

Un/Engendering the Collections: Rethinking Gender in the Ethnographic Museum forms part of our long term research and collecting interest not just to better engage the role of our museum in the study and representation of gender formations in the global context, but also to propose new collecting practices addressed when gender and sexuality as critical categories of analysis are considered outside a purely European Enlightenment tradition. In large part, it also comes out of the curational work done around the exhibit What a Genderful World, curated by Wonu Veys.
The idea to think un/gender/ing from the objects in our collections emerged from work by Wayne Modest, Amal Alhaag, and Carrie Nakamura.
Research coordinators for edited volumes emerging from this work: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Josep Chanza, and Wonu Veys.
As institutions of collecting and display linked to academic disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology, we recognize ethnographic and world cultures museums as potentially playing an important role in both scholarly and public comprehensions[i] of gender and sexuality. We are interested in probing: What kind of gendered histories do we have in our collections? If much of the way we learn to feel, act, or be hijra, kinnar, fa’fafine, trans, female, and male comes less from what we have been told than how we interact with our surroundings—people, objects, and built environment—then it behooves us as ethnographic museums to attend more carefully to what the objects in our collections can tell us about how gender is understood across the world, and across and through differing temporalities: outside of so-called ‘Western’ paradigms that give primacy to the dualistic nature of gender (i.e. male/female), but also in dialogue and in resistance to this often oppressive prototype.
To better attend to questions that link gender to the material cultures of the objects that populate our museums and their depots, we invite scholars from an array of disciplinary backgrounds to:
The edited volume, anticipated for 2021-22 will then have two parts: