Abstract
Intersectional perspectives in postcolonial theories and gender studies have long argued that femininity represented in museums and exhibitions is subjected to multiple forms of othering.
1) Acquired social modes of looking at artifacts, women and/or Others correlate with androcentric male gaze that passivizes the object being looked at.
2) Women's social roles in binary androcentric system further render femininity and feminine activities as associated with passivity. Thus, reproduction, care, and socialization as women's tasks are symbolically relegated to domestic, immanent sphere as a type of work that merely maintains the continuity of a society's life.
3) In traditional patriarchal schemes, then, transcendental masculine activity is linked with political, economic, scientific, and decision-making realms that are socially constructed as more influential and significant factors in shaping history, thereby being viewed as more worthy of remembering and recording.
4) Representations of minorities in terms of their gender, racial, class, sexual and/or indigenous identities in institutions safeguarding knowledge and historical memory take place in a pre-defined and pre-mediated context shaped by Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian, orientalist epistemologies, which inherently relate knowledge to power and objectification. Tackling such a value system and epistemological bias posits a major challenge for today's museums, institutions of memory and educational approaches. The following article follows suit in discussing the theoretical and practical potentials of decolonial methodologies which have been formulated from bellow by (formerly) othered, gendered, racialized and objectified positions. The text seeks to demonstrate some of the opportunities this standpoint offers in analyzing a case of (more or less) good practice in the American Museum of Natural History in its attempt to contrast historical narratives pertaining to early European settlements in what is now New York City. Further, elaborating on the tradition of quilting in the U.S., human zoos and exhibits of the Berlin Wall beyond Europe, the article argues for nuanced contextualization and intersectional methods in current musem work.