“Good Design Is Feminist Design”: An Interview with Sheila de Bretteville

by JESSICA SVENDSEN

April 2009

Sheila Lev­rant de Bret­teville, Dean of Graphic Design and Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art, is one of today’s most promi­nent fem­i­nist graphic design­ers. In 1971, she founded the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of the Arts, the first women’s graphic design pro­gram; she also founded the Woman’s Build­ing and its Women’s Graphic Cen­ter in Los Ange­les in 1973.

De Bret­teville came to Yale in 1990. Since the late 1950s, under the strong influ­ence of Paul Rand, the Yale pro­gram had been a “bas­tion” of mod­ernist the­ory. When de Bret­teville was selected as the new Dean, Paul Rand resigned on prin­ci­ple and wrote a man­i­festo in the AIGA Jour­nal of Graphic Design in response. Rand wrote, “To make the class­room a per­pet­ual forum for polit­i­cal issues, for instance, is wrong; and to see aes­thet­ics as soci­ol­ogy is grossly misleading.”

De Bret­teville has become an out­spo­ken designer and edu­ca­tor and an influ­en­tial the­o­rist of fem­i­nist design, which she defines as “graphic strate­gies that will enable us to lis­ten to peo­ple who have not been heard from before. Fem­i­nism is about enabling those voices to be heard.”

On April 2, de Bret­teville sat down with Broad Recog­ni­tion Arts Edi­tor Jes­sica Svend­sen to dis­cuss “fem­i­nine” type­faces, fem­i­nist form and con­tent, and the dif­fer­ence between a female designer and a fem­i­nist designer.

JS: Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones recently said at the Yale Art School that his­tor­i­cal res­o­nances and aes­thetic char­ac­ter­is­tics can shape a type­face. He, and oth­ers, have described Gotham–a type­face com­mis­sioned for GQ Magazine–as a mas­cu­line type­face. Is there a fem­i­nine typeface?

SB: This is a huge ques­tion. It sounds like a small ques­tion, but this is a huge question.

JS: In my typog­ra­phy class last semes­ter, two typefaces–Joanna and Mrs. Eaves–were described as fem­i­nine. Doesn’t such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion rein­force gen­der stereo­types or the gen­der cat­e­gories of “fem­i­nine” and “masculine”?

SB: It depends heav­ily on gen­der stereo­types that I am not inter­ested in fos­ter­ing. I don’t think it serves any­one to do that. I think a bet­ter way to describe a type­face would be to talk about its dec­o­ra­tive aspects, basic struc­ture, figure/field, how each ele­ment relates to another ele­ment, how they can be dif­fer­ent or the same. I think there is a whole range to talk about for­mal aspects of any­thing you look at with­out hav­ing to knee-jerk back into gen­der stereo­types… [T]here has been a lot of very solid work that looks at how cer­tain attrib­utes that are for­mal have been ascribed to gen­der stereo­types and then deval­ued accord­ingly. So, why in 2010, why would we ever want to par­tic­i­pate in con­tin­u­ing that?

JS: So what do you tell a stu­dent who describes a type­face as feminine?

SB: I would ask: “Is your lan­guage rich enough to find other ways to describe what you are look­ing at, rather than to have to use gen­der as a ref­er­ent?” Surely it is not the only sig­ni­fier out there. Please. I think you free it up. If we were in the time when using his­tor­i­cally ascribed attrib­utes that have been bun­dled under the fem­i­nine, with free­dom for not being stayed glued to the fem­i­nine, and the fem­i­nine being a free-floating sig­ni­fier, I’d be fine with it. But when you say it, and sud­denly every female in the room has to press those adjec­tives against her­self and see if that is in accor­dance with how she under­stands her­self, I don’t see that as use­ful. And every man, some­one who is genet­i­cally and phys­i­cally male, has to see a con­nec­tion to that action or it can­not be his. So this is not use­ful. If we were look­ing for a more demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, one in which there is equal­ity, a non-hierarchy of gen­der, this doesn’t fos­ter that kind of soci­ety. So in that respect, I think: “Hey, make up some more metaphors of your own. Find some other lan­guage to describe what you see.”

JS: What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male insti­tu­tional his­tory and culture?

SB: It has meant dif­fer­ent things over dif­fer­ent peri­ods of my time here. When I first came here, I know how many women were just ecsta­tic that I came here. I didn’t come here to be the first female tenured pro­fes­sor. My goal was not to be the first tenured woman at Yale. I came because I thought this area of study was lag­ging behind and needed to be refreshed and realigned with the present, in a way that would be help­ful to the stu­dents who came here. This meant that many aspects of the tra­di­tion of this depart­ment, that I wanted to honor it, so I wasn’t come here to throw away the past and start a new soci­ety, I was look­ing for: what are the val­ues we want to keep and what isn’t here that needs to be added. In fact, at my inter­view, I said pre­cisely that. I said I would bring what is absent from the Yale envi­ron­ment that I think would bal­ance it and make more egal­i­tar­ian and reac­tive to the world in which we live. And the inter­view­ers said, “Well, what would that be?” as if they had every­thing already. It was a lit­tle bit like, where shall I start? And of course, I would have to start with women, because in fact, there was a paucity of women who had ever taught here. There was one female fac­ulty mem­ber. There were many women who have stud­ied here, that said pub­licly, that it didn’t mat­ter to them that there were no female fac­ulty mem­bers. Whereas, for me, it mat­tered because the absence of women left an imbal­ance that fos­tered a lot of stereo­typ­i­cal behav­ior on the part of the male fac­ulty and the male stu­dents, that wouldn’t have been easy for them to sim­ply to do if there were more women around, who were in posi­tions of author­ity to help with those cir­cum­stances and to also pro­vide a more diver­si­fied power source.

One of my teach­ers, actu­ally, pulled me aside and kissed me in the dark­room. And I had come from Barnard, an all-women’s college—I was called “Ms. Lev­rant” there. I was actu­ally very young when I came here—I was twenty. It was just so not what I would ever expect in that kind of sit­u­a­tion. I mod­eled, because I was very skinny and I needed to get a job. Of course, I’ve had peo­ple do that in those venues. I expected it there. But I didn’t know how to han­dle it there [in the dark­room]. I was just com­pletely taken by sur­prise. So in that sur­prise, I was try­ing to point out the hier­ar­chy that existed, which means that you don’t do this. If my class­mate did this, I would know exactly what to do. I would know pre­cisely what to do because I am more used to it, but I had never thought [that would hap­pen]. And that shows what kind of naiveté I had from Barnard… The hier­ar­chy between gen­ders was not my pri­mary thought at Barnard, even though it was a women’s col­lege. It never even came up, at least among my colleagues.

JS: You talked about how you intro­duced female fac­ulty when you came here, but what was the reac­tion to your the­o­ret­i­cal approach to teaching?

SB: So let’s go back to the ques­tion you’re really ask­ing: what was I thinking?

My think­ing has changed over time. I came here with a real desire to be both a cit­i­zen of the town as well as a teacher, head of this depart­ment and area of study. I took that very seri­ously. My first acts were to under­stand what was going on here, at the town at the time. I looked to Hill Health Cen­ter, for exam­ple. The stu­dents decided to do a pro-choice bill­board. The stu­dents were able to use a bill­board on I-95. The stu­dents decided to do this them­selves, it was the thing they wanted to do. It wasn’t as if we told them, “Hey, how about doing a pro-choice bill­board?” They looked in the news­pa­per, at things that were going on, and one of the things that they dis­cov­ered was that the per­cent­age of peo­ple that were pro-choice was not com­mon knowl­edge, and they looked for a way to express a pub­lic study of the dis­crep­ancy between the media rep­re­sen­ta­tion and the opin­ions or per­spec­tives of the major­ity of Americans.

That group of stu­dents became a col­lec­tive, called Class Action. It still exists 19 years later. They did another bill­board that dealt with the issue of bat­tered women. They have also done inter­ven­tions about gun con­trol. It has to do with what the group feels the issue is of that time. It is totally student-run. It is now a stu­dent col­lec­tive that is now only loosely con­nected with us…

[One year] a bunch of stu­dents were upset that the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) was hav­ing a con­fer­ence in Florida, and they had, I think, one woman speaker. So they cre­ated a poster that pointed out the paucity of women speak­ers at the con­fer­ence. And they wanted to post them all over Miami. We were con­nected with a group who would put up the posters in the mid­dle of the night. I told them that it is ille­gal to do this. Every piece of pub­lic prop­erty is owned, there­fore, if you put some­thing up, you are vul­ner­a­ble to being arrested for defac­ing pub­lic prop­erty. There­fore, it can­not be some­thing from me to you. “I am help­ing you from me, as a per­son, not as a pro­fes­sor.” So they put it up. And imme­di­ately I got a phone call from orga­niz­ers from the con­fer­ence –Chee Pearlman—“Your stu­dents have pasted, all over Miami, these posters that say we have only X per­cent of women.” I said “If you had more women, you wouldn’t these posters. You can’t blame me that you don’t have enough women. It has noth­ing to do with me. This is young people’s response to you not rep­re­sent­ing women’s pro­duc­tive view in your conference.”

… The goal of hav­ing no gen­der hier­ar­chy is really more of what I am work­ing for. That is the ethos of the depart­ment. The school car­ries it as well. I can­not speak for the larger university.

Call­ing type­faces fem­i­nine is an unfor­tu­nate dis­trac­tion. That’s not where our ener­gies should be going, in my per­spec­tive. I think try­ing to get a kind of lack of hier­ar­chy in gen­der, to under­stand that it is con­structed, to not par­tic­i­pate in the recon­struc­tion of stereo­types, is much more valu­able. Energy is real. You have to choose your battles.

JS: I can under­stand the con­nec­tion of fem­i­nism, pol­i­tics, and express­ing gen­der in terms of con­tent, like the way you described the bill­board cam­paign. But I am also inter­ested in how a gen­dered per­spec­tive is man­i­fested in form, and you have talked about how break­ing down the mod­ernist grid, allow­ing for mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives or sub­jec­tiv­ity, is one way to enact fem­i­nist design.

SB: Yes, I said that, that’s true. In 1973 and again in 1981. But not until we have gen­der equal­ity, do I want to for­get the word fem­i­nist. It is really to infuse that equal­ity into fem­i­nist think­ing, that I think is impor­tant. Because, in fact, there are a lot of young women now, who think of gen­der in stereo­typ­i­cal ways, even after the work of Judith But­ler and Monique Wit­tig, just beau­ti­ful work, that has tried to unpack that in such a way that we really ques­tion the cat­e­gory women, and we open it up.

When you look at the word demo­c­ra­tic as a part of fem­i­nism, that equal­ity and that abil­ity to argue with each other, come into fric­tion with each other or come into con­nec­tion with each other, on an equal plane, that is inher­ent in the ideal of democ­racy. If you try to trans­fer that into a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive, it holds that same mean­ing that we can talk with each other, agree or dis­agree, and work it out, as a part of self-criticism, as well as a crit­i­cism of fem­i­nism, as well as a crit­i­cism of mod­ernism, how a demo­c­ra­tic and more equal soci­ety is cre­ated so that what­ever kind of gender—there is as much dif­fer­ence within each gen­der as between the gen­der. You come from that per­spec­tive, it makes it very hard to talk about men and women all the time, around it. But I do think the word fem­i­nism is impor­tant because it car­ries with it an activist buzz. It really belongs to pay­ing atten­tion to how women are being treated, which, until we are treated absolutely equally, then I can­not let go of the word.

JS: Many women design­ers acknowl­edge the glass ceil­ing and every­thing that sur­rounds them being a woman designer, but they are not nec­es­sar­ily fem­i­nist designer. Can you clar­ify the dis­tinc­tion between a female designer and a fem­i­nist designer?

SB: A female designer is often talk­ing about her­self, as many of the women who voted for Hilary in the elec­tion. These women talked about the expe­ri­ence with misog­yny as their rea­son for vot­ing for Hilary, rather than look­ing at what Hilary might do as Pres­i­dent. That was not what they were look­ing at; they were look­ing at their expe­ri­ence, and where they felt dissed. Vot­ing for a woman was acknowl­edg­ing them­selves. That is sim­i­lar to women design­ers who acknowl­edge the glass ceil­ing are really look­ing at.

I think to be fem­i­nist is to really care about women in gen­eral, not only design­ers, not only at priv­i­leged insti­tu­tions like Yale. Think­ing about women who don’t have any­thing, and what are the forces at work in our shared glob­al­ized cul­ture that keep women from actu­al­iz­ing their poten­tial. That is not what those women are talk­ing about. They are talk­ing about their poten­tial and their actu­al­iz­ing. That is the dif­fer­ence between being just a woman designer or being a fem­i­nist designer. It doesn’t mean that you are always work­ing on fem­i­nist con­tent, it means you think about, more broadly, women as a cat­e­gory and how that cat­e­gory is used against women, wher­ever they are, on a socioe­co­nomic level in a glob­al­ized world. That, to me, is fem­i­nism. It was never about me, what­ever “me” or “I” is. It is about “we.”

… It is a dif­fer­ent kind of per­spec­tive. I have a his­tory that makes for that. Some of it is actu­ally the­o­ret­i­cal and part of a fem­i­nist con­scious­ness and why the fem­i­nist move­ment was absolutely arrest­ing. It was like, imme­di­ate. I was part of the resur­gence of fem­i­nism in Cal­i­for­nia, at a time in Los Ange­les, when we all came into our own. I came into my own in my work. I became a mother. I became a fem­i­nist, all at the same time. All at the same time. It was an incred­i­ble over­lay of things. I came into my own work, I came into the fem­i­nist move­ment, I became a mother, I lived in a new city that was more for­eign to me than any other city. I lived in Milan, New York, but L.A. was some­thing else. All of those things shaped an expe­ri­ence that is going to change over time, but coa­lesced in a very par­tic­u­lar kind of way.

JS: There is one thing I would like to return to. You men­tioned the Miami poster cam­paign, and many peo­ple asso­ciate fem­i­nist graphic design with more con­fronta­tional or aggres­sive tac­tics, like the Guerilla Girls or Bar­bara Kruger. What alter­na­tives are there for fem­i­nist design?

SB: I am one of the alter­na­tives. I chose to focus on what we don’t have and how to get it, not on what is oppress­ing me or oppress­ing us. Some peo­ple are filled with a tremen­dous amount of anger and the way to express it is through their work and through their work about what is oppress­ing them. I think that that is very impor­tant work. It just hap­pens to not be my work.

JS: You ended one of your pub­li­cized con­ver­sa­tions with designer Ellen Lup­ton with “Good design is fem­i­nist design.” [SB laughs] Is that still the case? Do you have a changed per­spec­tive over the years, espe­cially as fem­i­nism has changed?

SB: Yes, because it is also how the notion of good design has changed. Both have changed. I just felt that Yale was known for good design, which was very much aligned with mod­ernist design at that point. So I was try­ing to open up the design, try­ing to open up the fem­i­nist design. A state­ment, like that, out of con­text, requires a lot of unpack­ing. Both around what is “good” and what is “feminist.”

I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with some stu­dents the other day. It wasn’t about fem­i­nism, but it is like this: two stu­dents were doing work that had images of like, kit­tens and sun­sets and palm trees, but they came off of Google images—they were get­ting them off the net. I was try­ing to locate what it is that those images were serv­ing. One of the other stu­dents, who was older than the two stu­dents who were doing it, said, “It’s gen­er­a­tional. The response to that.” I said, “I don’t think that if that’s oper­a­tive, it is not all that’s oper­at­ing.” It turns out that one of the stu­dents was doing it as a reac­tion against good design, clean design. Here we are, 2009, and some­one is choos­ing, what I call trashy, low, images to sig­nify “sweet­ness” as a reac­tion. My com­ment was: “You are here at Yale to do your own work. You don’t have to react against some­thing. Go for some­thing.” Because to spend your time against that now, unless you do it from an extremely informed, thought­ful, broadly-researched base, is a very knee-jerk, against, kind of activ­ity. It is not that you can­not use kitty kats and sun­sets. It is more: Why are you using [these]? I want to here from you, why, some­thing other than “I am against good design, clean design, all that design I learned at RISD.” I want more. I want to hear more. Talk about it more. Tell me more.

JS: How would you “unpack” fem­i­nist design in 2009?

What stays con­stant is try­ing to have a vision of what is desired: in this case, for me, it is a non-hierarchy within gen­der; an under­stand­ing of its con­structed nature; a ques­tion­ing of the cat­e­gory woman. That was not as clear in 1973, it was clear in ’83, because Gen­der Trou­ble had come later. When I read it, it was like a rev­e­la­tion. Monique Wit­tig and Judith But­ler were like a rev­e­la­tion to me. Since I came from par­ents who work in fac­to­ries, I did not even know where sub­ur­bia was, let alone, who was liv­ing there. So Betty Friedan made no sense to me. But whereas these women did make sense to me. I could locate what they were talk­ing about among the peo­ple I knew. I come from four gen­er­a­tions of work­ing women. I do not know the other kind of life. Betty Friedan was angry at me, but I wasn’t angry at Betty Friedan. She thought I was send­ing women back to the bed­room, to do sheets, to iron sheets, but I said: “That is not what I’m talk­ing about.” But she couldn’t under­stand it. I gave a talk in ’71 and she was in the audi­ence, and she just com­pletely couldn’t get behind what I was talk­ing about. Because I was think­ing about what is attrib­uted to women, and how do we free up those attrib­utes from gen­der. I don’t see why gen­der and these attrib­utes have to be attached.

Jes­sica Svend­sen is a senior in Yale Col­lege. She is the Arts Edi­tor for Broad Recog­ni­tion.