Higher Rewards

As part of my visual research on gender issues in higher education, I stepped into an awards store, and the distinctly male aesthetic of the trophy-lined walls struck me—strong geometric angles, controlled lines, staid symmetry, verticality/phallic forms, gold and other metals, dark hardwoods. I mentioned this phenomenon to the store employee. She said, “Oh wait a minute. We have a trophy for a woman.” She came back with a “Business Woman of the Year Award,” which looked just like all the others, except it had a little, shiny red gem at the top. Ugh. The recipients of all the other trophies were assumed to be male.

To explore the academy’s gendered career model/reward system and connect it to my research on feminist art, I arranged several items on the wall to symbolize a version of life in higher education’s competitive system (Figure 1). I cut, glued, and ironed a gray man’s dress shirt into a large “banner” and two sleeve “pennants,” and hung them on a curtain rod. Following the precedent set by many feminist artists, I used ordinary materials and processes common to the domestic life, like ironing and mending a man’s shirt and the use of a curtain rod, which is well known to housewives and women decorators. I also altered and framed three miniature vellum diplomas (the quintessential mark of achievement in education), layered them over packed pages from a daily planner, and hung them from the curtain rod. I brought this monochromatic story to a quiet conclusion in the subtly printed text over the shirt’s pen pocket—“I forgot how to color.”

With this assemblage, I established the context for the other pieces in the “exhibit,” which I displayed for one class period for a very limited audience—my five female classmates and professor. I used my other art works to offer an alternative to masculine conventional trophies, and more importantly, to propose new purposes for giving awards. The five smaller exhibit pieces are humorous, sparkling, touchable, “feminine” rewards, and I made them as gifts for each of my classmates and professor who shared the Sex and Gender in Curriculum and Instruction graduate course with me. Below, I describe two examples.

During a lecture, our professor made the off-the-cuff comment: “No one ever gets a medal for saying, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’” So, I honored her with a medal for the day she actually performs this act of self-care (Figure 2). I made her pillow-like award from the lacey edges of a linen pillowcase and designed it to be fashionably draped around her neck or hung on the wall with an accompanying blue scarf. It functions as visual encouragement to maintain a work-life balance, a metaphorical place for her to rest after the semester’s exhaustion, and as a reminder that we need veteran professors like her to create healthy boundaries and sustainable work environments for themselves and the new faculty members that they mentor.

My classmate Robin expressed deep compassion when her eyes filled with tears while discussing an article about a female scientist facing institutional sexism. I believed Robin would fight hard for equal rights, so for her, I designed my own version of the Purple Heart, the ultimate sign of bravery in battle (Figure 3). To create this piece, I re-worked a musical jewelry box into an aesthetic object, displaying a rosy human heart on the outside and sculpted multi-colored parts for the inside, including a small intestine rippling into the letters of Robin’s name (Figure 4).

I know critical analysis of gender in higher education was the main point of the course, and indeed critique is essential for identifying and analyzing institutional problems, but in most of my other critical theory classes, we didn’t take the next step of imagining or creating new practices to replace the old. Making art gifts instead...