Design Doing Gender

No matter if razors, barbeque sauces or low-fat products, the consumer's gender is anticipated and inscribed into marketing and packaging guiding consumer choices, reflecting, reproducing and constructing gender norms by placing men on one side and women on the other. In her article, Petersson McIntyre (2019) sees packages as "objects that play an active part in gender performativity", objects that do/perform gender and "create notions of what is masculine, feminine, and even gender-neutral".



Design, according to many scholars, can never be gender-neutral. Nevertheless design discourse shows the tendency to regard objects as neutral ones that only follow principles of form and function. 

 
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- Petersson McIntyre, M. (2019). Gender by Design: Performativy and Consumer Packaging. The Journal of the Design Studies Forum, 10(3), 337-358.
- photograph by Garry Winogrand (New York City, 1966) via