SocProf, from The Global Sociology Blog, has an interesting post about gender in the public sphere. Here is a photo (from Echidne of the Snakes) of the “first spouses” of the G20 nations (that is, the spouses of the political leaders of the G20):
Except…someone’s missing. Two of the G20 countries (Germany and Argentina) have heterosexual, married female leaders, and their husbands aren’t in the photo. I don’t know why–were they not invited to the event? Did they choose not to come? SocProf asks, “Would the husbands have looked out of place here? Would this have been embarrassing to them?”
But SocProf points out that a different disappearing act recently occurred in Israel:
…look what happened in reverse in a group photo of the newly-formed Israeli cabinet. On top is the traditional cabinet group photo, at the bottom is the “touched-up” version that appeared in [the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman]… notice the difference?
Indeed, the two female Cabinet members have been photoshopped out.
SocProf says,
[In the G20 photo]…the men are not visibly absent. It is their presence that would be noticeable. And also note the setting in which the women pose, the soft colors, pink carpet and sofa with pastel background. It looks like a somewhat formal yet a little domestic setting.
The bottom photo is formal, no pink or pastel there! Icy grey with flags and orderly pose…It is a perfect illustration of the gendered domains: where men belong and where women belong.
Taken together, the three images, though taken for different purposes in different places, provide a great illustration of how we often make people who don’t fit cultural gender norms invisible…sometimes very literally.
Also see our post on an ultra-Orthodox newspaper that airbrushed girls out of a photo of children.
UPDATE: Commenter Liz says,
I object to the use of the word ‘airbrushing’, because that’s not what happened: those photos were edited, manipulated, or fabricated, but airbrushing is a specific photoshop tool for minor modification. You can’t completely change the reality of a photograph with an airbrush, unless someone would like to tell me that those two male stand-ins are actually just drawings made with photoshop.
If you use the same word (airbrushing) for taking out a model’s cellulite as well as removing heads of state from photographs, you trivialise what’s been done. Digital editing is only going to become more and more common, and it’s important to find the right words to explain how a photo has been altered.
Good point–thanks for pointing the language issue out. I didn’t know what airbrushing referred to, exactly, and had just heard it used to describe altering an image in general.
Comments 24
thoughtcounts Z — April 4, 2009
I have a much harder time believing this instance of ultra-Orthodox newspaper airbrushing than the previous one! Wow. Their adherence to not showing pictures of women is more important to them than reporting actual news about their actual government.
I spent a while just now trying to figure out where the substituted men came from -- I thought they completely didn't belong, and I couldn't believe they would have stuck two non-members in a picture of the Cabinet. But: the second pair of men in from the left has been removed and the front one is substituted for the woman to the left. The four men on the right end have been cropped out and one of them was substituted for the woman to the right. (Their names are Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver but I'm not sure who's who.) I don't know if I'm more or less surprised overall, but I was definitely startled to find that in cutting out these two women they also removed four men (and made two more look a lot shorter than they really are...).
Denise R — April 4, 2009
My Aunt is usually the only one, or one of a few women on the board of directors for big companies. She always wears a brightly colored dress for the photo ops so you can see her in the sea of suits. :)
Maggie — April 4, 2009
wow, how unfortunate. (but Michelle looks fabulous, as always.)
mordicai — April 4, 2009
Hilarious how people still act like religion is a-okay. Lets be tolerant of THAT.
Sonja — April 4, 2009
Merkel's husband is almost never seen in public with her - they usually don't do the "First Lady - First Husband" thing. He's very strict about keeping out of the public eye. I guess he was invited and decided not to come.
But now that I check Wikipedia I see that he did a "Partner's Program" for the wifes of the EU leaders in 2007 (he was the only guy there).
jfruh — April 4, 2009
Angela Merkel's husband is an academic who notoriously hates attending public functions of any sort. He didn't even attend his wife's swearing-in, preferring to stay home and watch on TV. I suppose it is open to question as to whether any female first spouse would get the pass on this that Merkel's husband is generallly given.
Cristina Kirchner's husband is an ex-president himself, and her immediate predecessor as president (they are often compared to the Clintons). I wonder if that has anything to do with it -- if he was considered too "serious" a person as a result of his former office to hang out with the first ladies. I do wonder whether Bill Clinton would have done first spouse events like this had Hillary been elected.
Those Israeli pictures are just creepily Stalinist. During the election campaign, there was a picture of a series of campaign posters put up in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood with pictures of the three leading candidates -- Netanyahu, Barak, and Livni (who is female). Someone had splashed yellow paint over Livni's face in all of her posters.
Megan — April 4, 2009
jfruh, you KNOW Bill Clinton would have gone to first spouses events! First of all, he used to be president, he's got no insecurities about playing second fiddle to a powerful woman. Second of all, he loves the spotlight. Third of all... no, it's way to easy to make a joke about Bill Clinton and the ladies.
mordicai, I tend to agree, particularly after this post.
Elena — April 4, 2009
As for the absence of Sonsoles Espinosa, the wife of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, we don't really have a tradition of the wives of our presidents representing the country (the wife of Jose María Aznar, Ana Botella, was an exception and brought a lot of criticism), mainly because we're a young democracy without the time to grow traditions and the wife of the head of the state is Queen Sofía, who does a good job of representing the country, as do the rest of our royals.
Given that the person who will inherit the throne after the current prince and princess leave it is the infanta Leonor, in 30 or 40 years' time we might have a prince consort, though. If our monarchy survives until then...
Gis — April 4, 2009
Oh. My. God.
leontine — April 4, 2009
Who cropped off the woman on the right who seems to be using a wheelchair? Was she missing from the original picture?
Gwen Sharp, PhD — April 4, 2009
I don't know about the cropping--I posted it as I found it.
Dubi — April 4, 2009
Leontine - none of the cabinet members, male or female, are using wheelchairs. Sofa Landver (new minister of immigration) is just short.
Now, about the picture as a whole, let's make a few things clear:
This paper, Yated Neeman, serves a very small population in Israel (I estimate about 2-3 percent of the population of Israel is in the target demographics). Their practices are in no way indicative of the general Israeli media, and the picture as it was originally taken appeared in many more copies than in the touched-up version.
Drawing any conclusions from this extremist group about "gendered spaces", I feel, is as sensible as drawing conclusions about public sentiments towards psychiatry from a scientology convention.
An interesting note: Livnat, the minister standing between the (sitting down) PM Netanyahu and President Peres, was replaced with one of the ultra-orthodox ministers who was positioned at the edge of the picture - thus giving him a far more prominent position in the image(*). I don't know if this image is a copy of the complete picture as published in the paper - a couple of the ministers on the right hand side are cut out -- it's a big government! -- while people on the left were just sort of squished together - but I thought this particular choice was an interesting one.
(*) Yahadut Hatorah, the party that represents the public of Yated Ne'eman, is not in the coalition, and even if they did, they oppose having ministers (because that would make them part of the Zionist state, which they oppose), preferring to have vice-ministers in departments that don't have any ministers - sort of having their pie and eating it too. The minister who replaced Livnat is from Shas, representing the Mizrahi (Middle-Eastern) ultra-orthodox public. These two groups are not very fond of one another most of the time, but still.
Dubi — April 5, 2009
Oh, Leontine was talking about the other picture. ignore that comment then...
Billy — April 5, 2009
Wow, this was an interesting post. Thanks for putting this up. I feel as though I learned something here.
p.s. Dubi, there is a woman, in the first photo, who is in a wheelchair. Her face was cropped out, along with the woman above her. I would agree from an early statement that this is ableism at work. While I don't know a lot about the political side of this, I feel as though I can understand the argument about, how politically and sexist driven, was the reporting of these papers. In the first photo (unless this photo is not an accurate), statements are made about who is allowed to take up public space. Many of the women in the first photo are not made clearly visible. Without cropping, in my opinion, this photo shows how patriarchy scripts how these (very powerful) women, are viewed; not ever to be as powerful as men.
Gwen Sharp, PhD — April 5, 2009
I think the point is less that this is representative cultural norms of gender, and more illustrative of the fact that while it's still possible to find these types of examples of women being made invisible (not just in Israel), the idea of airbrushing men out of a photo of government officials is hard to imagine happening anywhere.
What is striking to me is how many photos of governments even in democracies that allow women to vote would look an awful lot like the second photo from the Israeli newspaper...without any airbrushing. And even if you left the women IN--I've seen many photos of important officials of various countries in which women (as well as racial minorities) are often nearly non-existent, or hold the positions traditionally allotted to members of their group (so there's a woman in a cabinet position related to the family or something like that, since clearly that's a "women's" position).
Ruchama — April 5, 2009
I don't think the Israeli one is about making women in politics invisible. It's about making women everywhere invisible. The newspaper that published that photoshopped Cabinet picture would not have published the picture of the wives at all -- they don't publish pictures of women, period.
Deleting women with photoshop - Crikey Team — April 5, 2009
[...] Israeli cabinet was photoshopped by an ultra-orthodox newspaper to exclude the two female members. Sociological Images notes the trend for one gender power [...]
Whit — April 6, 2009
Yes, the ultra-orthodox find publishing pictures of women to be an offense to modesty, and so they'd rather distort the truth than publish a woman's picture.
Endor — April 6, 2009
"Yes, the ultra-orthodox find publishing pictures of women to be an offense to modesty, and so they’d rather distort the truth than publish a woman’s picture."
Sure, better to be misogynistic and HOLY, then honest.
Penny — April 7, 2009
I was wondering about the woman in the wheelchair also--who is she? She's posed as if she expects to be in the picture, but someone along the way decided against that--why? (hmmmmm, I wonder....seems like you can be old or young or tall or short or round or slim, but don't bring your wheels into the photo, eh?)
Liz — April 8, 2009
I object to the use of the word 'airbrushing', because that's not what happened: those photos were edited, manipulated, or fabricated, but airbrushing is a specific photoshop tool for minor modification. You can't completely change the reality of a photograph with an airbrush, unless someone would like to tell me that those two male stand-ins are actually just drawings made with photoshop.
If you use the same word (airbrushing) for taking out a model's cellulite as well as removing heads of state from photographs, you trivialise what's been done. Digital editing is only going to become more and more common, and it's important to find the right words to explain how a photo has been altered.
Ben Zvan — April 12, 2009
@Liz: I object to your objection to the use of the word airbrushing. It is not, in fact, a photoshop tool that would be used for most photographic manipulation. The term refers to historical, pre-photoshop methods of photographic manipulation and could just as easily been called gum-bicromate painting; that just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily. Copy-and-paste, match color, and patch were probably what they used here and I don't think any of those terms sufficiently convey the offense that they perpetrated either.
Emergent Culture - Deconstructing the Biblical “Fall of Man”: Insight into the Source of our Ancient and Modern Misery — April 28, 2009
[...] WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? WHERE ARE THE MEN? Sociological Images SocProf, from The Global Sociology Blog, has an interesting post about gender in the public sphere. Here is a photo (from Echidne of the Snakes) of the “first spouses” of the G20 nations (that is, the spouses of the political leaders of the G20): [...]
Analiese’s Reading 5/2 | Quiche Moraine — May 2, 2009
[...] Sociological Images [...]