Seeing the Unseen through the Feminist Museum Hack

Abstract

I teach a course on culture and adult education and I begin by asking the students to name five male and then five female artists. Monet, Van Gogh, Dali, Picasso, Gauguin and more come easily for the former whilst eyes cast downward and silence meets the latter. Save gender, I set no parameters yet the students visualize ‘Europeans’, ‘famous’ and ‘painters’. Activities on ‘historical figures’ yield similar results. What is responsible for creating such limitations to our cultural, social, political, historical, and aesthetic world? The education system is one answer but another, and the focus of this chapter, is art galleries and museums (hereafter simply ‘museums’). Whether one frequents them or not, these ubiquitous cultural institutions have the power to produce, shape and “mobilise representations of the world past and present [telling us] what the world is, or should be” (Hall, 2013, p. 127). Feminist cultural theorists Carson and Pajaczkowska (2001) refer to representations as ‘the seen’, and they are powerful because sight more than anything else is “considered evidence, truth and factual” as it establishes “a particular relation to the reality in which a visual is considered” (p. 1). Therefore, what we see, and are shown, and the settings of seeing and showing such as the authoritative context of the museum, produce reality. Carson and Pajaczkowska also draw attention to the relationship between the ‘seen’ and the ‘unseen’, with the former acting as a façade “to an underlying and unseen system of meaning” that has implications ranging from aesthetics to identity (p. 1). Deconstructing the seen to unearth the unseen systems of meaning that perpetuate gender injustices has been a preoccupation of feminist cultural researchers for decades. As a feminist adult educator and researcher with one foot in museums and the other in gender justice and change, creating a pedagogical activity to operationalize pedagogically and investigate methodologically the unseen has been my aim. I have taken to heart Plantenga’s (2012) challenge to design “tools to analyse the underlying systems of power that institutionalise and manipulate identities in ways that justify oppression, discrimination and often violence” (p. 29). Manicom and Walters (2012, p. 4) too call for new “pedagogies of possibility ... grounded in pragmatic