Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education, Modernism, identity and critical feminism, 2001, OPen University Press, Buckingham.
Chapter 5 The Feminisation of Art Education.
Pen Dalton states feminised skills are usually under-valued, under-paid, low status and often menial with unsocial hours. Donna Harraway has described feminised work as :
both literally female and feminised, whether performed by men or omen. To be feminised meanest o be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that makes a mockery of a limited work day; living an existence that always borders on being obscene,out of place, and reducible to sex.
Since 2000 there have been increasing feminine rhetorics of empowerment, flexibility, creativity, co-operation and teamwork promoted in art educational discourse, and inclusion of race, culture and gender, seen as a positive. However as the content of art education has become more feminine, the larger structures of art pedagogy continue to operate as hidden patriarchal power, due to their authoritarian, bureaucratic operation.
In the 20th century, art education took on mass production processes in its concept of creativity. Art took on scientific-like methodologies of aims, objectives and outcomes (doesn't this sound like how I wrote my MA Proposal!). Art education taught not so much skills, as ideological attitudes that were passed on to students - i.e. patriarchal. School values were couched within the same systems of value and meanings as the world of work. Economically successful (i.e. capitalist) organisation of modern work lent (or pushed?) their rhetoric to the education field. This leads to school leavers having their identities formed by commercial values and global commercial attitudes to work. Occupational educationalist ideologies based on consumer capitalism and global corporate power are impacting working class identities, the feminisation of art education and the feminisation of teaching art. The worrying consequence of this is that patriarchal power continues to operate in feminised work - men usually dominate in ownership and control of business, high finance, and law, and are inaccessible and invisible to the front line worker.
Dalton says consumption is assuming a primary pedagogic role. Education, previously believed to give access to power, choice, and cultural capital, is no longer a passport to a good job, because of the acquisition of specialist knowledge and skill. "Performance" is enough - by the consumption of having the right stuff, the right contacts and the jargon of modern times. It's about the choice and deployment of objects and knowledges. Therefore the underlying values have changed.
Modern values (unspecified) have given way to the privileging in art education of the values of the feminine - intuition, emotion, pluralism, eclecticism and bricolage modes of creativity. In doing this it has devalued the modernist values of reason, science and progress - but, post modernists have not created theories in their place.
Creative work continues to be gendered as feminine - by this I think Dalton means the work is feminised - i.e. poor terms and conditions of work, and insecurity. She goes on to say that most artists' attitudes are similar to 19thC bourgeois feline leisure craft ideologies. I find this somewhat surprising, but she says these people are the ones who provide R&D for the commercial arts, by their innovative ideas and products, which commercial media dip into to create a product for mass consumption. Thus the independent creative provides what commercial businesses want - low paid workers who are creative, skilled, self motivated, in addition to being cheap and dispensable. "The artist provides the paradigm of the post modern worker".
Critical work can be described as art arctic that challenges existing oppressive norms and holds out imaginative possibilities for something different. This is where I think my work fits in. I am stitching work that recognises the values of ordinary, mundane women, which is not what the paternalistic society wants.
Dalton writes about service type jobs being feminised. Service work requires different skills and different relationships from productive work (which we have lost since we ceased being a manufacturing nation). It is much more a mental process and performance. It is an activity not an object producing role. Service involves the whole self, a bodily involvement and often close bodily proximity with the customer. The service worker often enters the homes or private emotions of the client. It needs good presentation, cleanliness, manners and willingness. The speech, demeanour and behaviour of the worker are embodied in the service performed. Service workers suppress or conceal their own opinions and feelings and align their expressed opinions with the person employing them. Key requirements are to smile, flatter, be friendly and to care. These personal, feminine, caring behaviours are defined as emotional labour. Good humour, listening skills, smiling and affection are part of the behaviours sought.
I believe I have worked in a masculinist company, where many of my male colleagues denied the experiences of female managers (along with black and gay people), and completely dismissed the validity of women's voices in any form of association with knowledge, or decision making. I had not thought of it in this way before.
In some ways I find some sympathy with many masculinist theories - e.g. Freud. If he really was one of the originators of psychology, as a man, he was only able to perceive from the masculine viewpoint and until more people worked in the field, the differences between men and woman could not be realised. This is why it is so difficult to identify what your assumptions are - if they truly are assumptions, they are probably unconscious.
However having said that, working in this environment where employment policies have been written in a machinist style, as a woman, is not a pleasant experience.
Contextual values
A term used by feminist philosopher of science Helen Longino in Science as Social Knowledge (1990) to indicate non-cognitive values, that is values that are not strictly part of practices of science but nonetheless play a role in scientific decision-making. Preferences, beliefs and cultural norms are contextual values. These include things like theory preference based on masculinist values or preferring a theory because the physical location in which one does research makes certain data more convincing. Contextual values play a role in scientific objectivity. Some feminist philosophers of science see contextual values as unavoidable, but argue that they need to be acknowledged and mitigated by a diversity of views.
Longino, Helen
Longino’s work in philosophy of science is classified as feminist empiricism. She argues that science should be understood to be a social practice. Because science is a social practice operates within the values and norms of the its community, she question whether an objective science is possible. Longino argues that scientific knowledge contains background assumptions as well as contextual values, which are non-cognitive values that are not strictly part of the practices of science but which underly the process. She asserts that objectivity in scientific practice is a matter of the degree to which a community practices a set of criteria that Longino argues is objectivity promoting. Among these is equality of intellectual authority, community response and shared community standards. Longino argues scientific knowledge or science’s cognitive capacities are themselves social or interactive. Furthermore, Longino argues that scientific knowledge needs to be studied in its complex local contexts.
I would propose that (masculinist) art organisations also need to consider whether female values are represented consistently, with no background assumptions made about the appropriateness of displaying such work.