Female Worker’s Role in Representing the Past in Museums

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behind the Scenes and on the Stage: The Women Who Shaped Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Museums perform as a window that exhibits the archaeological materials from the past to the public, and are often considered as neutral ‘authorities’ showing the ‘truth’. However, recent research doubts the authority of museums, arguing that the materials are interpreted and represented subjectively and selectively. One branch of these critiques, feminist museology, explores museums’ role in constructing the real-world gender pattern. This research intends to explore how women workers in museums can make a difference in interpreting and representing archaeological materials. This research will review the engendered process of interpreting and representing the past, and explore the influence of female museum workers in challenging gender construction through the case study, the Imperial War Museum, Britain. In this case study, it is evident that the gender identity of museum workers provides their curation a perspective that is significantly distinguished from social gender norms, but the intersectionality with race, class, and other identities makes other exclusive effects emerge. This research suggests building diverse and inclusive professional teams in exploring this past, in order to build up and disseminate a full image of the past in an inclusive perspective.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Behind the Scenes and on the Stage: The Women Who Shaped Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53743