Gendered Heritage: Interspaces and Intersubjectivity

Summary

Ideally, the intersubjectivity of heritage work creates space for the interaction of multiple gendered viewpoints maintaining a collective tension where heritage work flourishes in consideration of multiple lens, multiple meanings, and multiple gendered interpretations. The reality; however, is much further from the rhetoric. In medieval South Asia gender performance was a habituated component of the collective and individual social project. It remains so today. In this paper I work to consider the production of heritage, the engagements and motivations of heritage stakeholders, and to focus specifically on the life histories that develop around heritage places. Heritage sites are not static or rigid constructs - they are fluid and dynamic. How we study such dynamism is fundamentally shaped by our epistemological project and our own subjectivities. Heritage work deals with powerful past-negotiation and is an active site for the enactment of gendered identities and the projection of present gendered perceptions onto the past. Looking to medieval trade and transit systems and their maintenance today as heritage sites I attempt to recast this work in consideration of gender; examining how the social construction of gendered practice shapes the heritage project(s) I engage in and forms space within my research for gendered analyses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Engendered Archaeologies: Intersubjectivity in Archaeological Heritage Practice and Interpretation

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