Women and Museums, 1850-1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (original) (raw)
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Women’s museums today: their creation, objectives and contribution to history
Arenal, 26:1; enero-junio 2019, 275-297, 2019
This paper provides an overview of the main women’s museums existing worldwide, taking as its source the International Association of Women’s Museums. It also explores the history of their creation and problematises their relationship with women’s history and the concept of gender museology. It examines the principal vectors, missions and strategic lines of this category of museum and the structural themes of their respective permanent exhibitions, assessing the main approaches that have been identified for applying gender concepts to museum space.
Call for papers "Museums through gender lenses", special issue of Culture & musées
Research on women artists, collectors and art critics has become a well-established tradition in art history. Rarer, at least in France, is work examining the place, role and participation of women in administrating and organizing museums, museology and museography, or museum mediation and transmission. However a small body of research dating from the 1990s to the present has reread the history of museums through gender lenses, meaning it has examined the cultural and social construction of masculine and feminine identities in their "multifacetedness" (intersecting social, sexual, racial identities). Whether their approach is historical or contemporary, whether case studies, personal accounts or global analyses, these works have adjusted the focus of museology, bringing a fresh look to what has long been an androcentric and heteronormative field. First to mind are the groundbreaking scholarship of Jane R. Glaser and Artemis Zenetou (Glaser and Zenetou, 1994), Amy Levin's envisioning of museum and curating practices from a gendered perspective (Levin, 2010), and Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer Goodman's examination of the American women who shaped the conservation, restoration and visibility of the material and immaterial heritage (museums, libraries, natural sites, etc.) of their country (Dubrow, Goodman, 2003). Closer to home, Bernadette Dufrêne's article "La place des femmes dans le patrimoine" [Women's place in heritage] followed up on an alarming report published by the French Senate drawing attention to a profound paradox: women are overrepresented in educational programs in heritage, but underrepresented in management-level positions once they enter the workforce in the field (Dufrêne, 2014).
Modern Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender, 5-6 Mar, University of Sydney
In recent years there has been a substantial rethinking of the role of museums and their presentation of the past. The phrase or slogan (and for some a mantra) ‘museums are not neutral’ has become common parlance in discussions about what stories museums choose to tell, how they engage with contested histories and the representation of minority voices within institutions that are more often associated with the powerful rather than the powerless. The presentation of gender in museums is part of this discussion, both in modern display and historic collecting practices – the later often instrumental to the former. The University of Sydney’s Nicholson Collection is Australia’s oldest collection of antiquities, with artefacts primarily from the Mediterranean, Egypt and the Middle East. This paper will examine the collecting practices of this institution through a gendered lens: what artefacts represent women in antiquity, what artefacts and histories are absent from the collection, and how does curatorial focus or preferences impact upon gender representation in collections. We will conclude with a reflection on how these collecting practices may have contributed to distorted perceptions of women in the past.
EMPOWERING WOMEN IN MUSEUMS THE PROCESS
In this paper we present an experimental process of women's empowerment in museums. The starting point is our perception of a frequent exclusion of women in the work developed by Portuguese museums. We adopt a position in the field of museology defined as the study of the relation between human beings with their cultural heritage. We broaden the scope of research of museology to the subject " women " by integrating the analytical category of gender, and adopting an integrated gender perspective in museum work. We focus our attention on museum exhibitions considered as the privileged means of communication in museums and we present the most frequent images of women in some Portuguese museums through the categories of women and dominant feminine stereotypes. Finally, we present the stages of the project " Feminine Museum " by stressing the adopted methodology with particular emphasis on the contribution of the integration of a gender perspective in the design and organization of museum exhibitions as a contribution to women's empowerment.
Women\u27s Work: The Gendered Discourses of Art Museum Education
2006
Today, it is commonly acknowledged in the field that art museum education is a profession most frequently occupied by women, but there has been little historical investigation into the myriad discourses that molded and shaped it into "women's work." As with any profession, particularly those primarily practiced by women, the perception of their work as "feminine" directly affects the status and esteem of that work by colleagues and society at large. While women's history and status in the art world began to be explored as part of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, these writings have focused primarily on women as subjects (Mulvey, 1975), as artists (Nochlin, 1971), as art educators (Collins & Sandell, 1984), and as art historians, professors, art museum curators and directors (Sherman and Holcomb, 1981). Art museum educators remain curiously and conspicuously absent from the literature. In this project, I investigate the ways in which contemporary art museum educators are situated within a gendered art museum hierarchy. My experiences as a professional art museum educator are a critical component to this research, as these experiences and my struggle to understand them both personally and professionally drove me to the research trajectory that I currently pursue. I believe that perhaps the biggest stumbling block toward improving and changing the profession is that we as practitioners have little sense of our history, of how we are situated within larger societal discourses, or even within the art museum context. Utilizing an adaptation of post-structuralist historian Michel Foucault's notion of genealogy, informed by feminist and critical pedagogical theories, I will examine the history of art museum education specifically
Women' s Work: The Gendered Discourses of Art Museum Education
Marilyn Zurmuehlen Working Papers in Art Education, 2006
In this project, I investigate the ways in which contemporary art museum educators are situated within a gendered art museum hierarchy. My experiences as a professional art museum educator are a critical component to this research, as these experiences and my struggle to understand them both personally and professionally drove me to the research trajectory that I currently pursue. I believe that perhaps the biggest stumbling block toward improving and changing the profession is that we as practitioners have little sense of our history, of how we are situated within larger societal discourses, or even within the art museum context. Utilizing an adaptation of post-structuralist historian Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy, informed by feminist and critical pedagogical theories, I will examine the history of art museum education specifically during periods of substantial growth and development in order to identify, mine, and problematize the discourses that shape art museum education. My goal is to disrupt traditional narratives of art museum education (Newsom & Silver, 1978; Zeller, 1989, Cherry, 1992), creating a new conceptual space for informing and empowering art museum educators.
ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN FEMALE ART AND MUSEUMS
Sonia Chabbi, 2015
This thesis analyzes the role that women's art plays in the museum and could play in a woman's valorization process as an artist, curator or director of an exhibition. Through the analysis of the cultural context in which the female art is developed and borned, it will focus first on the perception that it had in the historical and artistic context and the various forms of thought. From here there will highlight a paradigm: “Are feminism and the museum as we know it compatible at any level?”. It will follow, at this point, the analysis of three case studies in the European reference museum context: the Frauenmuseeum in Bonn, the Museo della Donna of Merano and Microstories Women: Analysis of art exhibitions in the panorama of Bosnia and Herzegovina local area. By analyzing the different relationships between museums and feminine art and the role played by women, it will try to answer a question, namely relational between the museum and the female art as such. Finally, it highlight the relationships among the three different museums and women's art, the possible contributions that education and gender training processes can offer to the museum and back again, especially for the "thought reform" needed to change. The ultimate aim is to ensure a useful analysis for a rapprochement between art and revaluation of women in museums. Keywords: museums, female art, curating, displaying art, cultural background, local.
Women directors in museums c.1908 1965: an interdisciplinary approach
Journal of Art Historiography , 2022
This short article derives from the author's attendance to the Summer School in Digital Humanities taking place at the Universita degli Studi dell’Aquila (Italy) in June 2022. It acts as an Open Access introduction to her recently started postdoctoral research project at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). The project explores the extent to which the current ‘glass ceiling’ in museum management accross Europe may be linked with the historical, 20th-century gender-biased development of the curatorial profession. Via an interdisciplinary methodology, combining archival research and digital humanities with semi-structured interviews and statistical analysis, Women Managing Museums aims to uncover the legal framework, the social context and the historical circumstances in which women started becoming museum directors in Europe. The data collected via these means serves a dual purpose: on one hand, it unearths the significance of early twentieth-century female curatorial work. On the other, it brings to light the impact of gender-related difficulties (such as working conditions, legal restrictions, ‘marriage bars’, salary gaps, cultural prejudices, and limitations to decision-making) in shaping the work of pioneering female museum managers. By pursuing this dual outcome, the project aims to provide a new reading of the shaping of museums and their collections in early 20th-century Europe, thus contributing to rewrite their history from a gender perspective .
FWD: Museums, 2021
Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is the follow-up collection to the 2010 volume Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader, edited by Amy K. Levin. In the new book, Joshua Adair 1 joins Levin as co-editor, and together they aim to capture developments in museum practice, case studies, and research that have emerged in the past decade, this time with an added emphasis on activism. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is part of Routledge's Museum Meanings series edited by Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps. The series responds to recent significant shifts in museological practice and uses interdisciplinary investigations to explore the changing role of museums. The authors of the chapters in this collection, ranging from the emerging to the established, draw on a diverse set of perspectives including theoretical, practical, and critical, and consider themes of inclusion, representation, and coproduction in art and history museums.