The Gendered Eye

2020-2021

under the FWF Project “The Cultural Eye”

The research project addresses a longstanding question in feminist aesthetics: how does gender shape the perception and aesthetic experience of art?

While studies in psychology and cognitive science have quantified differences in perception across groups, they have often relied on an oversimplified understanding of gender. The project therefore examines how art perception can and has been framed through multiple “gendered binaries”, distinguishing between three dimensions: sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. It then investigates, through two eye-tracking experiments, whether these dimensions correspond to significant differences in visual behaviour.

The results reveal no such binary differences, highlighting the need for a more nuanced, transdisciplinary approach to understanding gender as a variable.