The Feminist Museum Hack as an aesthetic practice of possibility

Abstract

This article outlines the central components, foundations and key activities of the Feminist Museum Hack, an investigative, pedagogical, analytical and interventionist tool we have designed to explore patriarchal assumptions behind the language, images and stragecrafting (positioning, lighting) of museums and art galleries. We also share findings from a study of student and community participants who employed the Hack in a museum in Canada and an art gallery in England. While differences existed due to institutional genres, findings showed participants' ability to see and to reimagine absences, objectification, fragmentation, and double-standards and apply these to the world beyond the institution's walls. As a form of pedagogy of possibility, the Hack encourages critique, just ire and the imagination. As it hones visual literacy skills it emboldens participants to challenge the authority of the museum narratives and to engage in creative practices of agency and activism.

“The only way we knew how:” provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials

“…Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction.” Not coincidentally, vision—what we see, how we see, the ways in which the world is diffracted and represented through documentation, narrative, and storytelling—is central to the work of many feminist thinkers across a range of disciplines including Rich ( 1979 ), Haraway ( 1988 ), Hooks ( 1989 ), Butler ( 1997 ), Love ( 2007 ), Hartman ( 2008 , 2019 ) and Browne ( 2015 ), all of whom interrogate why the “view from nowhere” approach, the objective seer, perpetuates and sustains heteropatriarchal, classed, and raced hierarchies of power. A concern with the power of “‘scopic regimes’ and their relationship to gender inequality and oppression” has been extended to the heritage domain as well, where they are interrogated for their ability to normalize practices of collecting and interpretation that create “binaries laden with value judgments of superiority and inferiority” (Clover and Williamson 2019 , p. 145–146). Haraway suggests that “optical instruments are subject-shifters” ( 1992 , p. 295), and no one knows this better than those who have been rendered unwilling subjects, or not rendered at all, through the optical instruments deployed in the service of sustaining and enacting hegemonic power.…”