Bottles are men, glasses are women: religion, gender, and secular objects

Abstract

ABSTRACTRepresentations of objects as gendered appear cross-culturally and include a range of artefacts and natural phenomena, secular as well as religious. Such attribution of gender is one aspect of a broader attribution of human features, including agency, to many of these phenomena. Most broadly, for example, secular figures such as gremlins and abominable snowmen, as well as religious figures such as deities and demons, constitute ascriptions of humanlike agency to the nonhuman world. Gendered religious objects, then, are part of a more general pattern. Attending to this pattern as a whole helps account for its parts. One of these is religion itself.Gendered objects commonly occur in advertising media in the United States, as elsewhere. Their gender sometimes is implicit and sometimes explicit, but usually is stereotyped. Such objects in advertising mostly have escaped scholarly attention, as has the larger question why representations of objects as humanlike are so widespread. This essay attempts a partial remedy.Although the objects discussed are secular, my answer bears directly on the nature of religion. I claim that gendered objects and religion both are aspects of the paired phenomena of anthropomorphism and animism, and that these result from our scanning a perceptually ambiguous world for signs of agency.