• Dairai Darlington Dziwa

  Author

This qualitative study used discourse analysis as a semantic strategy to analyse the significance, relevance and influence of gender in symbolic interpretation and visual semantics. Whether the artist or viewer is man or woman, does it provide additional information that can certainly affect our understanding of works of art. The study in particular was aimed at discovering social, cultural, historical and biological implications related to the application of literary theory in deciphering content and symbolic meaning in visual texts. A total of 49 teacher education art students (24 females + 25 males) were selected for the study. Participants made individual interpretations to visual texts (paintings, drawings, installations, stone sculptures and public art structures- photographs). Interviews and observations were used to support and validate the interpretations written. Results indicated that females’ interpretations were impregnated with feminine reactions with themes of motherhood, sympathetic, care and love emerging common. Contrary and interestingly the males reflected masculine interpretations of authority, dominance, protectiveness and non-sympathetic attitudes on the same paintings. The reactions were in some instances diverse in meaning because they were a reflection of other factors like socio- cultural backgrounds, levels of education, biographical circumstances and personality departing from specific objective contextual meaning imbedded in visual texts.

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