Making feminist heritage work : gender and heritage

In this chapter I examine the ways in which a feminist approach to heritage and heritage studies can be used to illuminate particular gendered processes: processes that include attentiveness to the gendered curation, protection, preservation and commemoration of the past. In doing so, I examine selected studies and perspectives that may be helpful in framing heritage research around questions of sexuality and gender, as well as suggesting what additional forms of analysis, methodologies, theoretical approaches and conceptualizations feminist theory can bring to heritage studies. In bringing together gender with heritage, I argue that these are generally structured around four broad areas of enquiry. First, there is the question of gender in relation to heritage in terms of what one might broadly term ‘representation’, understood in terms of heritage collections, sites and performances. Second, there is work framed around gender and heritage from the perspective of consumption – defined as encounters with heritage by educators, visitors and tourists. Third, there are questions of gender focusing on production, usually in terms of a concern with the gendering of workplace structures, curatorial practices and heritage management conducted by those outside particular heritage institutions as well as on the inside. Finally, there are issues of gender in relation to local and national heritage policies, as well as international protocol and convention. In the chapter’s concluding section, I suggest briefly what areas within heritage studies require further work from a gendered perspective and what areas are undergoing transformations that require us to rethink gendered approaches and paradigms. The chapter begins with a brief critical history that seeks to reclaim some of the earlier and more obscured history of gendered approaches to heritage.