Politically Incorrect by Gina Strumwasser

Author:Gina Strumwasser
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: Cognella, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Gender Defined

Innovative approaches to art history include issues of gender, sexuality, class, and race that enrich the academic discipline by expanding factual documentation and critical interpretation. More than any other cultural boundary, however, gender is perhaps the most prohibitive. For example, while Renaissance culture promoted man as the focus of earthly life, the female gender was identified as inferior. How did the revival of ancient Greece and Rome inform female identity? Popularly acknowledged as the weaker sex, women were understood as corrupted by Eve’s sinful and sexual nature and therefore dangerous. Renaissance man returned to ancient authors like Aristotle to reinforce the inferior status of women. According to Aristotle, at the initial stage of conception, the male gender provided the fetus with intelligence. In contrast, the woman who carried the child furnished merely the sustenance and matter an unsubstantial compartment where the embryo was nourished. Embraced by Renaissance man, Aristotle’s paradigm of anatomy legitimized the inferior status of women and promoted gendered life expectations and roles. Recognized as intellectually incapable, the female gender was subjugated to the will of man.

No consensus exists in defining the term gender. Gender is commonly characterized as a societal crafting of masculine and feminine in regards to scripted roles, behavioral, and vocational expectations that are determined by biological sex, not by choice. The words male and female designate biological sex, which informs identify and determines social proscriptions. Gendered boundaries are fashioned by those in positions of power, commonly the male gender, who assigns modes of behavior to women, constructing female roles that may preclude occupational preference.

While each culture defines gender differently, most societies commonly construct distinguishable attributes and expectations that are understood as masculine or feminine. Designations of masculine and feminine can be applied pervasively to all nuances of life encompassing personality and pediments, clothing, colors (for example, pink for girls and blue for boys), and columns (masculine defined by the Doric Order and feminine by the Ionic Order), language, leadership and legislation, physical attributes, and psychological subtleties. At the time of birth, anatomically male or female, children were additionally distinguished by cultural expectations that would signify their role in adulthood. The mode of life and its consequences depended upon one’s gender.157 How did gender inform the crafting of female imagery in Early Modern Europe?

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