Musées et genre : état des lieux d'une recherche
Résumé
Research on museology and gender appears primarily within the American and English context. It is part of a militancy which, since the 1970s, has denounced the failure to acknowledge women in cultural and artistic milieus. But why do these protests choose to target museums? It is undoubtedly because the museum is a very powerful multidimensional place, at once institutional, social, educational, media-related and cultural, which employs practises of collection, classifcation and display of stories through selected objects. It is as much a place of production and legitimation of knowledge as it is a place of afirmation of cultural sensibilities and identities. From its historical origins, as shown by Tony
Bennett in The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics (1995), the museum asserts itself as a place of social construction and identity-building which cannot possibly be apolitical. One could go further and suggest viewing the museum as a place that sets standards as much as it can also transform and perform them.
The objective of this article is to trace a historiographical review of advocacy research combining engaged museology and gender up to the present day. Since the 1990s, study has provided a re-reading of the history of museums, museology and museography through the lens of gender, that is, in the light of the cultural and social construct of masculine and feminine identities and their cultural and sexual multitudes.
From early work that was very critical of museums (articles by Gaby Porter, the work Gender Perspectives. Essays on Women in Museums, edited by Jane R. Glaser and Artemis Zenetou) to the most recent historical approaches re-evaluating the role of women in museums (the work of Leslie Madsen-Brooks), the article will discuss the process of efacement and invisibilization of certain social and sexual identities in museums (collective anthology Gender, Sexuality and Museums, edited by Amy K. Levin), as well as examining the possibilities of a scenographic and museographic re reading through the prism of gender (articles by Irit Rogoff and Rebecca Machin). Whether they develop a historical or a more contemporary point of
view, whether they are case studies or general refections, whether they are based on personal experience or promote a purportedly scientifc
neutrality, all of these works invite one above all to shift the focus, to look anew at a museology which has too long remained androcentric and reliant on heterosexual norms. Examining patterns of discrimination, strategies for entryism and identity negotiation, acts of resistance in or against the museum, or hegemonic discourse, these studies have also beneftted from a strong interdisciplinarity and a dialogue with fertile theoretical concepts. By defnition interdisciplinary, gender has from this point of view an undeniable heuristic value for achieving a more accurate and nuanced vision of masculine and feminine heritage. This article thus explores the diversity of methodological and thematic points of view seen over the course of the last three decades, in order to note gaps and omissions and point the way to new research perspectives to follow from this standpoint.
Les recherches articulant muséologie et genre émergent majoritairement dans le contexte américain et anglais. Elles s'inscrivent dans un militantisme qui, depuis les années 1970, dénonce l'absence de (re)connaissance des femmes dans les milieux culturels et artistiques. Pensons notamment à l'article de Linda Nochlin sur les femmes artistes en 1971, puis à celui d'Ann Sutherland Harris en 1973 pointant le faible nombre de femmes aux postes à responsabilité dans les départements d'art des universités et dans les musées 1. Les années 1970 voient aussi la création de plusieurs programmes féministes offrant de nouvelles interactions entre pratiques artistiques, enseignements, expositions et débats avec le Feminist Art Program en 1971 au California Institute of the Arts et l'ouverture du Women's Building à Los Angeles en 1973 2. C'est aussi un moment de fondation de collectifs activistes féministes comme WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) et WCA (Women's Caucus for Art). Les années
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