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designfordisplay · 5 years

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Marstine, J. (Ed) (2006). New museum theory and practice: An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Notes:

Museums are so ubiquitous/omnipresent in our ‘“cultural landscape that they frame our most basic assumptions about the past and about ourselves”.

A lot of people’s perceptions of history are based of what is displayed in museums. This can be dangerous as it can manipulate and focus people’s mindsets, not allowing for alternate and contradicting histories - Hiroshima vs Enola Gay.

Huge controversy over who the items may belong to - a lot of Maori taonga was confiscated and taken and is not connected to its whakapapa. These such items on display have tikanga surrounding how it should be handled etc.. te papa enforced the mana taonga principle to ensure cultural significance and history are taken into consideration when dealing with taonga. Tribal elders are also asked for advice. Other places do not have respect for the items in their possession or do not care that they are reunited with their whakapapa - what ever culture they may be from. Such as the elgin marbles of greece who are in in the possession of the British Museum where they refuse to return them - stating that they were “rescued” and that the british are keeping them still to guard against damage from the neglect, earthquakes and pollution they might face in greece. Timothy webb says that they have come to represent britain as the “inheritor of democracy from ancient athens” and in turn, justifying their “political” decisions such as “colonisation and domination of other peoples”. Greece is seeing this as a humans rights issue- sculptures were gained through illicit means (stolen) and they are being denied of their heritage.

We see museum objects as ‘unmediated anchors to the past’ - teachers often take students to museums making real of the things talked about in class.

But they’re not authentic a lot of the time, museums are about individuals making subjective choices - mission statements, architecture, exhibition display etc.. what is meant to be a neutral space is influenced by ‘subconscious’ opinions.

What does it mean for something to be ‘authentic’? “Claiming authenticity is a way for museums to deny the imperialist and patriarchal structures that have informed their institutions. They control the viewing process and suggest a tightly woven narrative of progress, an ‘authentic’ mirror of history.

Andreas Huyssen believes that museums are a mass medium, “a hybrid space somewhere between public fair and department store”. ‘They are a response to the quest for authenticity fueled by the cultural amnesia of our times; the information overload and fast pace of the digital revolution evoke a desire for stability and timelessness.

Museums are well trusted, american association of museums survey, 87% deem museums trustworthy vs 67% books and %50 tv news.

New museum theory (critical museum theory/new museology) - while workers ‘naturalise’ their policies and procedures as professional practice, the decisions made reflect underlying value systems that are encoded in institutional narratives. Its about decolonising and giving those represented control of their own cultural heritage (mana taonga principle) real cross-cultural exchange. 1960s artists began to demand a voice in determining how their works were displayed, interpreted and conserved. The civil rights movement challenged the museum to be more inclusive.

What is a museum? These categories are not mutually exclusive and overlap.

Shrine: longest standing and most traditional view of the museum is as a sacred place. Has therapeutic properties, place of sanctuary removed from the outside world.collections are fetishised, objects ‘possess’ an aura that offers spiritual enlightenment. Leads people to assign meanings to objects unrelated to their original function. Objects are prioritised over ideas. Collections are thought to be reborn in museums, where they are better guarded and more appreciated. The shrine idea is influence by church, palace and ancient temple architecture - processional pathways, staircases, dramatic lighting.. Create and performative experience. ‘All museums stage their collected and preserved relics… (museums) use theatrical effects to enhance a belief in the historicity of the objects they collect.’ - Prezoisi.

market-driven industry: museums often position themselves as being ‘pure’ and unsullied by commercialisation. Obviously people understand the items are valuable but this information is usually hush hush - would commoditise the objects. Heritage and tourism are collaborative tourism. Museums have borrowed from the theme park and cinema to create a spectacle that engages all the senses.

colonising space: often look to/reference a postcolonial (eurocentric perspective) history. Appropriate objects from non-western cultures to tell their own history. Naturalise the category of ‘primitive’. Indigenous individuals were rarely acknowledged - seen as following conventions while ‘original’ western artists were seen as groundbreaking and intellectuals. Destroys rather than preserves. UNESCO declared that repatriation is a basic human right. Mansuline gaze

Post-museum: no longer a museum. Will acknowledge the politics of representation, actively seeks to share power with the communities it serves and the source communities. Encourages diverse groups to respond in museum discourse. Curator takes responsibility for representation. Doesn’t shy away from difficult issues but exposes conflict and contradictions. Redress social inequalities. Promote social understanding. Responsibility always rests with the researcher

Greater accountability, sensitivity and openness

Michel foulcault - epistemes -

Renaissance:15/16/17th century humanist desire to understand the world through seeking universal knowledge.science over theology. Finding relationships between objects, microcosm of god. Curiosity cabinet - mediates between the microcosm of humankind and the macrocosm of god and the universe. Precursor of the museum to represent the world in miniature - was private though

Classical: mid 18th century world was too complex, chaotic and fragmented to be contained in the cabinets. Linnean taxonomy classifies the natural world by genus and species. Repositories, study collections that were privated were founded for scholarly research. The rare in the laws of nature was rejected and seen as uncharacteristic or were made to fit in. displays were linear and embrace an ideology of progress.

modern: late 18th century marks the end of elitist institution and beginning of democracy. Military practice became standard. Biology and philosophy arose. Disciplinary public museum -accessible to all. Aimed to fashion modern citizens. Art was royal, aristocratic or ecclesiastical contexts and reclaimed national patrimony and democratise and secularise the viewer. Temporary exhibitions were formed to celebrate napoleon's birthday.

(can’t change) Many believe museums still conform to this modern model. They may create new spaces and exhibitions for consumptions but at heart, remain elitist institutions. The decision making process often refrains from scrutinising their own histories. Continue to attract (more art galleries) an educated upper and middle class audience, often times remaining irrelevant to marginalised groups. They aim to generate consensus rather than conveying differing perspectives. Curators are above education department. Quantitative vs qualitative.

Are museums able to change or are they becoming obsolete?

(can change) they can because deconstructing the traditional value systems in just the beginning. Can occupy a third space, beyond elitism and consumerism. Some curators are eager to share power by initiating open dialogue and forging new partnerships with groups previously disenfranchised. There are many organisations that are taking diverse approaches to the representation of race, ethnicity, class and gender. Time of the museum as a ‘great collector’ is past. Provenance is important to consider!! Finding culturally sensitive ways to treat non-western objects. Museum is more than a material collection - a lot are still stuck with this. FORUM.

Biggest change comes with the relationship between institution and audience - should be equal. Some are supporting educational research that theorised the museum experience. Acknowledging diverse learning, lectures, performances, videos, workshops etc…

Constitionaries

Visitors must be critical about the choices made by museums.

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waysofseeinginpurple · 5 years

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The modern/colonial gender system

How does Eurocentred capitalist power function? Anibal Quijano writes that all power in relations of domination, exploitation and conflict as social actors fight over control of “the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products.” Eurocentred capitalist power is organised around two axes: the coloniality of power, and modernity. These work to determine the meanings and forms of domination in each area. In other words, Eurocentred capitalist power works by defining the meanings and forms of domination in sex, labour, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity.

The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of "race." The invention of "race" is a pivotal turn as it replaces the relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination. It re-conceives humanity and human relations fictionally, in biological terms.

One extension of the coloniality of power is that it gives rise to new social and geocultural identities.

Modernity is the “the fusing of the experiences of colonialism and coloniality with the necessities of capitalism, creating a specific universe of intersubjective relations of domination under a Eurocentered hegemony.” We can think of modernity as a ‘way of knowing’. This way of knowing is Eurocentred. This way of knowing emerged to meet the cognitive needs of capitalism, and to naturalise the identities and relations of coloniality. This way of knowing was then imposed on the Eurocentric world as the only valid way of knowing.

Given the construction of the categories, the intersection misconstrues women of color. So, once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the “intersection” so as to avoid separability. It is only when we perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color.

Another model of thinking about the coloniality of gender:

Paul Gunn Allen argues that colonialism of gender also involved imposing a binary. Many Native Americans were matriarchal, recognised more than two genders, recognised “third” gendering and homosexuality positively and understood gender in egalitarian terms rather than in terms of subordination. Also shows that the scope of the gender differentials was a lot broader than biology. Gender under Eurocentred capitalist power is one aspect of knowledge in modernity.

Oyéronké Oyéwumí writes in The Invention of Women that patriarchy may not be a valid transcultural category, since Yoruba had no gender system in place before colonisation by the West. In fact, gender has been translated into English in Yoruba to fit the Western pattern of body-reasoning.

Oyewumi understands colonisation in two crucial processes: the imposition of races with the accompanying inferiorisation of Africans, and the inferiorisation of anafemales, which excluded women from leadership roles, led to loss of property over land and other important economic domains. The introduction of the Western gender system was accepted by Yoruba males, who thus colluded with the inferiorisation of anafemales.

In Native America,

Paul Gunn Allen writes that before colonisation, Native Americans had a gynecratic spiritual plurality — Old Spider Woman, Corn Woman, Serpent Woman, Thought Woman are some of the names of powerful creators. The West then imposed the Christian idea of one supreme male being, which was crucial in subduing the tribes. It was a transformation of Indian tribes from egalitarian and gynecratic to hierarchical and patriarchal. This required meeting four objectives:

1. Replacing the primacy of female as creator with male-gendered creators 2. Destroy the tribal governing institutions and philosophies that are their foundations, as with the Iriquois and Cherokee 3. Push the people off their lands, deprive them of economic livelihood, and force to curtail or end pursuits on which their ritual system, philosophy and subsistence depend. This will make them dependent on white institutions for their survival. Patriarchy requires male dominance. 4. Replace the clan structure with the nuclear family, so that the women clan heads are replaced by elected male officials and the psychic net formed and maintained by nonauthoritarian gynecentricity is erased.

The programme of degynocratisation requires impressive “image and information control”. It leads to the “decimation of populations through starvation, disease, and disruption of all social, spiritual, and economic structures...”

How did men contribute to the transformation?

Both Oyuwemi and Gunn Allen describe how men were coopted into patriarchal roles. This involved an indifference to the struggles of women in racialised communities against multiple forms of violence against them and the communities.

In the Iroquois and Cherokee gynecracies, the British took Cherokee men to England and gave them an education in the ways of the English. These men later participated during the time of the Removal Act, which was a constitution that disenfranchised women and blacks, modeled after the United States constitution, whose favour they were attempting to curry.

So the Cherokee women lost the power to wage war, decide the fate of captives, to speak to the men’s council, to be included in public policy decisions, the right to choose whom and whether to marry, the right to bear arms.

The term ‘third gender’

Horswell (2003) writes that the term “third gender” does not mean that there are three genders; it is rather a term for speaking with the sex and gender bipolarity. It is emblematic of other combinations other than the dimorphic.

Horswell and Sigal’s work complements Allen’s in showing the presence of sodomy and male homosexuality in colonial and pre-colonial America. Eurocentred capitalism is heterosexualist; this heterosexuality has been perverse, violent, demeaning, a turning of people into animals, and the turning of white women into reproducers of “the race” and “the class”.

The gender system introduced was one thoroughly informed through the coloniality of power. They were pivotal in understanding the extent and important of the gender system in disintegrating communal relations, egalitarian relations, ritual thinking, collective decision making, collective authority and economies.

Implications of intersectionality

Feminism which began in the twentieth century centred on ways of knowing and theorising against a characterisation of women as fragile, weak in both body and mind, secluded in the private, and sexually passive. It did not bring to consciousness that those characteristics only constructed white bourgeois womanhood.

Females excluded from that description were seen as subordinates; they were understood to be animals in the deep sense of “without gender”, sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity.

Oyewumi and Allen make clear that there was no extension of the status of white women to colonised women even when they were turned into similes of bourgeois white women.

Oyewumi and Allen also make clear that the egalitarian understanding of the relation between anafemales, anamales, and “third” gender people has not left the imagination nor the practices of Native Americans and Yoruba.

White feminism wrote white women large. They understood women as inhabiting white bodies but did not bring that racial qualification to articulation or clear awareness. They did not understand themselves in intersectional terms, at the intersection of race, gender, and other forceful marks of subjection or domination. They then presumed a sisterhood, a bond given with the subjection of gender.

African slave females were not considered fragile or weak. Patricia Hill Collins provides a clear sense of the dominant understanding of women as sexually aggressive and genesis of that stereotype in slavery: Black women were portrayed in the image of Jezebel which originated under slavery. The image was of “sexually aggressive wet nurses”. The function was to relegate all Black women to the category of sexually aggressive women, thus providing a powerful rationale for the widespread sexual assaults by White men typically reporter by Black slave women. It also portrayed them as having increased fertility. African-American women were forced to work in the field, “wet nurse” White children and emotionally nurture their White owners, effectively tying images of jezebel and mammy to the economic exploitation inherent in the institution of slavery.

Women from the uncertain continents of Africa, the Americas and Asia were also libidinously eroticised in European lore. Anne McClintock (1995): “Travelers’ tales abounded with visions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes, feminised men’s breasts flowed with milk and militarised women lopped theirs off.”

The discovery of America was also eroticised as an encounter between man and women. For example, Jan van der Straet: “Roused from her sensual languor by the epic newcomer, the indigenous woman extends an inviting hand, insinuating sex and submission... Vespucci, the godlike arrival, is destined to inseminate her with his male seeds of civilisation, fructify the wilderness and quell the riotous scenes of cannibalism in the background... The cannibals appear to be female and are spit roasting a human leg.”

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helshades · 7 years

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"In your country"? France was literally the first country in the world to declassify transgenderism as a mental illness, and as of 1 January 2017 is one of the few countries that allows people to legally change their gender without the need for sex reassignment surgery first.

Oh, there was a distinctly electoralist move to try and salvage the reputation of the current government, which is in tatters, in granting, say, cosmetic changes to a noisy segment of the population; and the general ambiance over the last few years has been definitely, fiercely liberal—no, not in the American sense of ‘non-fascist’, in the contemporary European sense of ‘ultra-capitalist’—and recent politics have proven enough that anything supporting the consumerist weight of the Western world was more likely to get enforced than, say, genuine societal changes we do need... Bah. Nevermind.

Anyhow, I rest my case. It’s not because politicians forced a profoundly divisive law onto the system that this validates any scientific hypothesis. Science doesn’t work like this. Oh, I’m sorry, science literally doesn’t work like this. In France, the term genre currently used to translate ‘gender’ refers to grammatical gender (the initial use of the word in English) or is a synonym to ‘type, category, etc.’ The use of genre to refer to a person’s role in society as determined (or not) by their sex is very recent, also divisive, usually misunderstood, and vastly superfluous considering the history and makings of the French language.

‘Gender’ garnered some success in the first place because Victorians were too prude to use the word ‘sex’ in public, whereas the French would speak of sexe freely to refer to what is nowadays often qualified as ‘gender’. People in public didn’t have much inclination to speak of their genitals, see. The French language usually supposes that the French people are capable of locating context and make handy deductions from it. I may admit, somewhat reluctantly, that it might presume a little too much.

Later on, ‘gender’ gained more recognition and a few definitions, one of which at least was understandable (Robert Stoller’s, which is the UNESCO’s too, for instance), but it was meant to speak, rather specifically, in a psychiatric context,of people born with an ambiguous sex. You may consider that the concept of gender as it’s being spread nowadays is an invention of several medical and academic disciplines with agendas to lobby: sexology and endocrinology most of all. They needed to justify their very existence, amongst other things, and they used patients to create statistically-passing panels—which was impossible with intersex people due to a diminutive number, whereas ‘transvestites’ as they were first called were more numerous, and their conditions having no physical aspect, they offered something of a virgin scientific land to experiment upon. Never, ever lose sight of the interests of the pharmaceutical industry, too, which is going to make so damn much money with hormone therapy!

Seriously, it’s a social and societal maelstrom. People are so enthusiastic about something that is actively lobbying to destroy over a century of feminist struggle against patriarchy. Meanwhile, politicians everywhere are revoking women’s rights, except we can’t complain too loud because it would be transphobic to proclaim that our body belongs to us and nobody else. Feminists had worked so hard for the rigid social roles of the Victorian era to disappear, and now there are people claiming to be feminists whose agenda is to make the concept of gender an institution? Naturalising so-called ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ social roles that have been especially harming women and homosexuals for literally millennia?

On a side note, where have you seen that France has declassified trans-ism as a mental illness first? I know of the phrase gender dysphoria replacing it in the 2013 edition of the DSM...

... except you do know that the DSM isn’t the Bible and that its contents are legitimately questioned by a great many serious shrinks, who usually compare its place in the Shrinkworld to Monsanto’s in agriculture? And that the main criticism points at the fact that American, globalised psychiatry’s aim seems to medicate the whole world...?

Yeah. Nevermind. Would probably be too long to explain.

#answers #nonnies

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