Gendered Interventions: Changes in Visual Art Education in Sweden: Discourses, Practices and Materiality

This article investigates changes in visual art education through gendered visual, pedagogical and theoretical interventions. The research material is derived from a combination of two independent research projects and examples from published research. The material consists of images and video diary recordings by young people, and researched didactic examples of working with gender in visual art education. Young people’s gendered cultures include 257 Synnyt / Origins | 2 / 2019 | Peer-reviewed | Full paper a growing vocabulary of gender definitions and ways to ‘perform’ gender. At the same time, everyday life experiences are largely structured around binary gender logics. This article answers questions regarding the ability of visual art education to change and transform stereotyped thinking and the binary oppositions of gender. Analysing visual and verbal material from a post-humanist perspective, the findings suggest that visual art education should engage with the gender problem, and that it has the capability to dissolve gender binaries and stereotypical thinking by facilitating fabulation, imagining, speculation and fantasising about the future. Visual art education seems to benefit from focusing on learning processes that are open-ended and acknowledging the affect and visual desires involved in image making. These are driving forces specific to visual art, which have the potential to differentiate gendered stereotypes.


Introduction
Recent studies report that visual art education in Sweden is perceived as 'feminine' and a respite from more 'important' schoolwork (Marner, Örtegren, & Segerholm, 2005;Skolverket, 2015;Wikberg, 2014).This research demonstrates that female students outperform their male peers in Sweden, especially in visual art classes.Girls are also more actively engaged than boys in digital techniques and visual art-making (Skolverket, 2015).The notion of visual art as a means to express emotions might be the reason why students view it as 'feminine' (Öhman-Gullberg, 2008;Wikberg, 2014).Despite strong indications of gendered subjectification in schools, the history of visual art education research is perceived as gender-neutral topics and subjects in Sweden (Lind, 2010(Lind, /2013;;Låby, 2018).Researchers Skåreus, Sigurdson and Wikberg (2018) suggest that visual art education, from a gender perspective, should be structured by the teacher to help students to: '. . .break traditional gender patterns in terms of expression, aesthetics and choice of techniques and tools ' (p. 178).Furthermore, the visual art teacher is advised to regulate students' freedom of choice in visual art education, since this so-called freedom reinforces gender stereotypes and structures.Good didactic examples that are provided by Skåreus, Sigurdson & Wikberg (2018) are perspective drawing and natural depiction, since the students practicing them are focusing on external matters, rather than their identity, and not relying on cultural gender norms.
Understandings of visual art as technical drawing, free expression, visual communication and visual culture exist simultaneously in the practice of visual art education.Traces of all the different stages of visual art education can still be found in the contemporary discipline (Åsén, 2017).This marks a resemblance with other western contexts; for example, in the United States, Tavin (2005) describes visual art education discourse as a palimpsestic discourse-a text that is 'written, then partially erased and written over again ' (p. 5).Considering visual art education from this perspective, the subject's varied history creates a palimpsestic discourse that both retains and erases the past while adding new layers of meaning (Tavin, 2005;Lind, 2010Lind, /2013)).Young people's gendered cultures unfold in several ways.A growing glossary of gender definitions, along with methods by which to identify with and "perform" gender, help to explain the patterns of these gendered cultures and aid those experiencing them (Bragg, Renold, Ringrose, & Jackson, 2018;Fisher & Jenson, 2017;Francis & Pechter, 2015;Hellman, 2017;Paechter, 2010;Renold, 2008;Renold & Ringrose, 2012;Ringrose, 2013;Westbrook & Saperstein, 2015).In everyday life, however, teenagers' experiences are still largely structured around binary logics at school and in public spaces (e.g., symbols on bathrooms and separate changing/dressing rooms).This binary logic underpins gendered stereotypes and the naturalization of male and female identities, with specific affordances and expectations for the two sexes concerning appearance, habits, sexuality and boundaries of possibilities.Deleuze (1968Deleuze ( /2014) ) asserts that 'The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art has to be injected into it. . .' (p. 382).The relational and affective dynamism involved in creating visual art challenges us to think rather than to understand.In a school context, this indicates that aesthetic subjects have the potential to stimulate learning processes that are open-ended, but require creative thinking and exploration in practice.When pupils learn to understand topics in school, the learning process ends when questions are answered (correctly) and the students understand how something works.In this sense, many institutional learning processes involve answering questions that already have an answer to be discovered.Thus, visual art education stands out because it has the potential to enable visualisation of how the world might be actualised differently from current norms and traditions.
This research uses the term gendered interventions in the sense of loosening up these fixed categories and affirming fluid, changing gender identifications (Bragg et al., 2018;Ringrose, 2013).In the current digital information age, sweeping changes and cultural shifts occur faster and reach wider audiences than ever before.As a recent example, the viral 'Me Too' hashtag movement started a global conversation about sexual assault, harassment and discrimination.
Often, settings such as schools struggle to keep pace with these rapid cultural changes and may be left without resources to support, for example, the increasing number of pupils identifying as transgender or 'queer'1 .

Theory and methodology as interventions when considering visual art education
The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari offers extensive resources for thinking in post-significations (Ringrose, 2013); that is, attempting to address the impasses of the discursive theories of power and knowledge-or research that ultimately demonstrates the complex ways in which dominant discourses are negotiated, contested and re-negotiated.This is done through the post-humanist theories of materiality, technology, embodiment and affect (Braidotti, 2018).These theories can be classed as post-humanist because they stress the forces of relationality between human and non-human (or bodies, technology and things) (Hellman & Lind, 2017).We believe that posthumanist perspectives facilitate alternative thinking about visual art education by emphasising the complexity and temporality of entangled assemblages in which materiality has agency.
In this article, theories of gender will be combined with processes of making in visual arts education programmes to explore art's potential to dissolve stereotypes and standardised images and thinking (Deleuze, 1968(Deleuze, /2014;;Hickey Moody, 2013).Changes in visual art education will be investigated by examining how discourses, practices and materiality are linked and how they, in their connectivity, result in transformation.Drawing on the concept of assemblages of becoming, this study examines the complex processes of gendered subjectivity in visual art education: how interconnected events and processes-assemblages with human and non-human agents-produce multiple subjectivities that are always in movement (Braidotti, 2018;Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004;Hellman & Lind, 2017).The term becoming refers to how we are in a constant process of transformation through movement over time, involving the very dynamism of change and the movements between the present as actual and the present as virtual (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004).This entails a philosophy about the present in that it produces multilayered effects: both the end of the actual-what we are ceasing to be, and the actualisation of the virtual-what we are in the process of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).When one applies this perspective, analyses of gender and becoming cannot stop at a critique of the actual (of what we are ceasing to be), but need to move beyond with affirmative, creative analyses of futurity and what might become, in relation to the actual.Thus, subject formations are not restricted to individuals, but are constantly produced from events that take place transversally in connected assemblages that displace binary oppositions (Braidotti, 2018).What the concept of assemblages conveys in the context of this article, then, is that the subject is formed by dialogical relations involving, for example, non-human elements, institutional traditions, discourses and technological media.
Affirmative ethics demand responsibility for the present as both actual and virtual; it is what both Foucault and Deleuze call 'thinking from the outside' (Deleuze, 1986(Deleuze, /1990, p. 97), p. 97), or thinking of, in and for the world-a world becoming but also created by knowledge production practices.According to Braidotti (2018), a post-humanist approach has ethical-political implications for processes of subject formation.Ethically, students' visual interventions will, in this article, be analysed with complex as well as subtle methods that allow for both the discursive conditions of the present, and the construction of new knowledge and subject-formations through the becoming of multiple actors (human and non-human).In this context, art is also seen as a potential tool for exploring pedagogy as democratic events within pedagogical relations, in terms of who is recognized and who is not, who is able to participate and who is not, who is able to exist and who is non-existent, within existing regulatory structures and technologies (Atkinson, 2016).
We draw on the visual and digital art productions of young people to elicit and articulate the virtual from the present; that is, the imagination and the futurity of becoming.The affirmative ethics, when analysing young people's imagery, allow for complex and sensitive analyses of multi-layered subjectivity that include the technological, affective, discursive and ethical dimensions of young people's becoming.The concept aims to deal with the complexity and sensitivity of power relations between multiple actors (Braidotti, 2018).Using these theories and methodologies, we address the delicate ethical navigation and balancing acts that are necessarily involved when analysing young people's image making.

Producing futurity Visual interventions by students
Lind (2010/2013) examined images produced by young people tasked with portraying what it was like to be a student.She drew on the students' visual artwork in a school context in order to analyse gendered practices, subject formation and gender positioning.Young people are often labelled as lacking knowledge, and their marginalisation, especially for students, relates to this experience of not being taken seriously or not listened to (Hickey-Moody, 2013;Lind, 2010Lind, /2013)).With a perspective of marginalisation in mind, young people's art practices can be viewed as minor languages.This concept stems from the philosophy of Deleuze andGuattari (1975/2012), in which a minor language is characterised by inadequacies compared to dominant languages; this can result in a 'shortage of space' in which to express oneself or a lack of faith that anyone will want to listen.Lind (2010Lind ( /2013) ) observed that young people's visual images exhibited ambivalent articulations with ambiguous messages, including multiple layers of irony and humour.This can be seen in the image Better goals at school, created by a 14-year-old boy, in which mild irony regarding the rhetoric of goal orientation in school is conveyed.This mixed-media image composition combines drawing and a collage of images-a woman in a long pink dress has the head of an old man pasted on her body.The woman's gestures suggest flamenco dancing, and a speech bubble reads 'I scored a goal-olé!'The expression 'olé', can also connote a matador's exclamation.A drawn football can be seen in the right hand corner of the goal net.
Visual and textual signs establish a sense of gender ambiguity, while the combination of This image uses visual arguments to challenge gendered and other norms, such as age.These visualisations challenge the norms by breaking or re-negotiating them as assemblages that are not seamless totalities, but collections of heterogeneous components.The double meaning of 'goals'-learning goals in school and football goals-is well-actualised and transfigured in an assemblage of becoming, producing multi-layered effects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).By As mentioned previously, the term becoming refers to how human beings are in a constant process of transformation through continuous movement; it conveys the dynamism of change in producing multi-layered effects.Visual practices make it possible to explore how to give a voice to people who are struggling to find spaces for 'freedom of speech' or to express themselves within dominating discourses (Lind, 2010(Lind, /2013)).Here, students' images intervene, often in humorous and multi-layered ways, by questioning what it means to be young from the young person's viewpoint.This imagery is knowledge in action, as agential image creation becomes a practice comprised of experiences and shifting identity positions.This perspective allows us to understand that it is through processes in action and communication events that we become changing, shifting, transformative subjects in the making.This way of taking seriously young people's utterances in dialogue with and for knowledge about their way of constructing their lives is at the core of next example.
In her licentiate thesis from 2014, Hellman asked upper secondary school students to record video diaries about what it was like to be a student in media education.These video diaries opened up a space and became an intervention whereby students could transcend gendered subject positions and construct themselves as someone or something else.The material agency of laptop web camera technology, together with the socially discursive contexts of popular culture and school, enabled this process.This study made students' nomadic and shifting subject positions visible, and their multiple becoming as someone/something unfolded through a pendular process of being both pupil and informant, digital and physical and between media materiality in school and staged performances in video diaries.Narratives from memory were mixed with desires, wishes, dreams and fantasies of future becoming.
One student, Erik, used his diary to present himself as a future film director.He tells the story of his current film project, about a 'normal' girl whose daily makeup routine creates a mask.He explains that: 'Every day, when she puts on her makeup, it's like putting on a mask'.
When asleep, the girl dreams about three men with masks over their faces (Erik clarifies that their maleness is obvious because they are bare-chested).While Erik explains the film project, the sound of female laughter can be heard.This represents the girl's fears and inconclusiveness about her gender and sexual identity.Erik explains that: 'It's a bit confusing, because . . .she is confused, she doesn't really know.She hasn't found herself yet, when it comes to sexuality and gender .. Thus, the original gendered student positions were contested, transformed and renegotiated during the school year (Hellman, 2014).Evidence of the transgressive potential of visual art and media education can also be found in earlier research (Atkinson, 2016;Björck, 2014;Hickey-Moody, 2013;Illeris, 2015;Lind, 2010Lind, /2013) ) and in visual research methodologies (Holliday, 2004;Lind, 2015;Rose, 2001Rose, /2016)).

Pedagogical interventions by visual art teachers
In this section, examples of gendered pedagogical interventions are presented, taken from teacher's educational practices and perspectives.A forthcoming pedagogical challenge is to invent working practices in the classroom, with the function of visual studies and art-making as transfigurative training for multiple identity formations.
The photograph in Figure 5 is part of a study conducted by Karin Domeij (2015).In this research study, upper secondary students examined issues of identity and gender norms through staged self-portraits in a photography course.The researcher and the teacher created an assignment called: 'If I were my brother or sister . . .' Here, the visual arts teacher created a process wherein the students reflected on and expressed how gender is embodied through clothes, hairstyle and posture.Most of the students were girls, so Domeij chose to focus on girls' selfportraits as representations of their 'brothers'.The female students reflected on and physically tried out bodily postures, clothing and hairstyles, incorporating different ways of looking at the viewer by staging themselves as male.The girls explained that projecting 'coolness' and toughness were key considerations when transforming into 'brothers' in their photographs.In class discussions about gender and norms, the girls articulated that during the assignment they observed that masculinity is valued more highly than femininity as a social and cultural norm (Domeij, 2015).
The student in the photograph in Figure 5  it demands that you expose yourself to unpredictable and ambiguous reactions such as fear, shyness and vulnerability in response to the images.Thus it is a sensitive and complex task, which also exposes a relational pedagogy that combines theories of gender with processes of making in visual art education and thus explores art's potential to dissolve stereotypes and standardised images and thinking.
Regarding sexual identity, teacher and researcher Addison (2005) draws attention to a de-Figure 6: Authors' personal photograph of alternative bathroom symbols for the Swedish.sign project whereby a student found the space to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools.Instead of representing her own sexual identity, the student used visual resources to oppose and respond to dominant discourses around homosexuality in school by designing pictograms to confront viewers with their own feelings on homosexuality.In creating the new design for standard bathroom symbols, the student questioned the limits of discursive legitimacy within the heteronormative matrix of school morality (Addison, 2005).This intervention also questioned the modernist canon of expressivist art-making as a means to explore one's identity in visual art education.The expressivist notion of art is part of a discourse in which visual art aims to elicit the natural rather than the cultural identity of the student.Using these examples of working with photography and design, Addison (2005) and Domeij (2015) demonstrate that it is possible to work with communicative and social engagements and transformations, in visual art education, instead of relying simply on psychological avenues such as modernist expressivism in art.

Discussion
This article examined interventions in visual art education that have the potential to change and transform standard, stereotyped thinking in general and, more specifically, the binary oppositions of gender.As we have seen from recent research about the state of visual art education in Sweden, visual art education is highly gendered, but is nevertheless treated as a genderneutral subject in school (Lind, 2010(Lind, /2013)).Concerning the traditions of visual art education, it seems crucial to be aware of this history and what different layers of discourse-meaning ways of legitimising the subject-are circulating in the practice of visual art education.In this way, opportunities will increase to question and resist the traditions that reinforce gender binary thinking and stereotyping.To facilitate movement, transformation and the various gendered becomings of students, it is necessary as a teacher to work with unexpected events and be sensitive to unplanned learning encounters.This entails what Haraway (2016) calls 'staying with the trouble' (p. 1) and learning to be present even in difficult times or situations.We argue that, instead of turning to areas of visual art education that seem to be less gender stereotyped, such as technical drawing and depicting, it is necessary to actively highlight and examine gender norms.We have illustrated this with the two examples of Domeij (2015) and Addison (2005).
These examples demonstrate ways in which teachers can use the practice of visual art education to work towards dissolving stereotypes and standardised thinking.They also show ways of exploring gendered becoming and visual communication as social comments and engagement.
It appears to matter from which standpoint we approach visual art education; from a largely structuralist standpoint, one response to the problem of gender stereotypes among young people seems to be an avoidance of working with identity: 'In order to minimise the risk of students getting stuck in gender stereotyped imagery, avoid assignments that are explicitly about their own identity or expression of emotions' (Skåreus, Sigurdson & Wikberg, 2018, p. 180).We argue that a post-humanist approach will both 'stay with the trouble' (rather than avoiding it) and encourage thinking of identity as a process of becoming that concerns both human and nonhuman relationality.Instead of regarding students' identities as fixed, inner cores that need to be expressed, one can focus on the futurity of becoming through an interlaced process with visual art didactics.Furthermore, we see affect, which is produced in educational assemblages with human and non-human elements, as a major driving force in visual art making (Hellman & Lind, 2017).These affective forces and intertwined becomings would be greatly limited by focusing only on depicting and perspective studies in visual art education.As we have mentioned earlier, the learning process stops when the (correct) answer is found.Learning to depict is a matter of learning the codes for central perspective, where the answers are given, although it is necessary to practice for many hours in order to master the technique.What visual arts can contribute to, in a school context, is working with open-ended learning processes, where the result might surprise both teacher and student.
In this article, students' visual productions were examined as a process that entails the movement from virtual to actual; that is, the movement of how the pupils differentiated conceptions of what it is to be young and to be a student through visual imagery.What is made actual, or materialised, is the image/artwork itself, which Deleuze andGuattari (1991/1994) call differenciation (with a c).The differenciation in this article involves young peoples' ways of rearticulating and reconstructing their worlds in, at least for us, unimagined ways.We argue that the democratic potential of visual art education lies here, in the ways that young peoples' ideas and conceptions are articulated and take material (or digital) form in images.These images then raise new questions and ideas that might destabilise our habitual conceptions of categories and norms.By working with the present, and learning to be present by 'staying with the trouble', we suggest that visual art might elicit the virtual; future ways of thinking differently.Using a posthumanist approach, we suggest that visual art education can contribute to dissolving gender binaries and stereotypical thinking by fabulating, imagining, speculating and fantasising.Furthermore, our study shows that as soon as the students' visual creations differentiate gendered positions, these are called into question by the pupils themselves.
In a digital age in which gender expressions are differentiated, not least visually online, it seems to be of great importance not to turn away from gendered stereotypes, but to emphasise the ways that young people themselves challenge and transcend gender binaries.The growing differentiation of gender identities and definitions implies that we, as visual art educators, should assist in making binary gender patterns visible and show alternative ways of defining and expressing one's identity, both playfully and seriously.
The use of images as spaces for assemblages of becoming can help in obtaining knowledge and information about the ways that young people experience and think about school as a place for learning, knowledge and social and cultural transactions.This involves freedom of speech and the establishment of conditions for children and youth to develop visual languages and visual ways of knowing.We have highlighted the pedagogical challenge of the ways in which visual arts educators are able to create a space for children and young people to grow in cultural awareness, including gender formation and deformation.We have also shown how teachers can connect learning and evaluation strategies in schools with young people's visual communications and creative and aesthetic work across different media as a means of gaining multi-layered knowledge.If the platform for discussions of gendered interventions can be the images produced by children and young people, within institutional settings or beyond them, then visual narratives arise from memory mixed with desires, wishes, dreams and imaginings of future becomings.This is a process whereby students differentiate conceptions of, and materialise, what it is to be young and to become a student in the making of visual productions.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Better goals at school: 'I scored the goal-ole.' Figure 2: Girl kept prisoner Figure 4: Screenshot from the video diary of Erik, in Hellman's research project.
Figure 5: Student's photograph on the theme 'If I were my brother . . .'

Figure 7 :
Figure 7: Authors' personal photograph of alternative bathroom symbols for the Swedish Museum of Natural History.