The Gender of Things II - Public Response in Trondheim
1) Background and Aims of the Exhibit
As of January 1 1999, the Centre for Women's Studies and the Centre for Technology and Society at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology were made permanent by being "normalized" in the departmental structure of the university. In fact, they were united into a single new department, the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture2.
One of the events we organized in preparation for this "shotgun wedding," as it were, was a 1-day workshop. We started off in single-center groups creating and performing sketches lampooning the other center, then moved on to more serious mixed-group discussions on the future form and activities of the department-to-be. One idea for an activity that might help unify the department, was proposed by Ame. I had recently visited Amsterdam and had seen there the second mounting of an exhibit first produced by a group at the University of Twente. The exhibit was called "Dingen (h/v)" [which translates to "Things (m/f)," or "The Gender of Things"] (Oudshoorn 1998). I proposed that the new department mount a similar exhibit in Trondheim to mark the two centers' shared interest in the intercept between gender and technology as cultural artifacts.
For a number of reasons, this idea took hold. First of all, it sounded fun. Secondly, by proposing it, I had ostensibly volunteered to do much of the work. And by supporting the proposal, the other members of the group where the idea was brought up - Merete Lie, Helen Jøsok Gansmo, and Trond Arne Undheim - had ostensibly agreed to share that burden. But beyond these "less serious" reasons, there were also good academic arguments for attempting new ways to teach that gender and technology are intertwined, and for the new department to make that attempt.
This was already an area of collaboration between the two centers. Several years earlier, the Centre for Women's Studies had taken the initiative to create a course on gender and technology at the college of engineering. For the first year it was offered that center had not yet filled the position in Gender, Science and Technology which was to cover that course and other initiatives in the field. Therefore, for the first year, the course was taught as a "barn raising" or "quilting bee," a team effort by members of both centers. (Norwegian provides a gender neutral term for this type of community effort - dugnad.)
The two centers had also collaborated in ensuring that gender was prominent as a theme in the lectures on technology and science in the university's new required introductory course - "Modul 2". In a lecture at a university workshop on the inclusion of gender in this course, I offered the following reasons for teaching gender and technology/gender and science:
2) Modifications to the Dutch Model
We began by seeking the permission of the Dutch exhibit group to copy and adapt their concept. This they graciously granted. Nelly Oudshoorn even sent us a copy of her paper (Oudshoorn 1998) from which we could glean exhibit descriptions and texts.
We next decided on what artifacts to feature. Our criteria were that these be obtainable, displayable, illustrate different theoretical and empirical points, that some artifacts be ones on which members of the two centres had done research, and that the objects (quite simply) catch our own imaginations. In the end, we chose the following objects: perfume bottles, car advertisements, computer games, computers, electrical appliances (drill, mixer, stereo, microwave, shavers), and bicycles.
Where our artifact choices echoed those of the Dutch exhibit, we then translated the corresponding exhibit texts as quoted in Oudshoorn's paper. However, when we next held an exhibit group meeting to discuss the texts, we quickly decided to revise them. We decided we needed to be less didactic, more open for viewers' own opinions, as we thought this would function better for an academic audience.
We must admit that this became quite a struggle! It was not at all easy not to impose our own views, not even to the point of asking leading questions! And even as we re-translated the texts back to English for this lecture we struggled over them again - on the one hand not yet convinced that we had fulfilled our own non-didactic goals for them, and on the other hand not yet completely happy at refraining from didactics. We also worked very hard at keeping the texts short.
For the perfume display, we had initially hoped to show bottles for some of the new "unisex" perfumes. It had struck us that the bottles for CK One and Be were not so much unisex as blandly masculine in form. We hypothesized for a while that perhaps this would be true of other unisex artifacts as well. Due to the hierarchical ranking of genders, might it be easier to sell artifacts marked with traditionally male (and therefore higher status) forms to women than sell female-marked (lower status) artifacts to men? However, we never did get hold of any unisex perfume bottles. Furthermore, as we gathered bottles for women's perfumes and men's after-shaves, we found that the forms did not always echo male-female clichés. For instance, while many after-shave bottles were plain and boxy, the Gaultier "sailor" torso has rounded hips, a slim waist, and pectoral muscles so pronounced they could be mistaken for breasts3. And the women's perfume bottles too were very varied in form - some elongated, some frilly, some squared, some rounded. The bottles themselves brought us to ask new questions about their forms, such as whether the forms reflected differences in scent or were meant to align with users' perceptions of their own bodies. We finally settled on a display case sign (see appendix for complete display texts) inviting viewers to "find [their] own style, if it's there."
The bicycles further disproved our early hypothesis about unisex artifacts tending towards the masculine. We managed to acquire three unisex bike models - a recumbent bike (which did not echo either the men's or women's traditional bike frame form), a mountain bike with a Y-shaped frame, and a Trondheim city-bike. This last is a model developed for lending out free to shoppers. It has a dropped crossbar to allow for skirts and a shopping basket for carrying purchases. Thus it is quite clearly based on the women's bike frame tradition. However - perhaps due to its odd-sized wheels, heavy frame, and snazzy advertising paint job - the city-bike is quite popular with young boys. So again, we opened up the display sign text to invite viewers to reflect on their own preferences.
With the electrical appliances, we stayed fairly close to the original texts, for the most part merely changing statements about the gendered meanings of form into questions. We compared a power drill to an electric hand mixer. The two are similar in form and function, but differ in certain details. We asked viewers to consider how they would react to a white or pastel drill, a military green and alarm red mixer. We also asked them what message they "read" out of the accessible screws for opening the drill, whereas the mixer was tightly closed with no way to access its inner machinery. We also compared a microwave oven to a stereo tuner, asking viewers to consider the control panel buttons. Why are the microwave buttons marked with icons (a dripping snowflake, a steaming cup) whereas the stereo buttons are marked with technical terms and abbreviations? What does this say about the presumed technical competence of the anticipated user? With the shavers, we were again somewhat taken aback by the shapes we found. The Dutch exhibit had used shavers to make the point about accessible screws. They had also asked why men's shavers were rechargeable whereas lady-shavers required a docking station to recharge and were therefore less transportable. And they had pointed out differences in form and color. We found that new men's shavers now came in rounded forms and bright colors. We asked viewers to consider whether men's and women's shavers were becoming more similar or were still different. If becoming similar, were they becoming more feminine or more masculine?
We also used the iMac computer to ask a similar question. The iMac has been marketed particularly, though not exclusively, towards women. We asked if viewers found it more feminine than other computers, and if so how. Did the rounded form and bright colors make it more feminine? Or was its purportedly user-friendly interface more important?
For our car ad display, we gathered a large collection of ads from newspapers and finally selected two pairs. The one pair actually features the same model car. One ad in the series targets male potential buyers, another females. The male ad emphasizes driving pleasure. The car is shown in motion, the driver (in a photographic insert at one corner of the ad) grinning. The car has been photographed from an angle that makes the hood appear long and sleek, like a sports car. In the female ad, the car, parked at a curb, has been photographed from high above at an angle that emphasizes its compactness. The woman in the corner insert is shown standing, arms crossed in front of her, gazing at . . . presumably the car. Our accompanying text points out how ads can highlight different values in a product. "Does a car have gender?" we ask. Can the same car have multiple genders? Which values are highlighted for women and men respectively? And which, we asked, appeal most to you, the viewer?
The other pair of ads each shows a roomy, boxy car in a wilderness landscape. One bears a text reading "This is the home of Buffalo Bill, John Wayne . . . and Chevrolet Blazer." The other, for a Volvo station-wagon, reads "Never too much to haul. Never more than one in the car. Never impatient children. Never a hole in the road. . . . Not likely." Again we asked viewers to reflect on whether the intended audiences for these ads were men or women, and also to consider which ad appealed most to them personally.
For the computer games display we managed to find one game specifically targeted at girls - a Barbie game. We also found one math-teaching game for small children featuring a girl bunny named Josephine. All the other games were either blatantly male-directed or seemingly neutral but with male main characters. Our poster mentioned a Norwegian game that, according to a newspaper interview with its designers, invites girls to join in to the shoot-out game scene by featuring a female main character with whom they can identify. "April is 18 years old, independent, intelligent, and beautiful. (. . .) She doesn't have such big breasts as do characters in other games. (. . .) She's attractive, but not a 'bombshell.'" [game programmer quoted in an interview in Dagbladet, 20.07.98]
Aside from finalizing the texts, other preparations included
Finally, we spent a full working day, all six of us, mounting the first exhibit (including washing the dusty display cases), several hours at least four of us re-mounting each subsequent site and about an hour at least four of us dismantling each site. As our slides show, each site was very different in terms of space and display equipment, thus requiring its own adaptations of the original set-up.
3) Was the Effort Worth It? Some Indicators of Response:
3.1) Store Response
Our first indication that the efforts might be worth it was that we had no problem borrowing the objects we needed. Many of the shop owners we contacted immediately grasped our points and seemed to really "get into it," helping us pick out the stereo tuner with the most buttons or the microwave oven with the most obvious icons. Others were clearly most interested in the anticipated advertising effect, and finally some just seemed to want to be nice in order to get us out of their hair. Only one store turned us down. Fortunately, there were competitors in town for that particular artifact. But in all, the response was positive and those we contacted seemed to grasp what we wanted to illustrate and find it at least amusing to think of their products in those terms.
3.2) Media Response
Our next encouragement came from the media. We had sent out 12 letters to news media six days before opening the first exhibit site. As our media advisor on the committee, Helen Jøsok Gansmo had recommended that we call back to some of the more important papers and broadcasters a day or two after they would have received the press announcement. Her experience was that they needed to be reminded, pressured, and/or further informed before they would respond by covering other than the most prominent academic or cultural events.
Much to our surprise, but for one television program, we did not have time to call back. The response was overwhelming. The regional paper insisted on sending out a photographer and journalist to talk to us and photograph the artifacts before opening day. They were convinced that the other media would grab this story fast and they wanted to have it first. Six other print media covered the event, including two national papers and a regional paper from the neighboring county in Sweden. The event was also covered by four radio stations (and in the case of the national cultural radio channel by three programs on the one station) and by two television channels (student TV and local TV). Our one disappointment in terms of media coverage was that neither the adult nor the youth science magazine programs on national television covered the event.
Our impression from some of the journalists who did cover the event was that they seemed to be expecting the theme to be "sexy" and clearly dichotomized. Perhaps the clearest indications of this are in the images that illustrate two of the newspapers' stories. When the journalist from the regional paper phoned us to set up an interview, she said that our press release had sparked off quite a conversation among the staff, all of whom had immediately (upon reading that perfume bottles were among our display items) thought of the Gaultier perfume-bottle "bodies." We could inform her that, yes, we did have a Gaultier "couple" in our collection. The photographer who arrived with her spent several rolls of film on those bodies, including setting up the female body together with the pistol-shaped electric drill as if about to be "shot." The photographer for one of the national papers has portrayed the drill together with a mixer in a juxtaposition hinting at intercourse.
Yet our impression is also that the journalists left the exhibit with more informed and nuanced views and we were quite happy with the texts (if not always the images) they presented. For instance, the journalist from P4, a pop music radio channel, told us when he started his interview that he planned to make a 3-minute spot - a standard infotainment spot between songs. But as we showed him the exhibit, he became more and more engaged in the theme. For instance, at one point he asked what it mattered that the stereo tuner had buttons marked with technical terms while the microwave's buttons were marked with icons. His guide explained that this also conveyed a sense of the expected technical competence of the user. He nodded. His guide then asked whether he thought this was accurate, whether it was actually technically more demanding to get good sound out of a stereo than good food out of a microwave . . . He stopped up completely for several seconds, then said, "You know, you have a point there." Then he discovered that he'd used ten minutes instead of his intended three. Since he now had a clearer idea of what he wanted to include, he suggested we try again. But now he got interested in the unisex bike models and before he realized it had taped another twelve minutes. On our third attempt he again called a stop after twelve minutes and said he would have to cut-and-paste bits together after all. He had practically had the equivalent of a university lecture, all at his own request, and had clearly enjoyed the whole "lesson."
3.3) Requests for Reruns
A third indication of the success of the exhibit has been the number of requests for remounts from new sites. So far, four sites have requested that we remount the exhibit or help them design their own version: two women's conferences ("Kvinner Viser Vei" [translates to "Women Show the Way"] in Hamar, August 1999 and "Women's Worlds" in Tromsø, June 1999), the University of Bergen, and a museum in Oslo. We had to turn down the Hamar conference and the University of Bergen. We simply did not have the capacity. We did, however, manage to put up a slightly smaller version of the exhibit in Tromsø, as several of us had already planned to attend that conference, and we are following up the request of a museum in Oslo to help them design a version focused on an historical period.
3.4) Public Participation
As announced in the title of this paper, however, the main issue in evaluating the success or non-success of the exhibit is the response of the general public. On this point we have three types of indicators: Our observational impressions of how many stopped to view the exhibit and how they reacted, the responses of people who engaged with the hands-on display, and specific comments which struck us enough that we made note of them. The first two of these indicators can tell us something of the number of viewers the exhibit had.
Beginning with our general impression of the number of visitors, we noted a small but steady stream of viewers during the times we were present at the exhibit sites. This stream was noticeable, even to the point of being something of a nuisance, already as we worked to mount the exhibit. At the college of engineering site (Gløshaugen campus), the display cases were antique. The displays had to be mounted on wooden tables, then the glass case lids carefully lifted over the displays and lowered down to fit the edges of each table. One problem we had with this was the steady stream of viewers who would pick objects out of the exhibit to examine them, thus disturbing the display before we could finish it and get it covered.
At the other sites, we did not have this problem, but the impression of a constant "trickle" of visitors - rarely more than a handful at a time, but also rarely fewer - was repeated at each site. At the two campuses, the rhythm of lecture hours was reflected in the size of the "handful" present at any given time. However, only the college of humanities and social sciences site (Dragvoll campus) was staffed throughout exhibit opening hours. At the other sites our impressions represent a small, non-random, and non-representative sample of exhibit hours, as we visited the exhibit briefly twice a day to check on the hands-on program. At the Dragvoll site we noticed that the trickle dwindled during the last day of the exhibit. Three or four days seemed to be enough for a site with a stable population of passers-by.
The hands-on program proved something of a problem. The program was in one sense robust in that it recorded each participant's responses immediately onto a diskette. However, the program required Windows 95 or newer as an operative base, and due to the risk of machine theft we had to install the program on an obsolete model that was barely able to run Windows 95. As a consequence, the program crashed after every few participants and had to be re-booted. When unattended, the machine was also subject to some unwanted attentions, especially from would-be net-surfers who mistakenly thought the machine might be hooked up to the Internet, then left the machine stalled when they found it wasn't.
While at Dragvoll, where the site was staffed six hours a day, we were able to keep the system up and running most of the time. 101 viewers stopped to fill out the "questionnaire" during the five days the exhibit was shown at Dragvoll. Based on our observations, only a small fraction of the viewers engaged with the hands-on program. At the other sites the hands-on program was down every time we came to check and had usually only recorded a few responses since the previous re-boot. We re-booted the program once or twice a day. We also left an instruction sheet for viewers who wanted to try to reboot it themselves. As far as we know, only one viewer attempted to use the instruction sheet, and he was interrupted by one of us coming to re-boot anyway. At the engineering college, 45 viewers filled out the questionnaire during the three days that the exhibit was shown, at the public library 59 viewers filled out the questionnaire during the ten exhibit days.
3.5) What Did People "See"?
Of course, how many people viewed the exhibit is only one aspect of public response. Our main concern is what these viewers "saw" - how they reacted to the exhibit and what they learned from it. On this issue, both our observations, the recorded responses to the hands-on program, and the occasional comments we noted down can tell us something about what viewers saw.
One impression of viewer behaviors is that there was a gendered "division of attention" between the different artifacts on display. There were "girl magnets" and there were "boy magnets." Girls and women were especially likely to be drawn to the exhibit initially by the perfume bottle display, whereas boys and men were especially responsive to the iMac computer and the computer game covers. Both male and female viewers then went on to look at the electrical devices and the bicycles. At some sites, the car ads were backgrounded and received little attention. Male viewers tended to leave the exhibit when they reached the perfume case, whereas female viewers (who had often started at that end of the exhibit) tended more often to view the entire exhibit, including the computer game covers at the other end.
Most frustrating to us as feminists was our observation of certain couples' behaviors. We saw several couples follow this same pattern while walking hand in hand past the exhibit. The boy would steer the girl over to the exhibit with a tug and maybe a word ("There?"). They would look at the display case wordlessly for a bit, she often looking more interested than he. Then he would tug her away again as soon as he lost interest, again maybe with a single word ("Næh!").
The most basic message we hoped to convey through the exhibit was that objects, including technologies, are inscribed with gender. Already on this point we met with some resistance. One way this resistance was expressed was when respondents made a point of crossing off all the items on the questionnaire as "neutral" and verbally underscored that this was a matter of principle: "Things" did not have gender!
Another form of protest was to insist that the artifacts were designed according to purely pragmatic, gender-neutral criteria and that whatever gender significance we were reading into the artifacts was simply a figment of our biased imaginations. Several viewers actively debated this point with us. For instance, one man of about 40 debated for a good half-hour with a staffer even before the exhibit was fully mounted. He focused on our comparison of the drill and the mixer. The accessible screws on the drill were necessary, he claimed, because the drill was an expensive piece of equipment. They were dropped from the mixer, he said, to force users to buy a new one if it broke down. He was unshaken in this standpoint even when the staffer pointed out that the drill we had on display cost only NKr 200 (about $25) more than the mixer. However, he did then supplement his argument, claiming that screw openings on the body of a mixer would also be unhygienic, as would a darker color or a less shiny finish. The staffer then pointed out that mixers had at times been in other colors, as fashion demanded, and that one cheaper model of mixer currently came with accessible screws. The debate was stimulating, but neither party appeared to shift positions. The debate was ended amicably when the staffer pointed out that we were not claiming that design differences were there solely for the purpose of marking gender, only that they might also, perhaps even unintentionally, have that effect.
Most viewers we came into direct contact with, however, did indicate that they accepted at least this part of our premise - namely, that technologies do in some sense "have" gender. This was expressed most clearly when viewers suggested further examples we might have chosen. For instance, an administrator from the college of social sciences slowed his pace while walking by one day to say:
"If you want an example of the gender of technology, you have only to look at who drives the street-sweeping tractors here in the mornings and who uses the manual mops."
Interestingly, viewers' opinions on the gender of particular objects varied, even among those expressing such a gender-association as an obvious fact. This was clearest in relation to the iMac, about which we asked (both on the accompanying poster, and at times verbally) whether viewers saw it as somehow more feminine than other computers. One young man was quite sure that the machine was obviously feminine, and that equally obviously it was thereby a less valuable machine:
Viewer to staffer: So, what do you think? Is it 'over and out' for Macintosh now? I would certainly never buy one of those. It's trashy, kitchy! [The Norwegian term he used was "juglat."]
Staffer: Do you see it as more feminine than other computers?
Viewer: Oh yes! Or at least childish!
Another young man, viewing the exhibit together with two friends, had an equally adamant but opposite view, yet a view based at least in part on a similar dissociation between femininity and (advanced) technology.
Viewer: Wow! The new Mac is really fine!
Staffer: Do you see it as feminine?
Viewer: No! But it's more thoroughly thought through, technically refined . . . and stylish, what with the colors and everything.
Viewer 2 (woman): And it's quite attractive, without the sharp edges and all.
Viewer 3 (man): Comes in cool colors!
And occasionally (returning again to our more encouraging experiences with the exhibit) we did have conversations with viewers that showed at least some of them to be stopping up and savoring new thoughts about the flexibility of the "gender of things." For instance, one 15-year-old boy said of the bicycles:
"You know, that red bike would have been even more of a boys' bike if you'd taken off the baggage rack. As it is now, it's the kind of boys' bike that girls use too. [. . . a few seconds later . . .] You know what else? I'll bet if you set that boys' bike way over by itself and then asked the first 100 passers-by what gender it had, I bet a lot of them would answer that it's neutral. But then if you moved it back where it is now, beside the women's bike, and asked another 100 they would all answer that it's a boys' bike."
The car ad posters also triggered some viewer reflections on gender flexibility and on how gender came to be "written in" to objects - by designers, advertisers, and consumers. Many viewers were surprised when we pointed out that the green and red Peugeot ads were, in fact, the same model of car. One young man, after a moment of surprise ("No way! . . . My goodness, you're right!"), spent several minutes studying the ads and pointed out a number of ways in which the ad images rhetorically gendered the car, linking masculinity to technical competence and femininity to its lack:
"Look. He's the only one driving. And to make it [the female ad] even easier, it isn't even parallel parking, really. [The term in Norwegian translates to 'pocket parking,' which emphasizes the difficulty of maneuvering between other cars.] There's nobody in front or behind. She's just standing there looking at a parked car. Maybe she's thinking it over, like 'Should I maybe drive now, before somebody comes along and parks in front and behind me?'
Others pointed to users' roles in gendering objects in terms of how we link them to our life situations. For instance, we sometimes repeated the questions on the posters to viewers, such as asking which of the cars they were left with most desire for. One woman said it was the uppermost cars that appealed to her most - the Chevy Blazer out in the wilderness all alone or the speeding Peugeot with the grinning driver:
"I might end up buying the other, but it's the top one I desire. Maybe it's the top one, the 'escape' car, we have most need for - as women."
Also the electrical appliances, defended as gender-neutral by several viewers, including one male viewer mentioned above, were accepted as gendered by others. For instance, another male viewer was stimulated by the display of the mixer and drill to reflect on his own purchasing choices and on possible meanings of the accessible screws. Cocking his head and assuming an inward look he said:
"You know, you're right. I would never buy a power tool I couldn't open up to repair. But I just recently bought a coffee machine and then I didn't even think to check that feature."
His conclusion was that this was not merely a question of gender, but of the interaction of gender with particular activities. In connection with activities like crafts-work and home repairs, it was important to signal users' (mostly men's) competence to conduct such tasks. But in connection with cooking, even male users did not to the same extent need to have that competence confirmed. We found this an interesting hypothesis, and were glad we had kept the signage texts open-ended so as to invite this type of reflections
Given that things do, in some sense, "have" gender, our further goal was to de-naturalize the association between masculinity and technology. How did viewers respond to our attempts in this regard? The questionnaire responses give one indicator. Looking at the distribution of responses site by site, we find that at all sites most of these technologies were viewed as predominantly masculine or neutral.
Cick here to see a graphic presentation of the responses site by site.
We have some regrets that we did not gather background data on respondents to the questionnaire. Thus we cannot compare women's responses to men's responses or compare responses across generations or educational levels. We can only compare site by site. The Dragvoll site is populated mainly by students and faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Gløshaugen site is populated mainly by engineering students and faculty. The library site is fairly representative of the general public, with some emphasis on students, families with children, and immigrants. Only two of the technologies (typewriters and microwave ovens) consistently received more marks for "mostly feminine" than for "mostly masculine" across sites. At the engineering campus, both during the exhibit and in the earlier responses from students taking the course on gender and technology, the microscope was also deemed more feminine than masculine. At this campus, comments showed that the respondents envisaged the chemistry lab in connection with microscopes, and chemical engineering is one of two study programs at this campus enrolling 40% or more female students. (The other is architecture.)
Comparing among sites, we find that more respondents at the Dragvoll campus (humanities, social sciences) than at the Gløshaugen campus (engineering) seem to have "hedged," marking technologies as feminine in addition to neutral and/or masculine. Respondents from the library site, i.e. the general public, have tended to mark technologies as masculine more often than respondents at the university sites. For the majority of library respondents, not even the microwave oven or the typewriter is considered more feminine than neutral, though they still get more marks for "mostly feminine" than for "mostly masculine."
Comparing with earlier responses (from our gender and technology course students of the previous two years), we find that the mobile phone has shifted from predominantly masculine to predominantly neutral in people's minds, probably in keeping with its spread in the population. Interestingly, the car has not moved in that direction, although it too has spread to the entire population long ago. But a staffer did note one young (about age 12) boy's comment as he crossed off for car on the questionnaire:
"Actually, when you think about it, there are just as many women who drive cars."
He crossed off "neutral." Apparently he had been about to cross off "mostly masculine," but then the exhibition caused him to stop and "think about it." More commonly, however, viewers commented that, "It depends what car you're talking about." For instance, one young man said:
"A 2CV, for instance, is very feminine, whereas a BMW gti is clearly masculine."
This young man did not seem to question what it was that constituted femininity and masculinity in current cultural assumptions, and his marking of the questionnaire ("neutral" for the whole list) seemed more of a protest against the whole notion of trying to make him reflect on that theme.
One means of de-naturalizing assumptions about gender and technology would be, we thought, to emphasize variations within gender rather than reaffirming assumptions of dichotomy. Did viewers seem to grasp this point? Again, we noted both positive and negative responses. On the down side, many viewers, including many of the journalists, came to the exhibit expecting us to tell them for instance what a men's car vs. a women's car looked like. They may or may not have left with more nuanced views about this. After all, we must admit: the exhibit was primarily structured as dichotomous pairs of objects; it was held in a culture where the dichotomous character of gender is presumed; and it may well have reinforced that dichotomy. However, we also had at least one viewer who came up to us with a request as we were mounting the first site. He felt that we had missed some of the variations in gender, specifically that our exhibit lacked representations of what he called a "gay aesthetic." One staffer was not so sure that the gay aesthetic was missing, and led him around to the display of perfume bottles. There she asked him if he agreed with her. Didn't some of these bottles (in particular the Gaultier "sailor," the corseted Gaultier woman's torso, and a very elegant bottle for an aftershave called "Façonnable") play with elements of exhibitionism, sado-masochism, cross-dressing, and "dandy"-era nostalgia in ways that might resonate with different styles within gay culture? He did agree, and thanked us for having included gay culture(s) in the exhibit and thus avoided reinforcing the hegemonic (and predominantly heterosexual) dichotomy between masculinity and femininity.
By displaying everyday objects, we obviously invited viewers to draw on personal, anecdotal experience. We noted a number of instances of this. For instance several viewers pointed out "their" perfume (or mother's perfume, or father's after-shave, etc.) from among the bottles on display. Of course, this was not surprising. After all, we invited them to do so in the display case sign. There were also similar instances of people pointing out personal attachments to other objects on display ("I have that game," or, "My grandmother had a mixer like that, but in red."). One woman student told of her father's indifference to the gender of scents. This had been a source of great embarrassment to her as a teenager, that her father was as happy to put on a dab of her mother's "Red Door" as of his own after-shave. As a national weight-lifting champion, he was perhaps unworried about whether others might doubt his masculinity.
Although aware that we were inviting viewers to draw on anecdotes, we also hoped that they would extend the argument beyond the anecdotal. Did that happen? We think so, at least in some cases. For instance, while the exhibit was showing at the city library one staffer observed a young girl, about 9 or 10, who ran up to the computer game covers as she entered the library. "Oh, look at that one!" she exclaimed to her mother, pointing to the Barbie-game cover, "That one's nice!" Her mother then replied, "Yes. I think that's the point, that there are only a few games made for girls, while most are made for boys."
Of course, the evidence we build on here is in itself anecdotal. We have not systematically studied the effects of the exhibit and cannot really be sure how strong or how lasting they have been, however . . .
3.6) Changes in Our Own Vision
One last indicator that the exhibit was a success is that we too have been changed by it. We too see the world through a slightly different lens now after having worked so intensively with this material. This was pointed out by Merete Lie when we met at the municipal library in Trondheim to dismantle the exhibit for what we then thought was the last time. She mentioned that she had been downtown shopping the other day and had discovered herself thinking, as she passed a window display in an electrical goods store, "Hey, they've copied our exhibit." We have taken a snapshot of that window display, and as you can see, there certainly are some similarities. Of course, we don't know how many of the exhibit's viewers are reminded of the exhibit when passing shop displays or reading advertisements. Probably fewer of them than of us have been so affected; they did not spend so much time and effort with the exhibit as we did. But if any have been so affected, then that is indeed a strong effect.
And the department has been institutionally changed by it. The clearest instance of this is that Professor Per Boelskifte of the Department of industrial design (Gløshaugen campus) accepted an appointment as an extra-departmental member of our department board. His first contact with the department was when we invited him to speak at the opening day mini-seminar for the exhibit. That lecture was also his first attempt at examining the "gender of things," and the lecture was an experience both he and the seminar participants found thought provoking.
4) Some Thoughts on What Worked and Why
We have hypothesized for ourselves that three key features of the exhibit contributed to its success in terms of the amount of attention it received: It was concrete (focused on actual, everyday objects), visual (the objects were actually on display and were eye-catching), and had a catchy, paradoxical title.
Some of that attention served to flag new department, but not a lot. The departmental structure of a university is not newsworthy in most people's eyes.
Some viewers seemed to catch the idea of mutual relevance between faculties. For instance, one viewer said, "This exhibit ought to be required viewing for archeology students. We slip so readily into projecting our own time's assumptions back into history when we have only the artifacts to refer to." But maybe we were "preaching to the choir" on this point? This particular viewer was a pioneer for transdisciplinary research at NTNU. He probably needed little convincing on either the "gender of things" or the relevance of social sciences to technology and vice versa.
However, remaining goals did seem to be reached with some frequency. Viewing familiar objects through an unfamiliar "lens" did seem to generate some reflection, often by creating a basis for bringing the personal and anecdotal into an analytical framework.
We were also retrospectively happy that we left the questions open-ended - that we didn't claim to know all the answers, and didn't claim that the questions had singular answers. This seemed to ease potential "conflict" situations when discussing with viewers who disagreed with us. We got the impression, on some occasions, that it also helped us avoid driving initial opponents over to a defensive position. And we even learned things ourselves at times, so that our open-ended questions came to be more honestly so as we gained experience with them.
If you want to do something like this yourself, our conclusion is . . . it's doable. And it's doable with fairly small resources. We spent about NKr 10 000 (approximately US$ 1300) on the exhibit - mostly printing costs, and a little insurance. We also "spent" in all a couple of person-months of work. This may not seem like overmuch, but by all means keep it within your resources' limits. By the end of our second exhibit period, we were getting near exhaustion. For the most part, we had fun though. So in conclusion, we recommend that people try this, but also try to keep it within a level of effort where you too can have fun doing it.
