The fleshyness of absence

Abstract

This chapter deals with growing number of scholarly engagements with feminism and cultural heritage museums. It describes such scholarly insights about an absence of women from exhibitions–if not a general absence from particular museum narratives, then an absence of aspects that do not fit stereotyped perceptions about women or established ideas about gendered roles. The chapter shows how addressing the gender political aspects of presence and absence reiterate binaries where absence is reduced to a relationship of present men and absent women. Defending the agencies of absence and acknowledging the politics inherent in non-present entities is a valuable contribution to articulations of a feminist museology. New materialist cartographies include Karen Barad's post-human feminist theorization of agential realism. In Barad's post-human feminist theorization of agential realism, ethics cannot be separated from becomings of matter. Feminist technoscience studies, however, trouble these uncontested, paternalistic and linear connections between good science and the general good of society.

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