Materialising gender fairness through iconic language: empowering tools from and for the design community

This contribution is conceived as an attempt to provide an answer, one of the several possible, to the huge issue posed by the editors of this volume regarding the meaning and the many forms through which gender fairness can materialise through design, considering in this case the communication design field. Wearing the ‘lens of gender’ from the disciplinary perspective of communication design means trying to move forward on a field that has already been partly traced by studies that – starting from Laura Mulvey's theories developed in the cinematographic sphere and, more generally, from the intersection between feminist theories and visual cultures – have historically brought to light the close link between media representations and the processes of gender construction. It is after all well-established that images constitute the matrix of the imaginary, recognition/misrecognition and identification, thus articulating the self, the subjectivity (Mulvey, 1975), and how subjectivity relates to collectivity. This implies firstly considering and critically examining the domain of visual representation and iconic languages as a possible vehicle of gender representations that can shape individual and collective biographies.