Summary Blog

                The beginning of this project was a bit rocky. I had to change my topic because of complications with my original idea. I eventually came up with the idea of interviewing different generations about the presence of traditional gender roles in their youth and in their current lives. In discussing gender roles, I am referring to “feminine and masculine social expectations in a family based on a person’s sex” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, pg. 155). I was expecting to find stricter and more sexist gender role stereotypes in interviews with older participates. I was surprised to find that traditional gender norms were also present in the childhoods of younger interviewees.

                I centered my project on two concepts. One is family a social institution. Traditional gender roles stem from the idea of the nuclear family. It is “composed of two parents (one male and one female) and biological children, with the male as the primary wage earner and the female as the primary homemaker (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, pg. 155). Even though the nuclear family is not ideal, it is still the stereotype of what a family should be. The nuclear family also makes it seem as though there is only one type of family, when in reality, even the term “family” has a unique meaning to each individual. With today’s high divorce rate, there are many single parent families. One of my interviewees mentioned this. Below is a clip from an interview with 62 year old Wesley Brown Jr. from Omaha, Nebraska on March 24, 2012. *Wesley chose not to be videotaped.

               

The nuclear family creates gender stereotypes of the way men should be and the way women should be. This is where gender as a social institution becomes relevant. Men are thought to be the breadwinners, work outside of the home, be dominant. Women on the other hand should be the ones to stay home to keep house and take care of the children. These gender role stereotypes put in place the idea that both men and women should be able to live up to these ideals. The demand to abide by these ideals is called a gendered social script.  They are “the rules that people carry around in their heads about what they ought to be like as men or women (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or intersexed) and what others ought to be like as men or women (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, pg. 155). The majority of the people I interviewed said that their parents followed stereotypical gender roles. Many of their mothers did the household duties while their fathers worked. Some interviewees stated that both of their parents worked. Even in the cases where both parents worked, they still saw their mother as the primary homemaker. Below, 21 year old Megan Pohl from Columbus, NE discusses her family’s division of work when she was younger in an interview on March 24, 2012.

                

                It was not surprising to me to find out that both parents of the people I interviewed worked. In the United States economy, it is hard to find a job that pays well enough for only one parent to work. I think with these restrictions, gender norms have to be broken. Maybe this will make way for generation who does not grow up with traditional gender norms.

                It was interesting to interview people from other countries. I was not expecting this to happen. One of the people I interviewed, Wesley Brown Jr., happened to know the three international participants. It seemed as though traditional gender roles were even more prevalent in their families than in the United States.  The international interviewees did not understand what traditional gender roles were, so I had to explain. Their English wasn’t very good, so that was another obstacle that had to be overcome. Through their interviews, I learned a lot about family dynamics in other countries. Below is a clip from one of those interviews. (I didn't think to have them write their names down, so I have no idea how to spell it. I added the clip where he states his name. He is from Beijing, China.)

                This project has taught me to open my eyes to the presence of traditional gender roles. I had never thought too much about women being stereotyped as the housekeepers while men were the wage earners. I realize now that I can make a conscious effort to break these norms in my own family. If I were to do this project again, I would ask the people I interviewed what norms are present in their own families. By this I do not mean their parents, but with their husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. I wonder if the gender roles one grows up seeing affects what roles they fill in the families they eventually make.


References:

DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating Gender Diversity: A Critical Approach. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.

Concept Application

                Since my last blog post, I have completely changed my project. I am now studying the gender norms different generations grew up with. I like to think that my generation has overcome sexist thinking and can feel comfortable defying traditional gender norms, though I know this isn't quite true. While I think that my generation is more open minded than previous generations, I believe we still internalize what it means to be a man or a women and what kind of roles we should fill. I have thus far interviewed one person from every generation 20 through 60 and I plan to interview more.

                My project revolves around a couple concepts: family as a social institution and gender as a social institution. In the United States, there exists an ideal family. It is known as the nuclear family. As stated in Communicating Gender Diversity, “Despite the diversity of family forms, gender role expectations are delimited by the ideal of the traditional nuclear family (also called the family of procreation), which is composed of two parents (one male and one female) and biological children, with the male as the primary wage earner and the female as the primary homemaker” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p. 155). Because of the nuclear family ideal, women were expected to be homemakers and those who took care of the children while the male worked outside of the home. I was curious to know if these ideals, while often impracticable affected the average person’s life as they grew up. Did their mother stay home or work? What about their father? Some of the people I interviewed also discussed the way their parents followed or resisted gender norms for various reasons. A 62 man from Omaha, Nebraska said in his interview, “In my family, both my father and mother worked. Many times my older sister, myself, and my sister who is one year younger than myself, would stay at home with the younger kids and babysit while my parents worked.”

                Gender as a social institution is also intertwined with my project. According to sociologist Patricia Yancey Martin in Communicating Gender Diversity, there are twelve characteristics of social institutions. A couple of these pertain specifically to what I am studying: (1) constrain and facilitate behavior and (2) continually change. These characteristics stood out to me along with this quote from the book: “The workings of social ideology and institutions can be identified in people’s use of gender/sex to designate divisions of labor, organize public and private life, distribute resources, create status structures, and so forth” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p. 145). Gender norms are enforced in our culture. It is frowned upon to disregard them. The characteristic of a social institution being ever changing made me wonder about the gender norms other generations grew up with. I questioned whether previous generations grew up with more sexist and strict gender norms and whether it affected their family in terms of which parent worked, did household chores, and did outdoor work. I interviewed people from my generation as a comparison to the older generations. A 21 year old girl from Columbus, Nebraska said in her interview, “My dad always was the one outside working and he was the rugged manly man and I think that’s what traditionally you would think. He was the one outside and he’d come inside after working on cars and be all dirty and my mom would be the one doing the laundry.”

References:

DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating Gender Diversity: A Critical Approach. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.

Video Interviews

Blog Intro

       Identity is described as “how people define themselves as individuals and as groups” (DeFrancisco and Palczewski, 2007, p.61). One of the most important aspects of my identity is being an artist.  This one piece of my identity has influenced my life greatly thus far. The medium that I enjoy working with the most is clay. Therefore, I decided to base my gender identity project in the ceramics world. I would like to study the ways in which men and women create ceramic pieces and the ways in which they surface those pieces. I am curious to know if there is a noticeable difference in the way men and women make art. My assumption is that males tend to make larger pieces and decorate the surface less ornately than a female. I am interested to find out if my hypothesis is true. I make these claims from observations I have already made of some males in my previous and current ceramics classes.
I am in my third semester of ceramics at UNL. The class I am taking is combined with another ceramics class, Ceramics 232, the second semester of ceramics. The class I am in (Ceramics 331) contains only seven students. Six of us are female. The Ceramics 232 class has, I believe, five males out of a class of sixteen-ish. I will find out the exact numbers through my exploration of this topic. To my knowledge, it is primarily art majors, minors, and art education students that take these classes. I want to ask the College of Fine and Performing Arts about the exact number of male art majors and female art majors enrolled at UNL. My guess is that it is primarily females.
Traditionally, I feel like some areas of art are thought to be more masculine and some areas more feminine. For example, sculpture is viewed as more of a masculine art because of the use of power tools, welding, and maybe even that sculptures can be quite large. I would see ceramics as being more of a feminine art because it usually involves smaller pieces and many of them are beautiful and ornate.
In my ceramics class last semester we watched an interesting ceramics documentary titled “Revolutions of the Wheel.” In the late 19th century, pottery was still an industrialized art. Ceramics were made in factories and produced in massive quantities. In the documentary, Kenneth Trapp explains, “Women were often decorators. Men were glazers, throwers, the potters, the kiln men. They were the technicians as well as the administrators.” Women were not given many tasks during the production of the pottery. They were seen as capable of doing only one thing: decorating. I wonder if these historical assumptions have affected  today’s art. Are women more interested in surface decoration? Do they tend to make more ornate surfaces? Are men more concerned with the structure of the piece rather than its surface? bell hook states in Feminism is for Everybody that “Before women’s liberation, all females young and old were socialized by sexist thinking to believe that our value rested solely on appearance…” (hooks, 2000, p. 6). I question whether society’s emphasis on external beauty has affected the way artists surface ceramics. Is the goal of most artists to make their work beautiful? Would the value of a ceramic work that is deemed unbeautiful be less valuable?
To study the differences in the ceramics made by men and women, I plan to interview the students in my class (the 232 students as well as the 331 students). I might be able to find some grad students to interview as well. I will look at their work for similarities based on their sex. I will ask them why they make their work a certain way. It would also be interesting to show males and females the same picture of a ceramic artwork and ask them to describe it as well as what they like about it. I will note whether they focus more on the surface or the structure of the piece and what words they use to describe it.

Resources:
bell hooks. (2000). Feminism is for everyone. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating gender diversity: A critical
approach. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.

(2011, December 5). Revolutions of the Wheel- The Tradition of No Tradition [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMaftTN7B0Q