Seeing through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums

Abstract

Applying poststructuralist and feminist theory to museums, this chapter traces the gendered relations of representation in museums. The author takes the relation of text, author and reader from poststructuralist studies and translates these to the museum forms of exhibition, curator and visitor. She examines the relations between men and women, masculine and feminine as they are constituted in museums, tracing a series of gendered, hierarchical oppositions. These are central to the ways in which museums organize their identity, space, collections and exhibitions to make meanings. She concludes that the roles of women as they are represented are relatively passive, shallow, undeveloped, muted and closed; the roles of men are, in contrast, relatively active, deep, highly developed, fully pronounced and open. Together, these provide a thread for the museums in the stories and narratives they construct. The author addresses the challenge of applying abstract and theoretical ‘readings’ to museums – where the collections appear to resist such readings through their concrete and solid presence, and where the prevailing professional culture is empirical and anti-theoretical. This challenge was also her own, as a museum worker struggling to develop a theoretical critique. Finally, she describes exhibitions in Britain and northern Europe which are more productive, diverse and open to re-reading. They are interdisciplinary and irreverent, breaking new ground in museum exhibition-making, developing new methods, forms of expression and themes.