Redesigning Difference: Paradox, Displacement and Gender Renewal in Designer Subjectivities

• In Event: 512 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Gendered Interactions and Gendered Spaces

Abstract

This paper brings theories from gender scholarship to the domain of creative production, asking how creative workers make sense of their work and their identities as workers. In focusing on product design studios in the US, the data offer insight into symbolic treatments of gender among creative workers in a male-dominated part of the “creative class.” By examining the dynamic of gendered meanings in the subjectivities of designers, the paper applies and extends existing theories of postfeminism. This paper is an empirical study based on 40 interviews of 20 men and 20 women graphic, new media and industrial designers. Thirty-one are permanently employed in 20 firms and 9 are self-employed.
The analysis identifies four deployments of gender in designers’ talk. These “treatments” of gender are potentially overlapping but they present a central paradox: designers deny gender is professionally influential but emphasize it as an advantage for the central task of empathizing with consumers. The analysis interprets this paradox as an instantiation of postfeminist ideology, which has its own resonant paradox in its treatment of feminism. Analyzing the dynamic of gendering among designers, the paper shows how these treatments of gender displace the locus of gender off the designers and onto the consumer. The result is a reproduction of gender difference by obscured symbolic means, through what I call “feminine encumbrance.”

Author

• Shelly Ronen, New York University