Chairs and Gendered Bodies: An Introduction
Gaetano Pesce. Donna, Model Nos. Up 5 & Up 6 (1969).
“We design them; but once built, they shape us. As sitting in chairs spread to the common person over the centuries, it left its mark on the human body and human consciousness…Chairs are embedded in a network of symbols.”
—Galen Cranz
It is hard to imagine a perfect living room, office, or even shopping mall without a chair. After all, our bodies spend countless hours pressed against a chair’s surface. From Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair, the chair seems to have been handpicked by designers and architects alike, among all other pieces of furniture, to become an object of intense study that is constantly challenged and redone, in an effort to materialize the sociological impacts of design. Scholars such as Paul Overy see chairs as not only extensions but also representations, “‘stand ins’—or rather ‘sit-ins’” of the human body. The chair’s formal and functional innovations not only reflect pragmatic valuations regarding pressing issues such as human health, but also communicate specific messages about the aesthetic and ideological zeitgeist at the time of the chair’s conception. As essentially an interface that connects the human body to its surrounding architectural space, a chair provides a site where design principles engage with cultural imaginations, manufacturing technologies, and medical research, to name a few.
Mariusz Warsinski, NAGABABA (2020) for wamhouse studio.
Recognizing the intimate tie between chair design and the human body’s socio-cultural existence, gender, the female form, and women’s lived experiences inevitably factor into this conversation. As I was exploring the topic of chairs, the element of gender did not come to mind until reading Galen Cranz’s critique on how posture contributes to social hierarchies, whereby the chair constitutes an instrument to exert biopower and enforce discretionary practices. I was immediately reminded of being educated in a conservative school that taught girls to only sit on the front half of a chair to achieve postural elegance. The ways in which women’s bodies have been frequently subjected to the male gaze and objectified inevitably influence the global lexicon of chair design. In Beverly Gordon’s “Woman’s Domestic Body,” she observed how women have been historically associated with arranging and decorating both the interior and the body, and that there is even a parallel between period interior design trends and women’s fashion. Under the existing patriarchal paradigm, a woman’s body is simultaneously useful—in the context of domestic labor—and highly decorative by virtue of being expected to conform to a specified set of beauty standards.
Salvador Dali, Mae West Sofa (1937)
In the particular case of chair design, this interrelation becomes quite apparent. Some chair designs such as Gaetano Pesce’s La Mamma assimilate the curvaceousness of a female body; some are named after female stars, like Salvador Dali’s Mae West Sofa; other designs like Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair expound on gender-related conventions by associating femininity with domesticity and motherly care. Even chair advertisements—posters or magazine spreads—by companies such as Knoll or B&B Italia seem to find it particularly appealing to portray female bodies next to a chair. The female body flirts with and decorates the latest chair models, many of which are designed by men, as marketing specialists translate their seductive, alluring presence into more consumption. Meanwhile, an increasingly influential generation of designers are now mobilizing the form and condition of women’s bodies to challenge gendered hierarchies and expectations. Mariusz Warsinski’s NAGABABA, for instance, constitutes an almost sculptural intervention, commenting on the damaging effects of mass-advertised cosmetic procedures. Frequently in the field of chair design, the female form is appropriated, reconfigured, weaponized, and emancipated, as visual culture responds to established structures of power and transgressive feminist movements.
Eero Saarinen, Womb Chair (1946).
Within academia, museums, and curatorial discourses, an intellectual interest in chair design is not new. Curators and authors such as Eliot Noyes and Barry Bergdoll have written extensively on how chair types fit within the larger backdrops of industrialization and organic design. From MoMA’s 1941 Organic Design in Home Furnishings to the 2021-22 exhibition The Modern Chair at Palm Springs Art Museum, many writings and shows tie chair types to architectural movements. But few works foreground the relationship between a woman’s body and the chair. Only relatively recently in 2019, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler dedicated an article to office chairs and sexism, noting that the size and stylistic differences between the average executive chair and the secretarial chair can be traced back to gendered corporate labor. Design features like structurally separating the backrest from the seating pad mirror the stereotypical images projected onto the average female white-collar worker. More often than not, gender and women’s bodies are only briefly discussed or even reduced to a footnote. This column seeks to bridge this gap. Through a series of conversations and research-based articles, this column would constitute a meaningful starting point for thinking about how the gendered body relates to the social apparatus of design.
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