Art and Gender

Art and Gender includes articles, excerpts, and case studies that address socio-cultural factors influencing the roles of women and men from the perspectives of the visual and performing arts. This text offers perspectives that examine underlying social structures that affect how we define art and artists and how those structures inspire the art from a perspective of gender. This text draws upon gender in its several and varied permutations as a vehicle for discussing and understanding the arts, culture, and society. These perspectives consider how gender is relevant to the creation and study of arts and culture.

Cultures normalize, legitimize, challenge, and resist understandings of gender through the arts. Art and Gender considers approaches to gender in art through select historical and contemporary analyses of education, social status, subject matter, criticism, and public perceptions. This revised and updated edition features relevant material and explores social, political, aesthetic, and economic factors that influence the ways culture defines art and artists in gendered terms, encouraging readers to adopt a critical perspective regarding the arts, gender, and culture.

Gregory Gurley currently teaches in the arts and administration program at the University of Oregon. He received his doctoral degree in theater from Arizona State University where his research focused on eighteenth century drama for children and the use of drama as an educational means for social moral development. His research was recognized by Project Muse and in 2008 Drama and Moral Education: The Plays of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was published by VDM Verlag Publishing. As an interdisciplinary arts curriculum specialist, Dr. Gurley is currently developing in-class, online, and innovative hybrid curriculum and serves as online mentor to other departmental faculty.