In this master thesis, we will examine the misogyny of the concept of creativity through the history of art, and in doing so, we will pursue the hypothesis that the inherently misogynistically conceptualized concept of creativity is precisely one of the key reasons for the lack of attributing greatness to woman artists. The concept of creativity is thus uncovered as one of the constituent concepts of contemporary understanding of art and, as such, as one of the basic concepts of art history itself.
Our approach to the topic is historical, which means that we follow the term and the concept of creativity through historical periods from the classical era to the 21st century, putting them in relation to cultural contexts of art production and to the then contemporary understandings of art, the artist, sex/gender, sexual difference and the concept of genius. By exploring and analyzing the historical constitution of the concept, we will thus try to locate its misogyny and the effects of the latter, and show how the understanding of the concept was not only consistently sexually signified but also sexually signifying—automatically presupposing a male creator.
The purpose of the thesis is thus to show that—and how—creativity, especially artistic creativity, throughout its historical constitution presumed or produced a certain subjectivity which was not only very specifically sexually signified but also substantially misogynistic. Furthermore, the purpose of this kind of deconstruction of the concept is to lay bare its sexual non-universality and its normativity; therefore, to present the notion of creativity as an inherently masculine concept and to expose its position as a position in the phallo(go)centric symbolic order.
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