Gender and Difference in the Arts Therapies

Inscribed on the Body

Susan Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138477186
• eBook ISBN: 9781351105347
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology

Gender and Difference in the Arts Therapies: Inscribed on the Body offers worldwide perspectives on gender in arts therapies practice and provides understandings of gender and arts therapies in a variety of global contexts. Bringing together leading researchers and lesser-known voices, it contains an eclectic mix of viewpoints, and includes detailed case studies of arts therapies practice in an array of social settings and with different populations.

In addition to themes of gender identification, body politics and gender fluidity, this title discusses gender and arts therapies across the life-course, encompassing in its scope, art, music, dance and dramatic play therapy.

Gender and Difference in the Arts Therapies demonstrates clinical applications of the arts therapies in relation to gender, along with ideas about best practice. It will be of great interest to academics and practitioners in the field of arts therapies globally.

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Introduction

Inscribed on the body: gender and difference in the arts therapies

Susan Hogan

Bodies and difference

In a bizarre TV programme, Naked Attraction, ‘blind-dating’ is done incrementally by revealing a row of nude bodies bit by bit: first the legs and genitals are seen of a row of contestants; then the competitors are asked to turn so the buttocks can be appreciated. Following that, the person doing the choosing eliminates one person, based on his or her appreciation of the physiques on offer. The bodies are objectified and the chooser may make personal remarks about the bodies on view. Next the torsos are revealed and a further contestant is eliminated. Next the screen is further raised so the whole body including the face is seen. In this final round, the two remaining contestants on display are invited to say something they like and dislike about their own bodies, so that their voice can be heard. They get to speak briefly, as instructed. Then a person (or I should say body) is chosen for the date.

A bisexual woman has both men and women in her purview and rejects a young black man because his penis is too big. ‘I’m sorry man, it’s just too intimidating’ she says as he walks out, but then he talks to the camera off-stage, incredulous and sounding slightly hurt that he has been rejected because of the size of his tool:

My penis was too big for her? If she got to know me she’d know I’m the kindest and most gentle-ist person there is, so that wouldn’t really be much of an issue… .

We are all judged by the appearance of our bodies. A penis can be an object of intimidation, an instrument of rape, of brutalising sex, or a gentle plaything in the expression of mutual tenderness. A kind gentle man couldn’t see his largeness as a problem, because he would be kindly and gentle.

Our bodies are all signifiers of meanings beyond our control. Our bodies are imbued with the values of our particular culture and historical moment. The body is not a ‘natural thing’ beyond culture. It is helpful to think of bodies as ‘symbols’ – ‘the medium through which social relations are constructed’ (Shilling 2016, p. 10). The body as a symbol ‘helps people to think, classify, and even engage in discriminatory practices based on physical markers… .’ (Shilling 2016, p. 7). These meanings are constantly contested. They are in a state of flux, so the meanings ascribed to the body are unstable and we are subject to multiple and conflicting messages about our bodies and what gender means. This instability, I’ll call it ‘field instability’ is affecting.¹ These conflicting messages are potentially destabilising and can lead to mental distress (Hogan 2016b).

Women and men have different bodies and so there is a cultural presumption of difference. However, there is significant variation between women, and between men, regarding attributes associated with femininity and masculinity – more variation in fact than between women and men overall (Kimmel 2011, p. 14).² Stereotypes often ignore the similarities and emphasise differences between male and female bodies, and supposed attributes (Richardson 2013). Shilling 2016 highlights the study of hormones (endocrinology) as providing an account of bodies that challenges assumptions of biological opposition, ‘Endocrinologists suggested that the chemicals responsible for sex differences meant that there was no such thing as the male or the female body: it was more accurate to speak of a continuum of sexed bodies’ (p. 35). So men and women are not from Mars and Venus respectively… .³ R. W. Connell notes, of sex differences between men and women, that,

Sex differences, on almost every psychological trait measured, are either non-existent or fairly small. Certainly they are smaller than the differences in social situations that are commonly justified by the belief in psychological difference – such as unequal incomes, unequal responsibilities for child care and drastic differences in access to social power.

(Connell 1995, p. 21)

Nonetheless, gender appears important; there is a cultural insistence on knowing sex. Many who have held a new-born infant in a public place will know that, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’ is a popular conversational gambit. Knowing the sex determines the gender rules: in this case what adjectives are appropriate to use to describe the baby’s behaviour… . Gender ambiguity is culturally disconcerting (probably because so many cultural ‘rules’ rely on gender categorisation). Braithwaite and Orr suggest that ‘gender nonconformity is often viewed as threatening to social institutions’ (2017, p. 181).

So there are tensions at play here. Gender differences between men and women appear to be fewer and less pronounced than some might suppose when researched, but notions about gender lead to cultural practices, which also create difference. Cultural practices do shape our physical and neurological make-up (Shilling 2016, p. 32). Indeed, to speak of a male or female sex is reductive, as it compresses an enormous variety of different cultural ideals into one entity. Fine (2010, p. 3) makes this point,

Every person is unique, multifaceted, sometimes even contradictory individual, and with an astonishing range of personality traits within each sex, and across contexts, social class, age, experience, educational level, sexuality and ethnicity, it would be pointless and meaningless to attempt to pigeonhole such rich complexity and variability into two crude stereotypes… .

An important concept to introduce here is that our experiences are also constituted by many other factors, which intersect with our having an ostensibly male or female body, such as colour, age, sexual orientation, and so forth. Thinking about intersectional aspects also allows a critical questioning of medical diagnostic classificatory tools used by mainstream psychiatry, for example, that, ‘capitalist, white, hetero-patriarchal norms dictate the ways in which people are diagnosed, and therefore treated’ (and some of these classificatory norms have an underpinning in theories which are fundamentally sexist and racist, Hogan 1997). ‘This also means access [to treatment] differs depending on these intersecting aspects of identity’ (Jensen 2015, np), as do diagnostic and treatment predilections (Hogan 1997).

Our identities are created by our cultural context, intersecting with many other elements. However, to say there may be different elements, such as ethnicity, which intersect with one’s body is potentially problematic, as such a formulation might imply a separation of elements; it is more helpful to see intersectional elements as unified aspects of selfhood, which are more or less operational depending on context. Scholars have highlighted simultaneous and multiple forms of oppression. Brah warns that ‘structures of class, racism, gender and sexuality cannot be treated as “independent variables” because the oppression of each is described in the other – is constituted by and is constitutive of the other’ (1996, p. 12). O’Reilly (2017) argues that motherhood should also be acknowledged in intersectional discourse as an important and often overlooked subject position.

Gendered subjects (us) are constituted through social relations. One might then go a step further and challenge the notion of us as having a fixed steady identity, though we seemingly have this – a ‘core’ sense of self, but close analysis reveals that actually we are all distinctive in different situations; we all have different repertoires of being. Context makes us different people. If I am engaging with my dog, I am likely to feel very different things compared to when I am engaging with my vice-chancellor, or a best friend. Different contexts bring out different potentialities and in so doing we are changed, often imperceptibly, moment by moment. Fine (2010, p. 7) puts it like this, ‘The active self is a dynamic chameleon from moment to moment in response to its social environment’. Ethnographers have articulated a sense of a self in process. Rather than a fixed self that is determined by our biology coupled with early formative childhood experiences (as some psychologists would have it) a more fluid approach to identity is adopted. We are formed and reformed, made and making simultaneously through our interactions with others.⁴ However, we should not think of this as a passive process, as we enact or perform ‘gender’ identity more or less self-consciously within certain discursive and conceptual limits (Butler 1993). The ‘self’ is a work in progress, not something fixed. Moreover, we should not assume an essential sameness of human subjectivity across cultures, or even within subject positions. Furthermore, genetic theories are also potentially very reductive when deterministically applied to ideas about identity,

… gendered identities of masculinity and femininity cannot be reduced to any ‘logic’ of genetic influence. The significance of genes and groups of genes, indeed, is codetermined by interactions within the human organism as well as by interactions that people have with the social and material environment in which they live.

(Shilling 2016, p. 36)

Inequality

Ideology is ideas and concepts about men and women, masculinity and femininity, appropriate roles, capacities or innate ability, ethnic characteristics, and sexuality, which are culturally and historically specific and subject to change. Ideological ideas are located in a particular moment in time, within a particular set of social practices. The body is not a tabula rasa (a clean slate) as, even at birth, it is subject to notions about masculinity and femininity and their relative value within particular cultures, because of ideas about the value of roles, dowries, primogeniture, or other inheritance rules. A female baby may be bottle-fed and a male child breast-fed, because he is considered more valuable. In many cultures women join their in-law’s families upon marriage and may be in some senses ‘lost’ to their original family. Large dowries can set up resentments, with negative repercussions for women, their husbands potentially aggrieved about acquired debts. A particularly detrimental cultural practice is called Baad, an Afghan custom of giving a girl or women away to a wronged family for the resolution of conflicts involving a murder or a serious affront to honour. Women given in marriage in this way are often subjected to ongoing maltreatment: treated like servants, housed in barns with the animals and beaten as a form of revenge against her family (Gagnon 2012). In cultures where extended families co-operate together the son, who stays with his parents, possibly accumulating a wife’s bride’s price or dowry along the way, is considered more valuable. In some cultures women have very circumscribed roles, or are kept in purdah (a practice of screening women from the sight of men or strangers), and therefore are unable to contribute directly to certain sorts of family business, or enter into a wide variety of roles that require independence of movement. In many contexts freedom of movement for women is simply unthinkable, ‘In Lagos, I cannot go alone into many reputable clubs and bars. They just don’t let you in if you are a woman alone. You must be accompanied by a man’, notes Nigerian writer Chimamand Ngozi Adichie (2014, p. 20). Cultural norms vary tremendously, but the economist Amarta Sen suggests that millions of women have deaths ‘directly attributable to gender inequality in healthcare’ (2001, pp. 35–40). He calculates that there are 100 million ‘missing women’ globally.⁵ Women receive less good health care or nutrition in many parts of the world than their male counterparts. ‘As a result of this gender bias’ explains Sen, ‘the mortality rates of females often exceed those of males in these countries. The concept of the “missing women” was devised to give some idea of the enormity of the phenomenon’ (2001, p. 470).

Mortality inequality had been documented in Asia and North Africa, including China (Sen 2001, p. 466). Female foeticide, the selective abortion of female foetuses, is prevalent in China, East and South Asia, South Korea, and India. Sen calls this ‘high-tech sexism’ (p. 467) as it relies on foetal scanning technologies. Fewer girls than males get educational opportunities globally and lower levels of education are in turn linked to higher rates of reproduction with attendant health risks and health inequalities for women; educated women are less likely to actually die in childbirth (UNESCO Report 2013). Lower rates of childbirth are associated with lower rates of maternal mortality, reduction of poverty, empowerment of women, and environmental sustainability (World Health Organisation, Cleland et al. 2006). Sexual violence and sexual slavery is still rife globally, with rape of women without nationality documentation and migrating women at border controls being on-going, including at the USA border (Human Rights Watch Reports 2017). There is also huge inequality in property ownership globally between men and women (Sen 2001, p. 468). To conclude,

Globally, many women do not have equal access to resources, and in many cultures have little autonomy outside male control, or are regarded as of lesser value than males, or face male resistance to independent action. Structural inequality in so-called developed countries is still rife, and women are more likely than men to suffer from poverty in later life, lack of opportunity and unequal access to public resources as they age.

(Hogan & Warren 2013, p. 6)

Same-sex relations are still illegal in many parts of the world and carry heavy penalties. Even in countries where gay marriage is legal, discrimination continues. Half a century after homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, following the Sexual Offences Act (1967), a YouGov poll of 1,609 adults undertaken in 2017 found that high levels of prejudice still remain. Age appeared to be a factor in the responses, as over three in four (78 per cent) of people aged 18–24 believing that gay sex is natural. However, many of the over 60s held negative views. Commenting on the survey, Pink News Chief Executive Benjamin Cohen said: ‘It is depressing that 50 years on from the Sexual Offences Act that so many people still think that gay sex is unnatural and that a third oppose gay couples having children’ (Nissim 2017).

Men and women who are ‘straight’ but do not c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the editor
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: inscribed on the body: gender and difference in the arts therapies
• 2 Feminism as practice: crafting and the politics of art therapy
• 3 Under the skin: barriers and opportunities for dance movement therapy and art psychotherapy with LGBT+ clients
• 4 Breaking and entering: wounded masculinity and sexual offending
• 5 Body politics and performance of gender in music therapy
• 6 Mask and gender: from concealment to revelation, from pain to relief. Arts therapies with masks. A journey through art therapy
• 7 Mediating the cultural boundaries: the rise of Lion Rock Spirit in Hong Kong women
• 8 Gender differences expressed in costuming and dramatic play: Warrior Cat boy
• 9 On being a male dramatherapist
• 10 The perilous house
• 11 Gender fluidity through Dance Movement Therapy
• 12 Gender research in Dance Movement Therapy
• 13 Art therapy and motherhood as a rite of passage
• 14 Gender identity, sexual identity and sexual orientation in a drama-therapeutic context: an attachment perspective
• 15 Dismantling the gender binary in elder care: creativity instead of craft
• 16 Beyond masculine and feminine: responding to real expressions of gender identity and the effect on our own gender identity in psychotherapy practice
• 17 Beyond the binaries: negotiating gender and sex in music therapy
• Index