Museums and Gender: Gaze, Visibility and Reinvention
Museums have been long recognised as institutions that hold vast amounts of power through the role they play in society. As guardians of memory, form, art and history, a common assumption made is one of impartiality in what a museum stands for, and how it represents truths of the past or present. There is more to examine in this context, however. While museums are inherently tasked with the representativeness of lived experiences of people, what they also carry forward in often-unexplored nooks and corners is a reflection of the privilege of the collector, of the socioeconomic and political capital held by those who organise the collection, and of the normalisation of this process.
Archives then, cannot be understood as being neutral. They are not merely repositories of objects, artefacts, and documents, but a historical framework that governs social acceptance and social relations. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault takes this into account to describe how the construction of an archive leads to the creation of relations and institutions that are continually formed and sustained through the process of archiving. From a historian’s perspective then, it becomes useful to look at the archival history of a museum, treating archiving as a process as opposed to an object.
The importance of re-looking what archiving means lies in its ability to help us reframe contexts. We no longer look at an object in isolation, separated from the social context within which it exists, but look at the processes that led to its acquisition at a museum. We then turn to look at the narratives that are built around the object, to ascribe power relations to it. This disrupts the process of the construction of a story — which becomes essential if one wants to critically examine the sources of their stories. Often rooted in essentialist thinking, this re-examination allows for individuals and power-holders both to consider how social constructions within institutions can lead to equally damaging outcomes, something that is usually taken for granted when “cultural” value is ascribed to something.
Take the example of a museum space itself. These spaces are coded as being masculine — in part because white male architects (or white-male-name codified institutions) are associated with presenting the plan and building the space — and in part because the grandeur of scale is coupled with power, and thereby, masculinity. In addition to this, artefacts contained within museums often tend to be the work of white male artists, side-lining the often-brilliant work done by people of colour, often women. The resultant male gaze also leads to figures of women more likely represented in nudes, further gendering the process of representation in museums. While the museum does not exist to cement the male gaze, why does it begin to feel that more often than not, that’s what it achieves?
Museums can thus bring forth an important range of questions, ones that are specific to the culture or society they represent, but also those that apply to issues of gender in institutions across societies. Importantly, they become spaces for us to examine the history of archives, whose stories are being preserved and told? Whose stories are tucked away in a corner and remain mostly unheard of? Who is telling these stories — what is the perspective taken, and can the power imbalance there be corrected? And how can museums acknowledge their gendered construction and biases while working to shift this skew closer to equality?
The International Museum of Women (IMOW) based in San Francisco is attempting to shift this narrative through amplifying the voices of women across the world in the areas of history, art and culture. In doing so, IMOW is not a series of objects preserved in glass cases, but an interactively programmed online experience that redefines what both ‘woman’ and ‘museum’ can mean. By opening the museum to the community, the museum has also enabled participation, making the experience of ownership and collective responsibility and sharing a communal one. These will serve as archives well into the future — as contemporary as they seem now — and will serve as a space for narratives about gender to be understood.
In considering the process of documenting and archiving, The New York Times recognised the role of the honorific “Mrs” in reducing a women’s identity to that of her husband’s. What does it mean for gender roles and personal identity when one’s sense of self was shrouded behind a deeply entangled relationship with marriage? If Amelia Earhart and Frida Kahlo were among the names hidden behind such a veil, what does it mean for the acknowledgement of countless other women who become nameless of the process of archiving? In a modern-day equivalent of such stifling, the (US) National Archives also blurred out signs from the Women’s March in 2017, attempting to stay nonpartisan. When the backlash for this forced the National Archives to issue an apology, it allowed for a shift in thinking about how we view gender.
Gender does not exist in a vacuum of its own. Gender, identity, and the role of women in everyday life are as personal as they are political. As organisations slowly work towards recognising that and the inherent bias in their archival processes, it would be prudent to think about what historical narratives we receive, and which power structures facilitated such a narrative in the first place. While this is not the only form gendered archival processes can be recognised, the museum can then become a space where histories, the concept of gender, and the power dynamic of gender relations can be re-examined in order to create an equitable space that lifts the voices of all the people it claims to represent.
