Investigating the Gender Variable: A Sculpture Examination of Material Gendering in the Production and Perception of Art

My main premise is that there are artistic materials and processes that have strong presumed correlations with gender. This paper focuses on the modern Western (and likely American) presumed pairings of femininity with textiles in art, in order to explore how such gender associations affect the artist’s working process and the audience’s perception. However, the term “gender” is a relatively ambiguous, used in research and literature as a term to describe multiple aspects of human condition. To develop a basis for discussion of how perceptions of gender can affect perceptions of artwork, I will discuss the diverse, stereotypical, and standard conventional definitions of gender, masculinity, femininity and androgyny