Creativity, Society, and the Hidden Subtext of Gender: toward a New Contextualized Approach

Today conventional categories of creativity are being deconstructed in the so-called postmodern debate (Kearney, 1988). This paper takes this process deeper, to what we will show is the hidden subtext of gender underlying how creativity has been socially constructed. It also proposes a more contextualized approach to creativity that takes into account both its individual and social dimensions and how this relates to what Eisler (1987) has called a partnership rather than dominator model of society. Until recently, discourse about creativity has been almost exclusively by and about one gender: the male 1991). This was so taken for granted that it was rarely even noted, much less challenged. The justification, when offered, was simply that men are more creative, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of important writers, artists, scientists, and inventors have been male. But in recent years a far more complex picture has begun to emerge, putting in issue many earlier canons about creativity. In the first place, women have actually made substantial literary, artistic, scientific, and technological contributions, even though the construction of traditional gender roles has placed enormous obstacles in the way of women's entry into the male-controlled domains of literature, art, science, and technology. In the second place-and this will be a major focus of this paper-the virtual exclusion of women from discourse about creativity has led to a gendered definition of creativity: one that has excluded from the categories of what is creative those activities stereotypically assigned to women. Moreover, because the kind of creativity that is contextualized in day-today life rather than abstracted from it has been associated with women, it has led to a noncontextualized discourse that ignores the fact that creativity is not just an individual but a social phenomenon. We believe that a new definition of creativity which includes both the female and male halves of humanity is more congruent with recent creativity research focusing on social aspects of creativity (e. believe that as a first step toward a new ungendered and contextualized discourse about creativity, we need to more fully understand how extremely gendered the old discourse has been. To this end, we will first explore some of the social and psychological implications of rigid gender boundaries, how this has affected not only creative women but also creative men, and how the contemporary loosening of these boundaries and changes in traditional gender valuations has begun to …