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Gender, Race and the Material Culture
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Gender, Race and the Material Culture

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Cultural Studies & Critical Theory in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 30732

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Maureen Daly Goggin

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English, Arizona State University, PO Box 871401, Tempe, AZ, USA
Interests: history of rhetoric; feminism; visual rhetoric; and material culture

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Relationships between objects and gender are formed and take place in ways that are so accepted as “normal” as to become “invisible.” Thus we sometimes fail to appreciate the effects that particular notions of femininity and masculinity have on the conception, design, advertising, purchase, giving and uses of objects, as well as on their critical and popular reception.

--Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield [1]

An allied tradition of socialist analysis . . . has habitually contrasted the cultures of production and consumption:  the former characterized as collective, male, creative and useful, the later individualistic, female, parasitic and pointless.

--Amanda Vickery [2]

Over the past two decades, researchers in rhetoric, literary studies, history, and cultural studies—fields that have traditionally focused almost exclusively on scripted or written texts—have turned increasingly to material culture to explore the significance of material artifacts and material strategies for ways of understanding history, culture, race, gender, sexuality, ableness, politics, economics, and literacy. Material culture encompasses a wide range of objects, from pottery shards to smart phones, that humans have a hand in making. Those who study material culture are interested in exploring how objects are designed, created, circulated, consumed, collected and/or repurposed. Objects, of course, are polysemic and multifunctional and can never be reduced to just one category, but each facet offers a starting point for understanding the role of everyday objects and their role in constituting and reflecting, as expressed by Kirkham and Attfield in the epigraph note, gender to which we must also add race. Indeed, since Thornstein Veblen, production and consumption have been gendered [3]: as Amanda Vickery above argues, men with production and women with consumption. However, recently this problematic binary has been dispelled even though it stubbornly remains. This Special Issue will focus on material objects and their role in constructing/reflecting gender and race.

Take, for instance, the artificial, social hierarchical division between art and craft. Beginning in the eighteenth century and solidified through the nineteenth, art became gendered as divisions between supposed high and low arts were drawn, a distinction between male and female practices was made, and a separation of art and craft was concreted. Men were allotted the top position of high art and women the lower as craft. Yet, the distinction in practice makes little sense. As the artist Kate Themel argues, “Art is not a separate ‘world’ from Craft. These two things are not entities themselves but rather they are specific aspects of all creative work.” [4]  The problematic division is now being challenged through an understanding that artists work along a continuum not of type but of quality and ability to produce good things regardless of the medium, whether in paint, sculpture, textile, wood, or any other medium.

Some questions to consider:

  • What is the relationship between art/craft and race and/or gender?
  • How are things raced and/or gendered?
  • In what aspects of the life cycle of an object does race and gender figure?
  • How do race and gender operate differently across the life cycle of an object, from design, to production, to commodification, to using, to collecting, to repurposing?
  • Why are objects raced and/or gendered?
  • Who wins, who loses by the gendering and racing of things and their processes?
  • What is the relationship of identity to everyday things?
  • How do objects make manifest life cycles from birth to death?

This Special Issue is not limited by these questions; they are meant merely to generate thinking about the issues of material things, gender, and race. We welcome proposals that tackle questions of gender, race, and material culture in both fiction and nonfiction spaces around the globe.

Abstracts of 150–200 words, along with 150–200-word bios, should be submitted by 1 June 2020. Completed articles of 5000–8000 words should be submitted by 31 December 2020. If you have interest to contribute, please directly contact <>.

[1] Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield, Introduction to The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 1.

[2]Amanda Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751-81.” Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (Routledge, 1993, 274-301), 274.

[3] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899. (Viking Press, 1967).

[4] Kate Themel, “ART & CRAFT Cannot Be Separated,” Ragged Cloth Café, Serving Art and Textiles (March 11, 2008). Accessed 6 September 2013. http://raggedclothcafe.com/2008/03/11/counterpoint-art-craft-cannot-be-separated/ Accessed 6 September 2013.

Prof. Maureen Daly Goggin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • material culture
  • material artifacts
  • material strategies
  • social hierarchical division
  • art
  • race
  • gender

Published Papers (7 papers)

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18 pages, 4114 KiB  
Article
From Oroonoko Tobacco to Blackamoor Snuffboxes: Race, Gender and the Consumption of Snuff in Eighteenth-Century Britain
by Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 92; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10030092 - 22 Jul 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4642
Abstract
This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or [...] Read more.
This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or representing enslaved Africans working on plantations articulated notions of race and coloniality. I then show that snuffboxes can be seen as material counterparts in the dissemination of racist ideology in the eighteenth century. The gender-defining practice of taking snuff is studied in relation to colonial politics using a selection of texts and a material corpus of rare extant “Blackamoor” snuffboxes (depicting the black body and face) that have not yet received scholarly attention. I argue that through female agency, the use of Blackamoor snuffboxes normalised slavery by integrating it in the cultural rituals of British sociability through a process of material aestheticisation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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18 pages, 3155 KiB  
Article
“Is Cleopatra Black?”: Examining Whiteness and the American New Woman
by Angelica J. Maier
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 68; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10020068 - 09 Apr 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4814
Abstract
In the 1920s and 1930s, conceptions of the “New Woman” and Egyptomania shaped American culture. Employing methods of critical race art history and material culture studies, I focus on a 1925 Callot Soeurs dress and silk pajamas (c. 1920–1929), taking into consideration both [...] Read more.
In the 1920s and 1930s, conceptions of the “New Woman” and Egyptomania shaped American culture. Employing methods of critical race art history and material culture studies, I focus on a 1925 Callot Soeurs dress and silk pajamas (c. 1920–1929), taking into consideration both the semiotic qualities of Egyptian motifs as they circulated in early twentieth century American visual culture as well as the sensuous material aspects of the garments. Through primary sources like cosmetic advertisements, fashion magazines, and costume manuals, I contextualize the figure of Cleopatra as a symbol of white beauty and power in this period. Weighing both visual and material aspects, I argue that the repeated act of wearing these garments by white-presenting women placed them in a performative valence, where the wearer ironically became a white woman through her appropriation of Cleopatra and Egyptian motifs. Further, these motifs conferred modernity, cosmopolitanism, class status and an acceptable sexuality upon the wearer. As such, I address how material objects shape subjectivity, simultaneously reflecting and producing racialized and gendered discourses. By focusing on white womanhood, I draw upon critical studies of whiteness in order to disrupt its invisible normative status. This essay traces its operational logic and aids in dismantling the pervasive power of white supremacy that continues to circulate today. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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17 pages, 4029 KiB  
Article
Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument
by Cynthia Prescott, Nathan Rees and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 41; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10010041 - 02 Mar 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 4962
Abstract
This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. [...] Read more.
This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. Each was part of a similar project of cultural recuperation in the 1930s−1940s that chose as their object of commemoration the overland migration in covered wagons of a group of white settlers that felt oppressed by other white settlers, and therefore sought a new homeland. In a precarious cultural moment, descendants of these two white settler societies—the Dutch Voortrekkers of South Africa and Euro-American Mormons (Latter-day Saints or LDS) of Utah—undertook massive commemoration projects to memorialize their ancestors’ 1830s−1840s migrations into the interior, holding Afrikaners and Mormons up as the most worthy settler groups among each nation’s white population. This essay will argue that a close reading of these monuments reveals how each white settler group employed gendered depictions that were inflected by class and race in their claims to be the true heart of their respective settler societies, despite perceiving themselves as oppressed minorities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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18 pages, 2865 KiB  
Article
Café Culture as Decolonial Feminist Praxis: Scherezade García’s Blame … Coffee
by Lesley A. Wolff
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 35; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10010035 - 25 Feb 2021
Viewed by 3272
Abstract
This article provides a decolonial feminist analysis of Latinx artist Scherezade García’s most recent portable mural, Blame it on the bean: the power of Coffee (2019), created for and installed in the café and library of The People’s Forum, a “movement incubator for [...] Read more.
This article provides a decolonial feminist analysis of Latinx artist Scherezade García’s most recent portable mural, Blame it on the bean: the power of Coffee (2019), created for and installed in the café and library of The People’s Forum, a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities” and “collective action” in the heart of Manhattan. This artwork depicts three allegorical women convening over cups of coffee, one of which has precariously overflowed onto a miniaturized portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose undoing was said to have been facilitated by his excessive indulgence in coffee and other commodities of empire. Historically, coffee production was bound to imperial plantocracies, enslavement, and patriarchal networks; today, the industry remains a continued site of oppression and erasure for female workers around the globe. By placing this mural in conversation with the portable material economies of the Caribbean, the gendered history of coffee production and consumption, and the history of female representation in art, this article argues that the mural dismantles heteropatriarchal conventions precisely by invoking café culture—the very mode of social performance that García’s work critiques. In so doing, García subverts the problematically gendered and racialized heritage of coffee with a matriarchal Afrolatinidad that, in the artist’s words, “colonizes the colonizer.” Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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16 pages, 2606 KiB  
Article
Reframing Entrepreneurship via Identity, Techné, and Material Culture
by Victoria E. Ruiz
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 31; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10010031 - 18 Feb 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2360
Abstract
Entrepreneurship is typically understood as capitalist, but new models are emerging; these new models, like Welter et al.’s “everyday-entrepreneur,” can be understood in the tradition of techné, in which entrepreneurship is an embodied practice balancing the sociality of identity politics and the materiality [...] Read more.
Entrepreneurship is typically understood as capitalist, but new models are emerging; these new models, like Welter et al.’s “everyday-entrepreneur,” can be understood in the tradition of techné, in which entrepreneurship is an embodied practice balancing the sociality of identity politics and the materiality of objects and infrastructures. With no English equivalent, techné is typically understood as either art, skill or craft, but none of the placeholders provide a suitable encapsulation of the term itself (Pender). Examining identity against the backdrop of entrepreneurship illuminates the rhetorical ways entrepreneurs cultivate and innovate the processes of making, especially in terms of the material cultures that this process springs from and operates within. Intersectional issues related to entrepreneurial identity present opportunities for diversification and growth in the existing scholarship. A reframing of entrepreneurial identity and continued development of Welter et al.’s everyday-entrepreneurship is argued for, showing how social biases render gender and objects invisible. The article uses data from an on-going study to demonstrate how reframing entrepreneurial identity uncovers the ways in which systemic biases are embedded in the relationship between identity and everyday things. The case study delves into connections between identity, technology, and innovation illustrating how entrepreneurial identity can be seen as a kind of techné, which helps readers better understand identity in relation to material objects and culture—including the biases at work there. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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19 pages, 1505 KiB  
Article
Curating Identities in the “Other” Office: My “Colored Museum”
by Neal A. Lester
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 19; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10010019 - 23 Jan 2021
Viewed by 5939
Abstract
In 1989, I began collecting and populating my university campus office with items reflecting what I knew—from my research, teaching, and lived experience as a Black American—was racist Americana. These items have supplemented my teaching of African American literature and culture for over [...] Read more.
In 1989, I began collecting and populating my university campus office with items reflecting what I knew—from my research, teaching, and lived experience as a Black American—was racist Americana. These items have supplemented my teaching of African American literature and culture for over thirty years, invigorating discussions and breathing life into the texts we study. My collection challenges one of the most esteemed aspects of our profession—alphabet literacy through reading, writing, and books. Embodying past and present, these artifacts are as powerful as books. As my personal traveling library, they go into human spaces in ways books cannot, allowing and inviting viewers’ sensory experiences. Every piece is a story and elicits a range of personal stories, documenting intersectional perspectives on race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion, and body size. An exercise in cultural literacy, this collection disrupts mythologies created to restrict and delegitimize the lives of Black people. Challenging my university campus office visitors to confront the reality of me—a Black male faculty member at a predominantly white institution—my collection invites open conversation about race on my terms. My “colored museum” invites all who experience it to reflect on how we experience community building and new meaning making. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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9 pages, 239 KiB  
Essay
A Body of Authority: Reorienting Gender and Power in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations
by Phillip Goodwin
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 30; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10010030 - 12 Feb 2021
Viewed by 3038
Abstract
The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the [...] Read more.
The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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