Gender and Clay

Fall, 2017

In what ways do culturally and socially determined gender traits and preferences of femininity and masculinity manifest themselves so deeply that males and females begin to willingly embody the stereotypes?

In the fall of 2017, I explored the question of subconscious learning of gender roles through an 87-person participatory art experiment. In four different social environments (individual females, individual males, mixed-gender groups, and same-gender groups) I gave each participant a block of clay, 10 minutes, and the choice of either making a cube or a sphere. My results were striking: 58% of the females made spheres (a shape that embodies stereotypical female traits) and 59% of males made cubes (a shape that embodies stereotypical male traits). From this highly-attuned, culturally learned tendency to organize the world into having masculine and feminine characteristics, even objectively non-gendered objects are prescribed a gender.