What a Genderful World – Thinking through and making of an exhibition

Abstract

On 10 October 2019 the exhibition What a Genderful World opened in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. The central premise was that all people experience inhabiting a body that moves, lives and breathes in a gendered world. The article firstly examines the process of making this a ‘gender' exhibition. In order to refrain from labelling, the exhibition team departed from the original assignment that aimed at an exhibition about ‘women’. Asking questions of what makes a woman or a man or any other gender identity in relation to the museum's historically and geographically diverse collections, revealed the necessity to do justice to the multiple layers involved in a discussion about gender. Ideas around gender are shaped and expressed differently through time and space, but other intersectional aspects including race, religion, socio-economic class, age or sexual orientation may well be equally important. Hence, this section discusses the means by which this huge and complex topic is made accessible in the exhibition to a broad audience. Finally, the article takes the reader on a journey through the various areas of the exhibition framed around the following questions: (1) What do you think? (2) Does your body determine your gender? (3) How do you become a gender? (4) How ought you to behave? (5) Gender without borders? (6) Who has power here? (7) Playful with gender? In so doing, the article addresses the theoretical framework underlying the choice of certain interactives and the privileging of design elements. The article will conclude with a critical reflection on the museum's role in the societal debate around gender.