Feminist Critique and the Museum

Educating for a Critical Consciousness
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-44017-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, 326 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 612 g

Thousands of diverse museums, including art galleries and heritage sites, exist around the world today and they draw millions of people, audiences who come to view the exhibitions and artefacts and equally importantly, to learn from them about the world and themselves. This makes museums active public educators who imagine, visualise, represent and story the past and the present with the specific aim of creating knowledge. Problematically, the visuals and narratives used to inform visitors are never neutral. Feminist cultural and adult education studies have shown that all too frequently they include epistemologies of mastery that reify the histories and deeds of ‘great men.' Despite pressures from feminist scholars and professionals, normative public museums continue to be rife with patriarchal ideologies that hide behind referential illusions of authority and impartiality to mask the many problematic ways gender is represented and interpreted, the values imbued in those representations and interpretations and their complicity in the cancellation of women’s stories in favour of conventional masculine historical accounts that shore up male superiority, entitlement, privilege, and dominance.

Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness problematises museums as it illustrates ways they can be become pedagogical spaces of possibility. This edited volume showcases the imaginative social critique that can be found in feminist exhibitions, and the role that women’s museums around the world are attempting to play in terms of transforming our understandings of women, gender, and the potential of museums to create inclusive narratives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sanford, Kathy

Clover, Darlene E

Taber, Nancy

Williamson, Sarah

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Feministische Perspektiven in den Wissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Kathy Sanford, Darlene Clover, Nancy Taber and Sarah Williamson

PART 1: Stories Museums Tell: Language, Discourse and Representation

1 Toward a Racialised Gendered Museum Literacy

Lisa R. Merriweather

2 Infinitely Obscure Lives: Depictions of Women at a US Historic Site

Micki Voelkel and Shelli Henehan

3 Fashioning Women, Defrocking Patriarchy: Exhibition Stories

Darlene Clover and Kathy Sanford

4 Hacking Language: Critical Engagement with Curatorial Statements

Kathy Sanford and Darlene Clover

5 An Exploration of Discourses on Niagara Falls: Feminist Praxis in the Exhibition 1779

Ash Grover

6 Signs Images Words from 1968: From Duoethnographic Enquiry to a Dialogic Pedagogy

Laura Formenti, Silvia Luraschi and Gaia Del Negro

PART 2: On War, Peace and Human Rights: Feminist Perspectivising

7 Whose (Military) Heritage? A Feminist Antimilitarist Analysis of Military Heritage Sites in Canada, England, and Europe

Nancy Taber

8 The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace: Pedagogies of Possibility of Social and Historical Justice for “Comfort Women”

Sachiyo Tsukamoto and Sara C. Motta

9 Familiar Brushstrokes, Different Narratives: Re-Framing Embodiment and the Futurist Free-Word Aesthetic with Stories from Female Veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces

Lauren Spring

10 Courage and Passion and World War Women: Interpreting Two Exhibitions on Women in Canada’s National Museums

Jennifer Thivierge

11 From Darkness to Light? Problematising Transformative Learning at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Monica Drenth

PART 3: Illumination, Provocation, Imagination

12 ‘ArtActivistBarbie’: The A/r/tographic Re-Deployment of Barbie in Museums and Galleries as a Feminist Activist and Pedagogue

Sarah Williamson

13 The Critical Advocacies and Pedagogies of Women’s Museums

Astrid Schönweger and Darlene E. Clover

14 A Room of Her Own: Interrogating Gender in a Historic House Museum

Mary Pinkoski and Lianne McTavish

15 Cultures of Headscarves: Feminist Intercultural Adult Education through a Challenging Exhibition

Gaby Franger and Darlene E. Clover

16 The Invisibility Cloak: Unveiling the Absence of Women Artists in the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea

Emília Ferreira, Joana d’Oliva Monteiro and Sílvia Prazeres Moreira

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kathy Sanford is a Professor at the University of Victoria and works in the intersection of teacher education and feminist adult education. Her research focuses on multiliteracies, gender, and museums and galleries as sites of learning.

Darlene Clover is a Professor of adult education and leadership studies, University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on feminist, cultural and ecological adult education, social, gender and ecological justice and arts-based research and practice, particularly in museums and galleries.

Nancy Taber is a Professor at Brock University and a retired military officer. Her research explores the intersection of gender, war, and learning in daily life. She is currently working in the area of fiction-based research.

Sarah Williamson is Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, UK, and specialises in arts-based pedagogy and arts-based enquiry. She researches the aesthetic construction of knowledge and the transformative value and impact of the arts in adult, professional and teacher education.