Gender perspective at museums: a pending task

Abstract

Museum exhibitions put «before our eyes» a set of objects within a discursive plot and a montage frame. In this way, they activate memories, re-inscribe them in the present, update, also avoid, silence and minimize them. Since 2011 I have been echoing many authors and thinking: Are there women behind the showcase? Are we -women-represented in museographical stories? How? Are we agents of history and its processes? What areas and objects is the female representation associated to? What happens when women are absent from the museographical account? The answer is simple: without women in their stories, museums offer visitors an incomplete plot regarding society and gender. This work tries to recover the different curatorial actions carried out in the Ethnographic and Colonial Museum and in the Provincial Historical Museum linked to the visibility of women - from a gender perspective - in the museographical stories.