Hiding in plain sight

Massive Gender Displays and the Ambivalent Reproduction of Gender Status

Bibliographic Data

ID7154455
AuthorsȘtefania Matei (0000-0001-8086-7293, University of Bucharest, corresponding author), Cosima Rughiniş (0000-0003-2436-678X, University of Bucharest)
Year2025
Volume32
Issue3
Pages342-365
Publication date2025-03-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGender Place & Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0966-369X • E-ISSN: 1360-0524
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0966369x.2024.2312357
OpenAlexW4391722913
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited52

This paper uses the method of concerned photography to examine the reproduction and disruption of gender status through urbanscapes comprising statues, outdoor advertisements, mural artworks, and other materialized gender displays in public spaces. We propose the sensitizing concept of 'massive gender displays' to analyse our corpus of photographs from cities in European countries and in the USA. Massive gender displays are subtypes of 'gender displays' understood, in a Goffmanian sense, as communicative acts that perform and reconstruct the social structure of gender. Relative to overall representations of gender in public settings, massive gender displays are remarkable either through size, as very large objects ('colossal displays'), or through repetition, as collections of representations that are scattered in space ('distributed displays') or concentrated and visible at-a-glance ('choral displays'). As a rule, massiveness has an empowering effect in the public display of masculine characters; yet it is often a disempowering feature in the portrayal of women, accentuating absence, marginality, devaluation, exceptionality, and vulnerability. Still, massive displays may disrupt gender status hierarchies, in exceptional cases. Therefore, we invite all people who experience city life, be it as citizens, residents, researchers, students, designers, policy makers, activists, workers, tourists, or otherwise, to pay attention to displays' massiveness as a feature that ambivalently reproduces and disrupts gender status and inequalities of power, and thus partakes in the construction of gender as a social institution

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Institution · Political science · Power (physics · Reproduction · Social science · Social space · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Psychology · Public Spaces through Art · Social Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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