts is invented only in the course of the dissemination of these concepts. But on the other hand the various acts of iconic figuration indeed refer back to existing iconographic motives, visual conventions, myths, and narrations, which in this way are adopted, recast and altered. The most important of these existing iconic motives that the various acts of pictorial figuration tend to link up to are the 'new man' and 'new woman', the androgynous, the hermaphrodite, or other sexually liminal and intermediate creatures, and the machine-body and visions of the self-sufficient and self-(re)creating body.
It was not the intention of PICTURING GENDER to break these various image-creations in connection to 'gender' down into one or to extract one single strand of narration from them. It was rather the aim to track the course of the concept through the public sphere and to highlight the struggle, conflict and ambiguities that arise in connection to it. Nevertheless, the investigation carried out by PICTURING GENDER into iconic figurations that the concepts of 'gender' inspires, brought to light several agglomerations or clusters of bodily image-creations that prevail in relation to culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender'. Here it is also important to note that such agglomerations or clusters never exist neatly separated from each other but overlap, i.e. several images take part in more than one of them. In the following, a range of such image-clusters that have emerged in relation to 'gender' since the 1980s will be presented. However, the project did not subscribe to a notion of something like a completeness of documentation but rather aimed at giving a comprehensive overview and at depicting exemplary case studies. The following types of iconic figurations have been identified as being predominant in connection with 'gender' concepts:
(1) Pictograms
Often posters, brochures, folders, or websites created as part of public campaigns in relation to 'gender' issues show icons and pictograms. These figurations demonstrate the rootedness of parts of gender discourse in a tradition of modernist reform discourses and political movements. Hence the figuration of 'gender' in the form of pictograms reiterates a tradition of a 'universal' picture language which emerged most strongly in the period of 'heroic modernism' (between WWI and WWII) and is the product of a modernist belief in the reduction of information, the simplicity of form, and standardisation for the sake of saving time, labour and money and of communicating effectively with 'all' members of society. Since central features of this modernist belief system, such as ideas of a rationality of public processes or the effective possibility to reform citizens from above, have been challenged in recent decades, however, this tradition is today performed in a transformed way. Contemporary designers often combine pictograms with more emphatic, emotionally appealing image components.
(2) Symmetry
Concepts of 'gender' are often 'translated' into images that show a pronounced symmetry. These images assert, promote and authenticate a symmetrical co-presence of the male and the female; often in combination of pictograms that assert a 'neutrality' of reform. In contrast, any form of asymmetry, for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections vis-à-vis the other sex as well as conflicts between the sexes, are usually not represented. This type of figuration is mainly used in official reform strategies - for instance for visual material used by gender mainstreaming institutions.
(3) Singular bodies, re-assembling male and female sexual and erotic codes
Another agglomeration of images that are invented in more or less explicit connection with 'gender' shows successful combinations of fragments of female and male bodily appearances. The depicted body appears as hypersexual (or asexual) and able to satisfy multiple desires (male and female, heterosexual, transsexual and gay, for affirmation as well as for critique). This type of images is mainly produced by artists or political activists, but also in marketing and pop-culture.
(4) Celebrations of the creativity of the 'patchwork self'
Often, images related to 'gender' explore change and transformation in relation to bodily appearance. They present the self as a kind of 'patchwork self' that can repeatedly and emphatically be reinvented and resampled. Usually this reinvention and resampling is presented as the outcome of a spectacular, successful, vanguard, and empowering activity that is somehow under the control of the doer and is this way purged of all painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and incontrollable aspects. Sometimes these pictorial figurations explicitly refer to the new biotechnologies and their potential to expand the radius of human action. Also this kind of figuration is mainly used by artists or activists, but also in marketing and pop-culture.
(5) Attacks on incorporations of body norms
A range of images invented in connection with 'gender' show incorporations of body-norms, for example by using 'Barbie', the famous long-legged, blonde doll, sometimes in combination with Ken, her male counterpart. Other examples are the representation of carefully and colourfully staged obese bodies often integrated in very individual and trashy life-style settings. These images often expose a (deconstructive) engagement with body norms. But in spite of the often very clearly expressed intentions, these iconic figurations designed to question conventions of femininity (and masculinity) also have other, non-intended side effects. They still maintain a kind of femininity (and masculinity) as for instance represented by Barbie (and Ken) in the public sphere and allow these to radiate and seduce. At the same time these presences can also produce very conflicting emotional responses - hence in connection with these figurations often struggle and conflict can be witnessed. These kinds of images are mainly created in political activism and in the arts.
(6) New every-bodies
Where explicit political grassroots mobilisation is an issue, it is not images that display symmetry or images that show a self in metamorphosis that are employed, but the a-symmetry of power is again highlighted and universality is again embodied via new particular-universal figures. Examples of such new every-bodies in public circulation in connection to 'gender' are the female migrant and the clown. Like older, modernist figures of this type, such as 'the worker' or 'the woman', the female migrant or the clown address 'all of us' and stand for truth-claims in respect to what is discursively represented. These figures make it possible to expose a gap between current asymmetries of power and a potential equality and parity. But like older every-bodies such as 'the worker', they also allow a mirroring and constituting of the protesting and acting self in the image of the other and in doing so romanticise or 'swallow' the other for a repositioning of the self. The clown in particular bridges the convention of the sexually indistinctive, androgynous self and that of older emancipation and social-reform discourses and their every-bodies, since this mask obliterates differences, affirms fantasies of uniting the male and the female into one 'unisex' person (oriented on masculinity), and accentuates the interior life of judgments, feelings, and ambivalence.
Conclusion
In particular with the last four of these image-clusters processes of self-authentication seem to occur or are reflected. This also means that 'gender' is employed in the course of contemporary life practice as a code for re-negotiating the self and its potentialities.
A further uniting feature of the various image acts investigated in PICTURING GENDER is that any form of asymmetry, for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections vis-à-vis the other sex, seems to recede into the background. Moreover, male and female body parts and their re-combinations are mainly represented as positive tropes, are emphatically staged, and linked to fantasies of control. Any painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and unsuccessful attempts of body- and self-modification are usually not represented and thus tend to disappear.
But at the same time artists or political activists sometimes express anger, fury and frustration by linking up with 'gender' or allow ambivalent feelings and what usually is considered as 'not-speakable' to develop and to be articulated in respect to current body regimes. And new sites of staging political claims and making reigning asymmetries an issue, such as the figure of the female migrant or the clown, are also created.
PICTURING GENDER developed the thesis that images and bodies that arise in connection with 'gender' affirm a kind of vision of the public sphere as being (already successfully) egalitarian and populated by discrete bodies that interiorise ambivalence and difference. At the same time, new figurations with the potential to question and challenge this vision such as the (female) clown also arise. With them 'gender' is used to disrupt the security of representing a neutral and universal collective subject, but at the same time the picturing of 'gender' tends to neutralise inequalities in themselves because it usually conceals asymmetries and conflicts between the sexes.
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Potential impact
Wider societal impact
The PICTURING GENDER project demonstrated that philosophical and social science concepts, political action and the arts and media are interconnected in shaping contemporary political negotiation. Hence, culture and the political public sphere cannot be separated as belonging to two different realms but are interlinked and inseparable. The project focused in particular on the performative force that images exert in creating a public life for 'gender'. It highlighted the particular figurations of the sexed body, relationships, sexuality and genealogy that thereby emerge and analysed them in their historical, political and social context. These insights can have an impact on 'gender'-related political and social reform strategies and activities on a local, regional and EU level. It encourages those involved in such strategies to look at the visual material they produce from new and fresh viewpoints and to consider the often surprising and unintended correlations and adoption processes these visual productions cause. Furthermore, usually hidden traditions and unexpected image-struggles are brought to public attention. Here the following two findings are particularly important for a critical development of future emancipation strategies in relation to (sexual, cultural, ethnic etc.) difference on various levels of political action throughout Europe: that any form of asymmetry in iconic figurations of 'gender', for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections, tends to recede into the background and that male and female body parts and their always new re-combination are mainly used as positive tropes and are linked to fantasies of control, whereas painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and unsuccessful attempts of body-modification tend to disappear.
At the same time, PICTURING GENDER also focused on new sites of staging claims and of making asymmetries an issue, such as the one of the female migrant or the clown - what makes the findings of the project also productive for contemporary political activism or general reflections about current processes of 'bottom-up' mobilisation.
Scientific impact
Gender studies are currently established as an institutionalised academic discipline on a global scale. The methodological approach and empirical findings produced in PICTURING GENDER are able to challenge 'frozen' concepts and assumptions that have emerged as part of this institutionalisation process. As already mentioned, the since the 1970s emerging fields of women's and later gender and postcolonial studies have changed the ways in which many scholars approach representations of women, men, the androgynous body as well as representation as such. A whole range of studies have been produced that analyse images as active agents that work to create and enforce social norms, including gender norms.
In contrast to this strand of research, the new discipline of 'Bildwissenschaften' (visual culture studies) has rather emphasised the role of images in throwing existing convictions, norms and everyday certainties into crisis and causing transformations in the realm of imagination as well as of social practices. These studies highlight that images are involved in the constitution as well as in the transformation of reality - since they embody a founding, promotional, activating, challenging and authenticating force.
PICTURING GENDER adopted these 'Bildwissenschaften' (visual culture studies) approaches and thus challenged approaches of gender studies and cultural studies that often tend to ignore the particular force and qualities of images. It directed the attention away from an occupation solely with norms towards an analysis of processes of imagination and of how pictorial worlds are linked to passages from one regime of certainties in respect to people's lives as sexual beings to another one.
Besides, through particular scientific events, papers presented at international conferences and workshops and several publications the project created public visibility for knowledge in the fields of visual culture and gender studies, which are still under-developed areas in European and especially Italian academia. It thereby linked these innovative research areas in particular to rather traditional research fields such as political philosophy and aesthetics, in order to initiate a reflection of the curricula of these study areas.
Impact on career development
The fellowship provided the researcher Dr Anna Schober with the possibility to acquire new knowledge. At the host institution, she was able to focus in particular on the re-reading of contemporary political discourses with respect to questions of the body and of sexual difference as well as on the conceptualisation of the image in contemporary philosophical thought and the effects this representational instance exerts in the process of the popularisation of 'gender'. This as well as the publications resulting from the project PICTURING GENDER consolidated and expanded her existing research specialisation in gender studies and visual culture studies. In this way, the diversity of the qualifications she can count on for her future career was strengthened.
Furthermore, the mobility action supported the researcher Dr Anna Schober in developing her skills in project management and in presenting and disseminating her work on an international level. The action was especially effective in expanding and strengthening the international networks the project is situated in and to bring various networks that usually exists quite separate from each other - such as those of political science and of aesthetics or visual culture - into communication with each other.
The impact of PICTURING GENDER on the career development of the researcher Dr Anna Schober is also proven by the fact that in September 20011 she was awarded the Mercator visiting professorship (financed by the DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for 'Kulturalisierung und die Popularisierung von 'gender' (culturalisation and the popularisation of 'gender') at the sociology department of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where she will continue her studies in the field of visual culture and gender studies. This will further support the researcher Dr. Anna Schober in order to reach her goal to become a full professor in one of her research fields in the near future.
Impact on network building
As already mentioned, PICTURING GENDER was especially effective in expanding and strengthening an existing international network of academics practising political theory, gender studies and visual culture studies. This was achieved through the organisation of particular events such as workshops and conferences, but also through participation in joint panels at international conferences or at international workshops as well as through joint publications and the conceptualisation of follow-up projects.
The project network was mainly expanded in gender studies (contact was for example made with the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and strengthened with the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Programme Diversity Management and Governance at the University of Graz/A), in political theory (the Centre of Excellence Cultural Foundations of Integration, at the Institute of Advanced Study in Konstanz/G, the philosophy department at Klagenfurt University/A, the Università Federico II di Napoli and the sociology department at Gießen university/G), and in aesthetics and visual culture studies (The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture, Florida Atlantic University, United States of America and the NCCR Iconic criticism at Basel university, Switzerland). In this way, the mobility action supported European excellence in these innovative research areas.
Project website:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/anna.schober/abstract_gender.html(opens in new window)
The project PICTURING GENDER tracked the progress of concepts of 'gender' through the public sphere. It investigated art and popular visual culture that have been stimulated by concepts of 'gender'. Examples of visual culture, the arts, performance, dance and film have been examined in relation to the visual output of official gender mainstreaming strategies as well as of third-wave feminism and queer groups, who also 'translate' gender concepts into images - in the form of web-pages, fanzines, video and multimedia productions or spectacular party events.
In analysing these pictorial figurations, it was detected that the following body-figurations prevail in relation to 'gender': the singular body, combining male and female attributes; representations of a 'patchwork-self' composed of body parts that usually do not belong to each other; emphatically staged body-transformations; figurations that reject body norms; pronounced symmetrical male and female bodies and bodies involved in family or clan life characterised by a dissolution of 'classical' models.
Usually, contemporary cultural and gender studies focus mainly on the codifying force of images - with most approaches refraining from explicitly analysing the effects that the instance of the image exerts in relation to our formation as sexual beings. In contrast to this, the project focused on particular on the popular appeal of images and visual culture and on their disseminating as well as promotional, founding, activating and authenticating force. This focus on the specificity of the communicative powers of images made it possible to access the complex reworking of the imaginary that accompanies the dissemination of gender discourse. In this way the more involuntary creations of meaning concerning 'gender' as well as unintentional linkages with other popular discourses (for instance concerning a self in transformation, a 'neutrality' of social reform, parity and symmetry), which remain closed to other perspectives, became graspable.
Summary description of project context and objectives
In recent decades philosophical and sociological concepts of 'gender' have had major institutional success. However, 'gender' was often officially adopted only after heated struggles. For instance it was chosen by the European Union (EU) officials in the mid-1990s as a kind of compromise to sidestep positive action programmes that could not achieve a majority. And at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Vatican as well as queer groups voted for the use of 'sex' instead of 'gender'. However, 'gender' was further disseminated with the proclamation of 'gender mainstreaming' as an official goal of the equal opportunities politics of the EU in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. Some local traditions of dealing with women's emancipation have seen themselves being marginalised by the spread of this concept. Other and especially younger generations of political grass-roots movements, however, have embraced the concept of gender. Political groups of 'third wave feminism' such as the 'Riot Girrl movement' and the 'lady-fests' have converted gender concepts into music, fanzines, film or multimedia festivals or into spectacular party events. And queer or transgender groups started to oppose 'gender' and to create self-images featuring 'sex'. In parallel, artists in various ways have played with self-performances and their potential to exhibit sameness and difference.
The PICTURING GENDER project was designed to investigate art and popular culture that were stimulated by philosophical and sociological concepts of 'gender'. Hence it handled 'gender' as a concept that fascinates and shapes the political imagination as well as being rejected, being heatedly debated and being confronted with other concepts and images. The fresh viewpoint the project adopted lay in the fact that it did not engage in finding a single 'correct' and applicable definition of 'gender' but that it tracked the travels of the concept through the public sphere. It dealt with 'gender' as a concept that animates the political imagination and triggers the creation of - sometimes very unusual and provocative - pictures and visual worlds.
The PICTURING GENDER project was carried out at the philosophy department of the University of Verona, Italy, which is internationally well-known for practising political philosophy as related to questions concerning the body and sexual difference and for research on concepts of the image in contemporary philosophy. Within a period of 24 months, the researcher Dr Anna Schober, who had already extensive experience in analysing visual culture and its impact on the public sphere analysed examples of adopting philosophical concepts of 'gender' into popular visual culture in various European cultural milieus.
PICTURING GENDER carried out a pronounced interdisciplinary investigation that combines philosophy, aesthetics, political sciences, art history and visual culture studies and research regarding gender and the body. Since the promotion of concepts of 'gender' is one of the main goals of current equal opportunities policies of the EU, an investigation into the meaning iconic figurations created in connection to 'gender' disseminate and a re-evaluation of their public effects is able to support a critical development of future emancipation strategies in Europe. In addition, the project's results are relevant for cultural studies, which tend to neglect the specificity of the powers of the image. And in particular it is important for the growing field of gender studies, since it contributes to a scientific practice that pays attention to its own history and especially to the history of its popularisation.
The main objectives of the project have been the following:
(a) To collect a stock of visual sources by researching visual figurations of 'gender' in art and mass culture (film, video, the internet, exhibitions etc.), created by public reform strategy as well as by grassroots political tactics. Examples since the 1980s in various northern and southern European countries have been considered. This collection also documents a quite solid trans-national network of artists, film- and video-makers, political activists as well as festival and exhibition organisers that emerged across Europe around notions such as 'gender', 'queer' and 'new identities in construction'.
Various media channels and archives have been consulted.
(b) To analyse these images with respect to the meanings staged in them and how they interlink with meanings created by visual culture, set in motion by other social agents (for instance by advertising, plastic surgery, social reform agents, political parties, self-culture). This included the selection of some especially interesting and representative examples and exemplary case studies.
(c) To investigate the processes through which individuals and groups are empowered to respond to these images or not, i.e. some particular reception histories and struggles these images set in motion have been tracked. As part of this, several interviews and conversations with political activists, artists or key public figures have been conducted in order to gain access to the intentions connected to the various image-creations.
(d) To compare examples in various southern and northern European countries. On the basis of the stock of visual examples and interviews produced in the first year of research, it was decided to focus the project on a comparison between processes of PICTURING GENDER in Italy and Germany.
In pursuing these objectives the project has elaborated a pronounced new interdisciplinary methodological approach of linking 'gender' and an analysis of images. Usually, contemporary cultural studies or art history informed by gender discourse sets out to analyse how images and visual culture in general - together with other social institutions such as education, the family or a divided labour market - contribute to the fixation of specific subject positions for women and men. They see images as active agents that work to create and enforce social norms, including gender norms. In contrast to this approach, this project focused in particular on the popular appeal of images and visual culture, on their disseminating force as well as on their role in processes of conversion from one body regime to another. In this way it paid attention to the fact that images are not only agents to create and enforce social norms, but are also able to cause a crisis of norms and existing concepts and to initiate processes of 'conversion' and of 'passage'.
The methodology used for the investigation combined political theory with methods of visual culture studies, film and cinema studies and art history. For reflections on the specificity of the image and its impact on the viewer the investigation referred to works of contemporary philosophers such as Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Didi-Huberman. According to these scholars the peculiarity of images and pictorial worlds consists in the promotional, founding and authenticating force that images exert by combining a productive agency with a representational effect. In addition, images and visual representations are characterised by the fact that they expose elements and tendencies that often remain unarticulated in what is explicitly the subject of public negotiation. They thus show a certain 'over-determination', i.e. similar to dreams, they stage wishes, fears and desires in an alienated, transposed form.
PICTURING GENDER paid particular attention to processes of conversion and of passage from one visual regime to another one. In order to investigate such processes of 'passage' or 'conversion' the project referred to the concept of 'imagination' coined by Cornelius Castoriadis and to concepts of the aesthetic 'event' coined by early scholars of visual culture such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes as well as on the further development of their concepts in recent literature. In order to grasp these processes some works of artists who are linked to 'gender' discourses in an outstanding way, such as Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie and Jenny Saville have been investigated, and in particular the reception and adoption histories their art has given rise to in the work of a younger generation of European artists.
Description of the main scientific results
PICTURING GENDER focused on the double-edged role that images perform in the course of generating a public life for 'gender': On the one hand they increase the public presence of 'gender' as a reflexive theory, but on the other hand figurations of 'gender' through visual culture also hold another - somehow antidromic - tendency. Visual worlds expose traces and evidence that have the capacity to throw political, philosophical, and sociological concepts and definitions into crisis. They are linked to processes of conversion and - as part of them - to experiences of what can be called 'authenticity' and the 'incontestable' - which often comes into conflict with the knowledge produced by culturalist constructivist discourses such as gender studies.
Remarks on the historical-political framework in which the institutionalisation of 'gender' as a key discourse of contemporary emancipation strategies occurs
Since the late 1980s, a 'rearrangement of the scenery' can be observed in the ambit of the political creation of European society (Hark, 2005: 37f.). An emancipatory discourse promoting 'women' has been replaced by one that features 'gender'. This notion has - as was formulated in 1995 by the Contact Group on Gender during the United Nations Meeting on the Status of Women in Beijing - 'evolved as differentiated from the word 'sex' to express the reality that women's and men's roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change' (quoted in Butler, 2004: 182). But even if such concepts were quite quickly adopted by social agents as a way of addressing the social construction of women and men, until now this remains an intensely debated subject in scientific as well as in political discourse and is often contested. At the UN Meeting in Beijing, for instance, the Vatican as well as queer groups voted for the use of 'sex' instead of 'gender' (Butler, 2004: 183). But even within the EU the adoption or rejection of 'gender' was debated on various fronts (Stratigaki, 2005). In particular, the fact that concepts of gender as well as the bulk of scholarship accompanying them originate mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world and have been somehow 'imported' from the US context led to clashes with many European feminist cultures (Braidotti, 2002).
Nevertheless, such concepts were further disseminated with the proclamation of 'gender mainstreaming' as an official goal of the equal opportunities politics of the EU in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 (Shaw, 2002) - which enhanced the need to 'translate' what is meant by 'gender' into attractive figures in order to bridge the gap between the scientific-political discourse and the wider public. Some local traditions of dealing with women's emancipation have become marginalised by the spread of this concept - such as Italian feminist groups that strengthened the concept of 'differenza sessuale' (sexual difference) around which they have emerged and which have in the 1990s increasingly closed themselves off from diverging feminist discussions (Putino, 1998). Other and especially younger generations of political grassroots movements, however, have embraced culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender' and 'sex-gender'. Especially political groups of 'third wave feminism' such as the 'Riot Girrl movement' and the 'lady-fests' showed themselves as being inspired by 'gender' and 'translated' these concepts into music, fanzines, film and multimedia festivals, or spectacular party events. And in the 1990s artists stimulated by culture-oriented, constructivist interpretative models also began to invent unusual figurations in relation to the body and our life as sexual beings or to relate to other art that evolved around notions such as 'gender'. In parallel, queer or transgender groups started to oppose 'gender' and to create self-representations featuring 'sex'. Such a re-arrangement of the scenery is however never complete, nor does it proceed in a homogeneous way. On the contrary, usually various political positions, different artistic and media initiatives or reform strategies in respect to parity or issues such as sexuality, the family and work conditions simultaneously compete in attracting an audience. What changes is the dominance these initiatives may gain in their hegemonic field.
Images and the transition from one regime of certainty to another
PICTURING GENDER referred to a notion of 'certainty' Linda Zerilli has adopted from works by Ludwig Wittgenstein. She points out that our relationship towards our own sex or towards that of others is one of certainty, conviction, and passionate practice (Zerilli, 2005: 38f.). This relationship has less to do with knowledge, in the sense that we are searching for proof to justify our actions as sexual beings and thus cannot be easily influenced by propositional statements. For example, today we know that there are no ultimate criteria for establishing a gender difference: the Olympic committee, for example, changed from a naked inspection to chromosome tests and back to a naked inspection. However, in most cases we usually have no doubt with regard to the sex of a counterpart or of our own sexual identity. Certainty, according to Wittgenstein, is a doing not a knowing (Wittgenstein 1984: 127f.). Pictorially speaking we inhabit a house in which the existence of two sexes is backed by various details of daily life practice. We are guided by certainty and passion without analysing every move we make or constantly questioning our actions. Hence, the general framework of the game we are playing in this house is certainty not knowledge.
In recent decades an enormous production of knowledge with regard to masculinity and femininity has been counter-posed to this matter-of-factness and the connected myths. It seeks to demonstrate that 'gender' is a becoming, a collective, constantly repeated, and thus transformed construction, etc. The question, however, is: How can this knowledge affect the certainty that guides our everyday actions and the passions and drives connected to them? Because to detach oneself from the certainty and the matter-of-factness that guides our practices in everyday life and to assume other ones constitutes a conversion - comparable to abandoning religious or ideological beliefs and assuming others. This process usually involves being profoundly touched, taken out of oneself, fascinated and involved, rather than critique, explanation, and demonstration. Hence, there is also a gap between the certainty of the everyday and the knowledge of gender studies, even if passionate involvement and rational judgment are not mutually exclusive, as some traditions of political science would have us believe, but rather reciprocally inspire and motivate each other.
This gap between the certainty of everyday life and knowledge also has to do with the fact that myths cannot be conquered by argument, for instance by exposing them as 'groundless illusions' or by showing that what they tell is 'wrong'. Myths are composed of a multitude of mutually reinforcing narratives and a variety of often very seductive details that have the capacity to accommodate our wishes, fears or desires. These narrations exist and circulate without having to be justified and are able explain and give sense to most of our actions. Nevertheless, myths do transform themselves: we are involved in a more or less constant innovation of the mythical (Schober, 2001 40f. and 158f.), with some myths that no longer correspond to what we experience losing their importance and even being abandoned and others being revised, fused, or even revitalised or reinvented. Hence the main question formulated in PICTURING GENDER concerns which innovations in our mythical frameworks related to 'gender' can be detected and how this is tied to processes of figuration and image acts.
Imagination and experiences of authenticity / the incontestable
In turning the attention towards these processes of innovation and conversion from one mythical world to another, a particular faculty comes to the fore that in a very eminent sense is responsible for them: the faculty of imagination, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) calls it. According to Castoriadis, this faculty allows us to generate forms and figurations that are not already given by experience or the existing order of things. Such 'innovative' figurations are capable of fascinating, involving, and affecting others and can in this way transform institutional society through captivation and conviction.
Connected to such processes of conversion is also an experience of what can be called 'authenticity' or an experience of the incontestable. In today's constructivist approaches 'authenticity' is mainly used as a core target for deconstructivist efforts. These approaches usually set out to demonstrate again and again that such claims for authenticity are political and ideological representations serving particular parties and emerging in certain milieus. But as anthropologists such as Mattijs van de Port (2004) have shown, the constructedness of life-worlds and their historically contingent becoming usually goes along with processes of authentication, i.e. we usually manage to transcend the constructedness of our life-worlds. Events of conversion are thereby in particular linked to an experience of an incontestable that is then usually 'translated' into new lifestyles and their iconic representation. Hence the focus on the make-believe does not necessarily go along with a devaluation of the act of believing. The realm of the sexual, the erotic and the body and its sensorium as well as its materiality emerge in post-1968 cultures in particular as realms where processes of differentiation of life-worlds and self-authentication occur. It even seems that the more existence is seen and experience as uprooted and in transformation, the more a demand for acts of authentification rises too. Also in this respect a gap between processes of self-authentification (for instance via sexuality, body-modification) that characterise our life-practice and the knowledge-production of gender studies can be witnessed.
The epistemic framework of PICTURING GENDER
This role of images in setting existing convictions, norms and everyday certainties into crisis and causing transformations in the realm of imagination as well as of social practices was recently highlighted and analysed by the new discipline of visual culture studies (for instance by Mersch, 2007: 66). Louis Marin, whose writings are a central reference point for this kind of research, has directed our attention in particular toward the founding, promotional, activating, challenging and authenticating force that images embody by combining a productive agency with a representational effect (Marin, 2007: 12f.). PICTURING GENDER demonstrates that this force of images can be measured by paying attention to events of transition, by tracing reception histories and processes of adoption and by studying where visual worlds become issues or even sites of struggle.
These methodological reflections provided by visual culture studies show that images are not a second hand representation of something primary but a generating force. At the same time, they again point out that images cannot only be seen as active forces that work to strengthen social norms but can also become agents causing a crisis of norms and political concepts.
In contrast to this, gender studies, which started to spread in the 1990s, is characterised by the fact that it is usually engaged mainly with norms in relation to the body and its social performance. Consequently, most of gender-studies approaches also conceptualise images as active agents in enforcing social norms, including gender norms. The second tendency of images to throw existing norms and concepts into crisis was largely ignored. A further effect of this is that popular (and artistic) image-making is often discussed in binary models: either they are seen as maintaining or enforcing gender norms or they are judged as 'subversive' or even 'critical'. As an effect, the dissolution of norms that characterise 'late' or 'post-modernity' (Hegener, 2009: 132) as well as innovations in mythical explanations and events of conversion between belief systems recede into the background.
PICTURING GENDER integrated visual culture studies for the analysis of the public life of 'gender'. Consequently, the investigation focused not on the image as product but as an act that triggers processes of reception or becomes a site of struggle and on how pictorial worlds are linked to those passages in the mythical and ideological realm by which people make sense of their lives. Furthermore, the project analysed how this change, in turn, is reflected, negotiated, and contested by the production of new and pronouncedly 'different' images concerning masculinity, femininity, androgyny, sexuality, the family and genealogy. The investigation thereby counteracted the usual practice of fixing the meaning of 'gender'. In contrast, the PICTURING GENDER project focused on how concepts of 'gender' have been adopted for the creation of a huge variety of image productions within various European milieus through which they have passed in recent decades.
In doing so, PICTURING GENDER operated with the following conceptual definitions. On the one hand 'gender' is seen as a very specific concept that in itself already contains a set of preliminary considerations: it opts for a societal analysis; it reanimates the dichotomies 'nature: culture' or 'biology: society'; it renounces the representation of sexual relation and its conflicts in favour of a voluntary abstraction; it constitutes a subject of thought that seems to have a certain autonomy (Fraisse, 1996: 53f.). But on the other hand, 'gender' is perceived in its function as a 'figure of the newly thinkable' in terms set out by Cornelius Castoriadis (1997). As such, 'gender' concepts animate the political imagination, which leads to collective bricolage and to vivid processes of iconic figuration. The images and visual worlds created in this way disseminate and popularise this concept further throughout the public sphere.
However, if 'gender' or 'sex-gender' are in this way seen as particular figures of thought able to trigger imagination and action, they cannot be used simultaneously as an epistemic category (Zerilli, 2005: 59f.). Hence, on an epistemic level rather than using the 'sex-gender' distinction, the concept of 'difference' is used, which does not propose an absolute difference but operates on the assumption that men and women (as well as transgender persons or other representatives of different identities) are different and equal at the same time - something that needs no further definition because any definition will set new social norms (Fraisse, 1996: 135f.).
Image clusters
Iconic figurations of culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender' are usually characterised by a particular tension: on the one hand there is no ready-made iconic tradition available for the act of figuration to link itself up to, i.e. an iconic tradition in relation to such new philosophical and sociological concepts is invented only in the course of the dissemination of these concepts. But on the other hand the various acts of iconic figuration indeed refer back to existing iconographic motives, visual conventions, myths, and narrations, which in this way are adopted, recast and altered. The most important of these existing iconic motives that the various acts of pictorial figuration tend to link up to are the 'new man' and 'new woman', the androgynous, the hermaphrodite, or other sexually liminal and intermediate creatures, and the machine-body and visions of the self-sufficient and self-(re)creating body.
It was not the intention of PICTURING GENDER to break these various image-creations in connection to 'gender' down into one or to extract one single strand of narration from them. It was rather the aim to track the course of the concept through the public sphere and to highlight the struggle, conflict and ambiguities that arise in connection to it. Nevertheless, the investigation carried out by PICTURING GENDER into iconic figurations that the concepts of 'gender' inspires, brought to light several agglomerations or clusters of bodily image-creations that prevail in relation to culture-oriented interpretative models such as 'gender'. Here it is also important to note that such agglomerations or clusters never exist neatly separated from each other but overlap, i.e. several images take part in more than one of them. In the following, a range of such image-clusters that have emerged in relation to 'gender' since the 1980s will be presented. However, the project did not subscribe to a notion of something like a completeness of documentation but rather aimed at giving a comprehensive overview and at depicting exemplary case studies. The following types of iconic figurations have been identified as being predominant in connection with 'gender' concepts:
(1) Pictograms
Often posters, brochures, folders, or websites created as part of public campaigns in relation to 'gender' issues show icons and pictograms. These figurations demonstrate the rootedness of parts of gender discourse in a tradition of modernist reform discourses and political movements. Hence the figuration of 'gender' in the form of pictograms reiterates a tradition of a 'universal' picture language which emerged most strongly in the period of 'heroic modernism' (between WWI and WWII) and is the product of a modernist belief in the reduction of information, the simplicity of form, and standardisation for the sake of saving time, labour and money and of communicating effectively with 'all' members of society. Since central features of this modernist belief system, such as ideas of a rationality of public processes or the effective possibility to reform citizens from above, have been challenged in recent decades, however, this tradition is today performed in a transformed way. Contemporary designers often combine pictograms with more emphatic, emotionally appealing image components.
(2) Symmetry
Concepts of 'gender' are often 'translated' into images that show a pronounced symmetry. These images assert, promote and authenticate a symmetrical co-presence of the male and the female; often in combination of pictograms that assert a 'neutrality' of reform. In contrast, any form of asymmetry, for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections vis-à-vis the other sex as well as conflicts between the sexes, are usually not represented. This type of figuration is mainly used in official reform strategies - for instance for visual material used by gender mainstreaming institutions.
(3) Singular bodies, re-assembling male and female sexual and erotic codes
Another agglomeration of images that are invented in more or less explicit connection with 'gender' shows successful combinations of fragments of female and male bodily appearances. The depicted body appears as hypersexual (or asexual) and able to satisfy multiple desires (male and female, heterosexual, transsexual and gay, for affirmation as well as for critique). This type of images is mainly produced by artists or political activists, but also in marketing and pop-culture.
(4) Celebrations of the creativity of the 'patchwork self'
Often, images related to 'gender' explore change and transformation in relation to bodily appearance. They present the self as a kind of 'patchwork self' that can repeatedly and emphatically be reinvented and resampled. Usually this reinvention and resampling is presented as the outcome of a spectacular, successful, vanguard, and empowering activity that is somehow under the control of the doer and is this way purged of all painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and incontrollable aspects. Sometimes these pictorial figurations explicitly refer to the new biotechnologies and their potential to expand the radius of human action. Also this kind of figuration is mainly used by artists or activists, but also in marketing and pop-culture.
(5) Attacks on incorporations of body norms
A range of images invented in connection with 'gender' show incorporations of body-norms, for example by using 'Barbie', the famous long-legged, blonde doll, sometimes in combination with Ken, her male counterpart. Other examples are the representation of carefully and colourfully staged obese bodies often integrated in very individual and trashy life-style settings. These images often expose a (deconstructive) engagement with body norms. But in spite of the often very clearly expressed intentions, these iconic figurations designed to question conventions of femininity (and masculinity) also have other, non-intended side effects. They still maintain a kind of femininity (and masculinity) as for instance represented by Barbie (and Ken) in the public sphere and allow these to radiate and seduce. At the same time these presences can also produce very conflicting emotional responses - hence in connection with these figurations often struggle and conflict can be witnessed. These kinds of images are mainly created in political activism and in the arts.
(6) New every-bodies
Where explicit political grassroots mobilisation is an issue, it is not images that display symmetry or images that show a self in metamorphosis that are employed, but the a-symmetry of power is again highlighted and universality is again embodied via new particular-universal figures. Examples of such new every-bodies in public circulation in connection to 'gender' are the female migrant and the clown. Like older, modernist figures of this type, such as 'the worker' or 'the woman', the female migrant or the clown address 'all of us' and stand for truth-claims in respect to what is discursively represented. These figures make it possible to expose a gap between current asymmetries of power and a potential equality and parity. But like older every-bodies such as 'the worker', they also allow a mirroring and constituting of the protesting and acting self in the image of the other and in doing so romanticise or 'swallow' the other for a repositioning of the self. The clown in particular bridges the convention of the sexually indistinctive, androgynous self and that of older emancipation and social-reform discourses and their every-bodies, since this mask obliterates differences, affirms fantasies of uniting the male and the female into one 'unisex' person (oriented on masculinity), and accentuates the interior life of judgments, feelings, and ambivalence.
Conclusion
In particular with the last four of these image-clusters processes of self-authentication seem to occur or are reflected. This also means that 'gender' is employed in the course of contemporary life practice as a code for re-negotiating the self and its potentialities.
A further uniting feature of the various image acts investigated in PICTURING GENDER is that any form of asymmetry, for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections vis-à-vis the other sex, seems to recede into the background. Moreover, male and female body parts and their re-combinations are mainly represented as positive tropes, are emphatically staged, and linked to fantasies of control. Any painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and unsuccessful attempts of body- and self-modification are usually not represented and thus tend to disappear.
But at the same time artists or political activists sometimes express anger, fury and frustration by linking up with 'gender' or allow ambivalent feelings and what usually is considered as 'not-speakable' to develop and to be articulated in respect to current body regimes. And new sites of staging political claims and making reigning asymmetries an issue, such as the figure of the female migrant or the clown, are also created.
PICTURING GENDER developed the thesis that images and bodies that arise in connection with 'gender' affirm a kind of vision of the public sphere as being (already successfully) egalitarian and populated by discrete bodies that interiorise ambivalence and difference. At the same time, new figurations with the potential to question and challenge this vision such as the (female) clown also arise. With them 'gender' is used to disrupt the security of representing a neutral and universal collective subject, but at the same time the picturing of 'gender' tends to neutralise inequalities in themselves because it usually conceals asymmetries and conflicts between the sexes.
References
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- Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. 'The Discovery of the Imagination.' In: Curtis, Davis A., ed. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 213-245.
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- Hark, Sabine. 2005. Dissidente Partizipation. Eine Diskursgeschichte des Feminismus. Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp.
- Hegener, Wolfgang. 2009. 'Die Ambivalenz des Ursprungs. Diesseits und jenseits von Geschlechterdifferenz und Sexualität.' In: Berkel Irene, ed. Postsexualität. Zur Transformation des Begehrens. Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag: 129-147.
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- Schober, Anna. 2010. 'Undoing gender revisited: Judith Butler's parody and the avant-garde tradition.' Gender Forum. An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 30 (see http://www.genderforum.org/issues/de-voted/undoing-gender-revisited/(opens in new window) online).
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Potential impact
Wider societal impact
The PICTURING GENDER project demonstrated that philosophical and social science concepts, political action and the arts and media are interconnected in shaping contemporary political negotiation. Hence, culture and the political public sphere cannot be separated as belonging to two different realms but are interlinked and inseparable. The project focused in particular on the performative force that images exert in creating a public life for 'gender'. It highlighted the particular figurations of the sexed body, relationships, sexuality and genealogy that thereby emerge and analysed them in their historical, political and social context. These insights can have an impact on 'gender'-related political and social reform strategies and activities on a local, regional and EU level. It encourages those involved in such strategies to look at the visual material they produce from new and fresh viewpoints and to consider the often surprising and unintended correlations and adoption processes these visual productions cause. Furthermore, usually hidden traditions and unexpected image-struggles are brought to public attention. Here the following two findings are particularly important for a critical development of future emancipation strategies in relation to (sexual, cultural, ethnic etc.) difference on various levels of political action throughout Europe: that any form of asymmetry in iconic figurations of 'gender', for instance an asymmetry in access to public power but also asymmetries in imaginary projections, tends to recede into the background and that male and female body parts and their always new re-combination are mainly used as positive tropes and are linked to fantasies of control, whereas painful, problematic, disordering, confusing and unsuccessful attempts of body-modification tend to disappear.
At the same time, PICTURING GENDER also focused on new sites of staging claims and of making asymmetries an issue, such as the one of the female migrant or the clown - what makes the findings of the project also productive for contemporary political activism or general reflections about current processes of 'bottom-up' mobilisation.
Scientific impact
Gender studies are currently established as an institutionalised academic discipline on a global scale. The methodological approach and empirical findings produced in PICTURING GENDER are able to challenge 'frozen' concepts and assumptions that have emerged as part of this institutionalisation process. As already mentioned, the since the 1970s emerging fields of women's and later gender and postcolonial studies have changed the ways in which many scholars approach representations of women, men, the androgynous body as well as representation as such. A whole range of studies have been produced that analyse images as active agents that work to create and enforce social norms, including gender norms.
In contrast to this strand of research, the new discipline of 'Bildwissenschaften' (visual culture studies) has rather emphasised the role of images in throwing existing convictions, norms and everyday certainties into crisis and causing transformations in the realm of imagination as well as of social practices. These studies highlight that images are involved in the constitution as well as in the transformation of reality - since they embody a founding, promotional, activating, challenging and authenticating force.
PICTURING GENDER adopted these 'Bildwissenschaften' (visual culture studies) approaches and thus challenged approaches of gender studies and cultural studies that often tend to ignore the particular force and qualities of images. It directed the attention away from an occupation solely with norms towards an analysis of processes of imagination and of how pictorial worlds are linked to passages from one regime of certainties in respect to people's lives as sexual beings to another one.
Besides, through particular scientific events, papers presented at international conferences and workshops and several publications the project created public visibility for knowledge in the fields of visual culture and gender studies, which are still under-developed areas in European and especially Italian academia. It thereby linked these innovative research areas in particular to rather traditional research fields such as political philosophy and aesthetics, in order to initiate a reflection of the curricula of these study areas.
Impact on career development
The fellowship provided the researcher Dr Anna Schober with the possibility to acquire new knowledge. At the host institution, she was able to focus in particular on the re-reading of contemporary political discourses with respect to questions of the body and of sexual difference as well as on the conceptualisation of the image in contemporary philosophical thought and the effects this representational instance exerts in the process of the popularisation of 'gender'. This as well as the publications resulting from the project PICTURING GENDER consolidated and expanded her existing research specialisation in gender studies and visual culture studies. In this way, the diversity of the qualifications she can count on for her future career was strengthened.
Furthermore, the mobility action supported the researcher Dr Anna Schober in developing her skills in project management and in presenting and disseminating her work on an international level. The action was especially effective in expanding and strengthening the international networks the project is situated in and to bring various networks that usually exists quite separate from each other - such as those of political science and of aesthetics or visual culture - into communication with each other.
The impact of PICTURING GENDER on the career development of the researcher Dr Anna Schober is also proven by the fact that in September 20011 she was awarded the Mercator visiting professorship (financed by the DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for 'Kulturalisierung und die Popularisierung von 'gender' (culturalisation and the popularisation of 'gender') at the sociology department of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where she will continue her studies in the field of visual culture and gender studies. This will further support the researcher Dr. Anna Schober in order to reach her goal to become a full professor in one of her research fields in the near future.
Impact on network building
As already mentioned, PICTURING GENDER was especially effective in expanding and strengthening an existing international network of academics practising political theory, gender studies and visual culture studies. This was achieved through the organisation of particular events such as workshops and conferences, but also through participation in joint panels at international conferences or at international workshops as well as through joint publications and the conceptualisation of follow-up projects.
The project network was mainly expanded in gender studies (contact was for example made with the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and strengthened with the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Programme Diversity Management and Governance at the University of Graz/A), in political theory (the Centre of Excellence Cultural Foundations of Integration, at the Institute of Advanced Study in Konstanz/G, the philosophy department at Klagenfurt University/A, the Università Federico II di Napoli and the sociology department at Gießen university/G), and in aesthetics and visual culture studies (The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture, Florida Atlantic University, United States of America and the NCCR Iconic criticism at Basel university, Switzerland). In this way, the mobility action supported European excellence in these innovative research areas.
Project website:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/anna.schober/abstract_gender.html(opens in new window)