The role of gender polarisation in visual interpretation by Zimbabwean undergraduate art teacher education students

Abstract

Dichotomous and asymmetrical relationships between masculine and feminine gender categories are encoded and decoded variably by males and females in visual culture. This study interrogates the influence of gender polarisation on artistic and reader-viewers’ interpretation by undergraduate art teacher education students at a purposively selected university in Zimbabwe. Literature established that gender differences which are arbitrarily related to sex are manifested in doing gender but escapable in redoing/undoing gender. Gender constructions influence and shape the individual’s engraved perceptions and precepts. In this study I argue that making meaning of an image is determined by the propositional and perceptual attitudes of the artist and reader-viewer at encoding and decoding levels respectively. Learners also primarily exploit visual interpretation (decoding) skills in visual learning. Thus, I deductively argue that visual learning is also indexed on learner’s socio-cultural background such as gender identity and polarisation which restrict meaning making within the dictates of that gender orientation. The study therefore aimed to establish the influence of gender polarisation on visual interpretation among teacher education students with the aim to develop a suitable critical visual learning pedagogy to emancipate the art student teachers as artists and reader-viewers in visual interpretation. This interdisciplinary study, therefore, drew inspiration from three disciplines: gender studies, pedagogy and visual interpretation studies (visual social semiotics). A qualitative critical-interpretive research paradigm and a phenomenological design informed the data-gathering procedure. The qualitative paradigm was found suitable to uncover from purposively sampled twenty (20) in-service art student teachers how gender constructions influenced visual interpretation. Data generation utilised pilot-tested visual narratives, structured individual interviews, focus groups and observations techniques to gather data which was analysed through a hybrid critical discourse analysis (CDA) for textual data and critical visual discourse analysis (CVDA) for visual data. The analysis established deep layers of plural meanings and hidden consequences of gender ideologies represented in visual displays. The research findings revealed that gender polarisation informs dichotomous and asymmetrical gender constructions which are evident in the visual narratives. Both male and female art teacher education students revealed a heightened level of critical consciousness through emancipatory displays of gender reversals from stereotype roles. Critical visual pedagogy in art is therefore an emancipatory tool for these and other social prejudices. The findings of the study set a springboard and need for further studies to explore multi-gender society and action research to test, verify and improve educational experiences of art learners (male or female) through critical visual pedagogy