Zombies and Boobies

This is what Dave got up to today:



This is what I've been up to at the studio:


With snake and without.


Dave preferred the without-snake version, so I took the snake off and coiled it up.

This is a pregnant one:

The boobs were getting a little too Playboy bolt-on-ish, not primitive enough, so I went to a gumdrop version:

(With nascent bear, but minus one skeleton. You'll see.)

As I was making the gumdrop boobed figure, I thought: I don't really want for them to be gendered, or not obviously gendered anyway, and boobs are definitely a big gender sign. Currently, sociologically, male is the default, female the "other." But I want some way to signify female as the default. The easiest way to do that (without using boobs, say) is situationally, like, if one has a baby or a child by the hand, most people are going to assume female. Or if one is pregnant, even sans boobs, the assumption is going to be female, right?

But then I thought:

Why does it matter that they are genderless? Gender does matter, yes, but if you think about it, it matters mostly to people and other animals that have a strong gender dimorphism (for example, in many spider species where females are the larger and more dominant than males). But there are certainly instances where gender makes no difference. For example, if you were to be confronted by an aggressive dog, would it make a difference whether the dog was female or male? Or if you came across a bear in the woods or a shark in the water, would you feel any less frightened if it were a female? I want these primitive figures have that kind of genderless feel to them. But how do I manage that? Do I push them further into situational ambiguity or do I push them into strangeness of form or both? Is there another way?

What does "situational ambiguity" mean? To me, it means putting the figures into specific but ambiguous situations where it doesn't matter if one is male or female. Take the figure sitting with the bear as an example. If most people were to try to guess the gender of the bear, would they guess male or female? If the figure didn't have boobs, would they guess it was male or female? How could I further strip away gender-oriented cues from various situations?

What does "strangeness of form" mean? To me, it means being able to construct a figure that is so far away from gender-based distinctions that people don't assume that the default is male. The strangely placed eyes, for example, don't give anything away. There is no curvaceousness to the more ambiguous figures.