NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

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Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of

a Feminist Museology

Arndís Bergsdóttir

To cite this article: Arndís Bergsdóttir (2016): Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations
of a Feminist Museology, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI:
10.1080/08038740.2016.1182945

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 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2016.1182945

Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of a Feminist

Museology
Arndís Bergsdóttir 
University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that Received 31 August 2015
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considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging Accepted 22 April 2016
with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within KEYWORDS
academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances Feminism; post-human
challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not feminism; museology;
exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate materiality; ontological turn;
that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, agential realism; museum
but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and
how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s
agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that
shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion
of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of
object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that
can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities
possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that
emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to
move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so
long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage
museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology
re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different
possibilities possible.

Introduction
Everywhere we look we are entangled in and with materialities. Whereas museums are
currently being called upon to grasp these human and non-human relationships within
the world, we must also theorize the relationships within museums. Materialities are the
stuff of cultural heritage museums. Their predominant role within the representational
frameworks of museums has – in crude terms – been to anchor narratives. Yet, museum
materialities have touched and been touched by past and present humans: the makers and
users of artefacts, the bodies of visitors and museum staff, the technologies of archaeology,
conservation, and curation, to name a few. The encounters have been surprising or delib-
erate, but they have constituted reciprocal relationships between humans and non-humans.

CONTACT  Arndís Bergsdóttir  arb24@hi.is

© 2016 The Nordic Association for Women's Studies and Gender Research
 2    A. Bergsdóttir

These relationships need to be theorized and accounted for in feminist terms. We need a
re-thinking of the human that traverses the discrepancies of socio-cultural analysis that
assumes the human at the centre.
This article addresses this issue via the proposal of a post-human feminist museology.
It seeks to open lines of conversation that navigate towards feminist theorizations that can
articulate the reciprocal relationships between human and non-human entities in museums
that focus on collecting, assembling, and exhibiting cultural heritage. We have been forced
to notice the rapid changes currently taking place within the world. Discarded or lost objects
are accumulating in oceans, some disintegrating into particles that become part of marine
organisms, and climate change affects and is affected by humans and non-humans. Growing
technologies are enmeshed with human bodies in the form of analytical devices such as the
sonogram or medical interventions such as artificial heart valves. Such global circumstances
as climate change – which Fiona Cameron (2015) has discussed in a post-human museo-
logical context – have made it more difficult to discern the boundaries between human and
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non-human. We are becoming uneasy with the disproportional nature of relationships to

the world. Rather, as Cecilia Åsberg, Kathrin Thiele, and Iris van der Tuin have argued, we
are increasingly encountering notions of “how we see ourselves both in and of the world”
(Åsberg, Thiele, & van der Tuin, 2015, p. 151, emphasis in original).
Rich, post-disciplinary attention towards the entangled relationships of entities that are
human and/or non-human is currently radiating in academia. Such attention is, in fact,
a matter of some urgency, but it has also, as argued by Cecilia Åsberg, come about due to
“the inability of culturalist theories to deal with the concerns of embodiment, human or
non-human” (Åsberg, 2013, p. 2). As I write these words, conversations between museology
and post-humanist approaches such as (new) materialisms and object-oriented ontology
are gaining ground. For those concerned with regenerating museological theorizations,
these emerging conversations offer an alternative to present-day museum practices – and
the hierarchal divisions of agencies and the boundaries that are formed within traditional
cultural heritage museum environments – by recognizing museums as material processes,
rather than (or as well as) hybrid institutions largely committed to modern humanist thought.
Conversations with post-human feminisms are a re-tooling of feminist research that would
benefit museums as they make it possible to map meaningful contacts between museum
practices, technologies, science, bodies, and objects – to name a few possible encounters
– that let us discern which constellations of relationships get to matter, and which do not.
Instead of reading the meanings imbued in the contextualization of museum objects and texts
to understand the power relations that marginalize women in the narratives, as I shall discuss
later, they would yield understandings of agencies and entanglements. They also provide
alternative tools for the recording of histories as entangled human and/or non-human pro-
cesses that can be taken apart and reassembled, thus making different possibilities possible.
Museological alternatives that emerge from conversations of nature/culture entanglements,
and human/non-human furling, thus not only aim at regeneration as a way to move beyond
the dualist paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but a re-thinking of muse-
ology and cultural heritage museums. Rodney Harrison has suggested that a dissolution of
categorizations of heritage into separate natural and cultural domains will create “an expanded
field for heritage, one in which the open question of what and how heritage could be has
radical and transformative potential if directly addressed” (Harrison, 2015, p. 12). Concerned
with re-thinking museums as institutions appropriately equipped to engage in discussions on
 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research   3

entangled becomings, Fiona Cameron points out, in the context of museology and climate
change, that “in using the idea of materialization of the human and discourse, an idea that
gives agency to an array of things, institutions are no longer conceptualized as solely anthro-
pocentric social and cultural entities but also as material processes” (2015, p. 28). When it
comes to materiality, the main concerns of current feminist theorizations, such as post-human
feminisms and material feminisms, are re-workings of feminist frameworks that can encom-
pass human and non-human matter, in ways that are capable of recognizing their agency.
As discussed by Camilla Pagani (2013, pp. 168–169), dynamic political landscapes, and
academic attention to post-colonialism, multiculturalism, and globalization, have c­ hallenged
museums to interrogate categories, and to re-calibrate their processes and technologies. As
I have mentioned, museological concerns can no longer be met with notions of the human
as the centre of knowledge-making practices. In her cartography of feminist post-human
conceptualizations, Åsberg (2013) argues that there is a demonstrable need for feminist
theorizations to articulate the reciprocal relationships between human and non-human
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entities. This need has not entirely been met by the application of the deconstructive/
post-­structuralist/social constructivist frameworks predominantly applied in analyses of
­museums and their narratives. Yet, we must also acknowledge the genealogy of feminist
research in museums, which has made valuable contributions to a broad spectrum of
­concerns associated with the depiction of women in exhibitions and their representation in
narratives of cultural heritage. Since the 1980s, studies within feminist museology (although
it is rather sparsely populated) have encompassed concerns and insights relevant to how
cultural notions of gender are perpetuated and naturalized in museum discourses. Despite
differences in perspectives and theoretical approaches, these studies share the project of
articulating how artefacts and museum processes produce depictions of women in exhi-
bitions. They likewise share the effort of analysing those depictions as discursive produc-
tions participating in power relations and social processes (not only curatorial processes)
(e.g. Kavanagh, 1994; Levin, 2010; Machin, 2008; Melosh & Simmons, 1986; Porter, 1995;
Summers, 2000). Despite different perspectives, they have a common focus on how con-
textualizations of museum materialities and gendered power relations make man a central
figure in the stories told through exhibitions and displays, pushing women (as a binary
category of gender) to the less discernable outer rims.
Within feminist museology feminist theories have been applied to apprehend and cri-
tique the processes and underlying frameworks that generate meanings where man (and
notions of masculinity) plays a pivotal role. Also, museums have been considered as sites
for explorations of feminist frameworks, and frameworks that are sensitive to inequality.
Directing her focus towards museum processes, Hilde Hein (2007) suggests that when
aligned with philosophical and museological frameworks, feminist theories and museums
can influence each other in a manner that is mutually constructive. Speaking of feminist
critiques in general, she argues that feminist theories attend to the hierarchal separations
of subject and object. Aligning them with museological frameworks may instigate new
ideas that could have reciprocal effects. In a similar vein, Amy Levin (2010) suggests that
museum spaces can be used to explore feminist theories by utilizing museum collections
and objects as case studies and grounds for research. In dialogue with Åsberg, I would
suggest that critical attention to androcentric (re-)presentations within cultural heritage
museums is, in itself, a step towards post-human conceptualizations, under the umbrella
of feminist museology.
 4    A. Bergsdóttir

As pointed out by Åsberg et al. (2015) feminist critiques and perspectives always already
contextualize how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. In this article I attempt
to navigate concerns of feminist museology towards conversation within post-human fem-
inism by elucidating a few of the many stepping stones within the context of post-human
feminist museology. In doing so, I shall follow the work of a sample of feminist museologists
who have offered valuable contributions to a feminist museology within post-structuralist
frameworks. I seek concreteness in Karen Barad’s theorizing on agential realism and consult
the post-human feminist theorizations and articulations of Iris van der Tuin and Cecilia
Åsberg. There are, without a doubt, several avenues for articulation. For now, my question
is: How does a feminist museology come to matter?

Examples of (re-)presentations of women

To give an idea of what is at stake here, I shall begin with taking stock of empirical research
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within the (still) marginal field of feminist museology from the late 1980s and onward. This
body of research is slight, yet it has offered valuable analyses of the processes of museums,
mainly in Britain and Sweden, and the underpinning power relations and androcentric
discourses. The main focus has mostly been the “representations of women”, or to put it
more clearly, the representationalist depictions of women in exhibitions and their roles in
the contextualizations that form museum narratives. It is also worth noting that the research
mentioned here rests on diverse approaches. They range from critical projects that focus
on deconstructing the hierarchal relationships and binary oppositions inherent in museum
exhibitions, to a nomadic perspective that allows for pluralistic feminist approaches that are
sensitive to layered meanings within museum exhibitions, and the ontological and epistemo-
logical implications of knowledge production in museums. These diverse approaches also
imply that the use of the term “woman” in this research differs. Thus, earlier research tends
to rely on the notions of man/woman, sex/gender, feminine/masculine as a critical approach
to biological determinism or essentialist frameworks. More recent work, however, seems to
use the term “woman” as a “diversity of different subjects, who are considered to be equal
in value to each other and to men” (Lykke, 2010, p. 35). Despite the small pool of feminist
research in cultural heritage museums, these differences in approaches and definitions of
crucial matters contribute to a richness of theoretical perspectives.
In 1984 Gaynor Kavanagh pointed out that curators within the cultural heritage museum
sector have played a key role in initiating discussion on gender, aiming at exhibiting richer
and more challenging histories. Yet, in her mapping and critical analysis of historical exhi-
bitions in Britain, Gaby Porter (1995) observes that the exhibitions she surveyed actively
reproduced cultural assumptions about sex and gender. These assumptions, she argues,
demarcate the periphery of space and knowledge, reducing women to passive, shallow, and
underdeveloped roles within museum narratives. Women who fit the hegemonic mould are
idealized, while (problematic) others are approached with disproportional focus, discordant
gestures, or exclusion (Porter, 1995, pp. 108–109). This unease with Others in cultural her-
itage museums has also been discussed from a gender perspective by Wera Grahn (2006).
Tracing the former belongings of a homeless woman through their journey from the world
outside museum walls, to museum artefacts, and museum exhibition at the Nordic Museum
in Sweden, Grahn illustrates how the journey through museum processes entailed exclusion
of elements that did not fit socially constructed notions of gender. Narratives seem to be
 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research   5

“shaped in such a way that they will fit into a binary hierarchal matrix” (2006, p. 446). In
the case of the homeless woman, artefacts were transformed through museum processes
and contextualized in a manner that exhibited the stereotypical connection between woman
and home, as opposed to homeless: “Even the most homeless woman seems in this version
to devote herself to traditionally female duties so as to preserve her belongings and order
them in an aesthetically pleasing way” (p. 446).
Empirical examples of exclusion may be found in Leigh Summer’s (2000) research on
women’s costumes at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Britain. Only corsets that adhered
to stereotypical images of Victorian women as trim and dainty beings were selected for the
museum’s exhibitions, while corsets that were larger-sized and more worn were kept deep in
storage. According to Summer, this underscores how museum processes present an (uncon-
scious) choice. Choosing corselets that adhered to an idealized image of Victorian women
to speak for the undergarments of all Victorian women results in erasing the existence of
women with larger bodies and lower-class women who wore down their garments. However,
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exclusions from museum narratives seem to have a wider reference than reflections and
support of gender normativity alone. Porter’s (1988) research on exhibitions of domestic life
illustrates the exclusion of social classes, such as domestic help. She argues that narratives
are constructed by contextualizing museum artefacts in ways that specifically illustrate the
lives of women with prominent social status. Such contextualizations are not only part of
curatorial processes, but occur within deeper layers of museum processes and knowledge
production that categorize, interpret, and employ artefacts in a way that reduces or omits
marginalized groups (of women). As elucidated by Nicole Robert (2014), museums – along
with their management, curators, conservation specialists, and research professionals – are
currently aware of the exclusion of (intersectional) gender. Yet, I would suggest that most
museums straddle what Robert has called “primarily Euro-centric, heteronormative col-
lections and narratives” (p. 24) and approaches that seek wholeness in their representations
by adding identities that have mostly been disregarded. The issue of wholeness is attended
to from a sex/gender perspective by Grahn (2006), who argues that exhibition narratives
created within an epistemological matrix that does not include gender perspectives are
destined to reproduce simplifying dichotomies such as men/women.

Representation of reality - the (ab)use of objects

Following my focus on post-human feminist articulations, the examples I have discussed
present two related concerns: materiality and representations. The traditional authority of
museums is underscored by museum processes that mainly involve collecting, registering,
and preserving objects according to their established epistemological frameworks. As in
the example of the homeless woman at the Nordic Museum, discussed earlier, this entails the
careful fusion of specific material objects with a certain understanding of reality outside the
walls of museums that transcends time and space in exhibitions where it is presented – or
represented – to the public (Bjerregaard, 2013). As argued by Rebecca Coleman, representa-
tional thinking “underpins accounts of matter that privileges discourse” (Coleman, 2014,
p. 9). The matter of materiality has been widely discussed within social and cultural theories,
as well as within frameworks that can loosely be assembled under the term post-human.
On that note, Stuart Hall (1997) indicates the passivity of objects that exist as a see-able
and touch-able mass without any agency or meaning. Turning to materiality, Bjørnar Olsen
 6    A. Bergsdóttir

(2010) is among those scholars who have argued that the refusal to acknowledge the agencies
of material objects reduces them to language that mirrors understandings of the world. The
realness of matter, as Barad (2007) has shown us, lies in its discursive value – its ability to
take the form of language that mediates between knower and known.
Linguistic theorists’ emphasis on the discursive, however, has caused the material in work
such as Foucault’s (1966/1994, 1976/1990, 1980) to be somewhat overlooked. As Foucault
himself argued, it is precisely within the discursive that the power structures that define
discourses are expressed through processes that are material (1969/1972). Thus, I would
suggest, it is not necessarily a focus on representations and discourse as such that eliminates
the material (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008), but an exclusive focus on representations and dis-
course as entirely linguistic constructs that constitute a retreat from the material. It is here
that any linguistic play between socially constructed meanings and museum objects becomes
problematic. Cultural heritage museums are grounded in the accumulation, conservation,
categorizations, and contextualizations of material objects that constitute the foundation of
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their whole existence. However, within linguistic and discursive theories, material objects
have been treated more as evidence that corresponds to a world outside museum walls than
agentic entities. Museums tend to straddle the modernist world grounded in access to reality
and natural states of being through scientific objectivity, and the world of post-modern
thought where there is no reality other than the socially constructed perceptions of humans.
Donald Preziosi (2012) argues that museums approach objects through the semiotic instru-
ments of stagecraft and dramaturgy, where objects, ideas, and beliefs are managed in syn-
thesis. This not only refers to representations, but the museum as a system of knowledge
production, an “epistemological technology” (p. 82).
According to Preziosi, the product of such management rests on the conviction that the
staging of artefacts produces independent meanings. Thus, material objects are managed
according to certain scientific and epistemological processes and – ultimately, through
museum stagecraft – employed to represent specific correspondences to the outside world.
Reduced to language, material objects are used as symbols to reinvent the past through
interpretation generated by museum spaces. As we have learned from Stephen Best and
Sharon Marcus (2009), the employment of objects for this purpose is an undertaking that
aims to draw hidden meanings from the depths that are perceived as lying under the surface
of objects. Only certain elements of a whole are drawn forth (Malpas, 2012; Sontag, 1966).
These fragments are then translated according to a certain set of rules to encompass a way
of knowing that, as Stengers (2011) argues, has “been mobilized in defense of a public order”
(p. 374). Focus on representations as linguistic constructs, and the attendant ideological
impact on women’s roles in exhibitions and museum discourses, not only excludes the lived
bodily experiences of women (Hekman, 2008), but, as discussed by Stacy Alaimo and Susan
Hekman (2008), reinforces the binary oppositions of nature/culture, reality/language (see
also Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell, 2007). This (artificial) recreation of cultural binaries
ultimately reduces our access to the possibilities inherent in performative contextualizations
of becoming in the world.

Diffraction
The concept of diffraction not only opens up possibilities of meaning; it also opens up
possibilities of attending to agency. Diffraction is an optical phenomenon that Donna
 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research   7

Haraway applied (in her particular ironic manner) as early as the 1990s, precisely to chal-
lenge impressions of narratives as fixed (and I would add pre-existing) entities. “If Western
patriarchal narratives have told that the physical body issued from the first birth, while man
was the product of the heliotropic second birth”, she writes, “perhaps a differential, diffracted
feminist allegory might have the inappropriated others emerge from a third birth into an
SF world called elsewhere – a place composed from interference patterns” (Haraway, 1992,
p. 300). Thus, for Haraway diffraction is a “narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual and
political technology for making consequential meanings” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p.
102). Rather than producing something to be known, diffraction examines the entangled
state of knowing and being in the world. It records the history of material-discursive entities,
not as reflections that end up as categorizations, but as a passage. Thus, instead of allow-
ing endless reflections, it records processes that allow us to see “both the history of how
something came to ‘be’ as well as what it is” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 104). It is an
articulation of entities that allows for the making of difference as an alternative to reflection.
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Barad (2007) considers diffraction as a material-discursive phenomenon that elucidates

the effects of various differences, instead of representing mirrors upon mirrors that, in a
museological context, I would suggest, reflect images of a world standing outside museum
walls. Diffraction, in Barad’s view, attends to specific material entanglements as ways of
understanding “the world from within and as part of it” (p. 88). It is a constructive consid-
eration of differences that, unlike reflections, “do[es] not displace the same elsewhere, in
more or less distorted form, thereby giving rise to industries of [story-making about origins
and truths]” (Barad as cited in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 51). In a similar vein,
van der Tuin (2014) has regenerated interpellation as a post-human conceptualization of
diffraction that disturbs and interferes, and sets forth motions that centre on explorations
of the entangled states of humans and non-humans. In museums, this would imply an
alternative to the separation of subject and object involved in the production of knowledge
in exhibitions that results from an entanglement of the two.
Diffraction facilitates direct engagement with the material and thus speaks directly to
the distance between subject and object that has been at the heart of knowledge production,
not least in museums. Considering entanglements of onto-epistemological phenomena as
an alternative is a point I shall also visit later in this article. In an interview with Thyrza
Goodeve, Haraway (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000) demonstrates that diffraction is a potent
tool to record the histories of material objects as entangled processes of knowing and being
in the world. Her example is a diaper pin. For the woman wearing such a pin, it was a sign
of her affiliation with a birthing movement that advocated natural childbirth. Reading the
pin diffractively – by recording the histories inherent in the particular object as entangled
processes, revealing the histories of industries, regulatory systems, and ideologies – made
“visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not in order to make the other
meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single
statement” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 105). This engagement with materiality involves
conditions where possibilities and accountabilities can be taken apart, but also reconnected
in ways that make different registries possible.
Agency is not a human trait; indeed, agency is not something to be had or acquired,
for that matter, but already inherent in the entanglement of humans and non-humans,
of thinking and being. This nexus comprises a sphere of influences where new arrange-
ments can be produced, while building on former insights. Shifting from representation to
 8    A. Bergsdóttir

diffraction not only elucidates the materiality of lived experiences, it may also encompass
intersecting identities, the boundaries of discursive practices as patterns of interference,
and thus contribute to a feminist museology that matters.

Agential realism in museums

Within most museums at this time the production of knowledge requires our vision to be
directed toward what we see. Yet, diffractively accounting for interferences and material
semiotic actors that have an agentic part in their own construction compels us to consider
how we see, and how our visions are framed by technologies that allow distinct perspectives.
A compelling example may be found in Haraway’s (1984) writings on Akeley Hall, an exhi-
bition of African wildlife at the American Museum of Natural History. Haraway analyses
how visual and material technologies that the museum had at its disposal are instrumental
in shaping the hierarchical constructs (of animals, race, and gender). Although this study
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was originally written in the early 1980s, it is clearly a precursor to conceptualizations in

her later works (e.g. Haraway, 1989, 1992, 2003). In the cultural construction of exhibition
narratives in Akeley Hall, stories appear and disappear, through manipulative approaches
that reduce a disharmonious multitude of voices to a singular point of view. Haraway argues
that this point of view reduces (for example) women to peripheral entities necessary to
fulfil a particular story-telling, aimed – in this case – at “restoring manhood in the healthy
activity of sportsmanlike hunting” (Haraway, 1984, p. 53). The appearance and disappear-
ance of stories in the narratives at Akeley Hall, in Haraway’s account, reflects a paternal
solicitude that weaves lives and cultures “into and from a social and political tissue” (p. 35).
Following Haraway, the woven narrative mesh is presented in exhibitions through museum
technologies aimed at implementing specific meanings.
Concerned with the peripheral roles of women in cultural heritage exhibitions in the
1990s, Porter’s (1995) application of deconstructive approaches critically challenges the
dichotomous meanings (re)presented in museum narratives. By reading museum narratives
from her own perspective as woman, Porter examined the hierarchal binaries she claims are
inherent in museum exhibitions, not as constructs of disseminative practices, but as core
elements in museum processes of collecting and managing contextualizations of artefacts
– processes that lay the groundwork for a production of knowledge:
All these methods are presented as objective, neutral, and rational, their goal to create com-
pleteness and comprehensive historical and material record. From a critical and feminist per-
spective, these practices appear to construct and maintain the male order, with women at its
margins. (Porter, 1995, p. 108)
In discussing a stronger link between feminist cultural memory and collections of objects
from the Australian women’s movement, Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson (2013)
argue that when meanings depend on a frame of reference – managed within conven-
tional modes of practice in museums – that guides objects toward certain expressions,
they may be seen as ways of containing certain viewpoints within historical narratives. As
a result, the authors argue, narratives that fall outside such frames of reference may eas-
ily be lost through exclusionary practices in museums. Responding to the work of these
scholars from a feminist post-human perspective of agential-realism, I would like to draw
out the entanglements of subject, object, apparatus, and exclusionary practices elucidated
by their work. There is an entanglement, of human and non-human actors, that within
 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research   9

deconstructive/post-structuralist/social constructivist frameworks appear as man-made,

scientific (museum) processes that make certain elements visible through representations.
These processes, central to the arguments in the examples mentioned above, automatically
involve the exclusion of elements that thus become lost in the museums’ translations.
Exclusion, of course, can also be seen in the empirical examples presented earlier in this
article. Summer’s (2000) discussion of women’s corselets at the Victoria and Albert Museum
presents one such unfolding. Her analysis of corsets categorized as (re-)presentable and
un-representable suggests that the processes on which the museum depends guide certain
objects towards public view, while others, as also indicated by Bartlett and Henderson
(2013), become absent in museum representations. Thus, creating meanings depends on the
museum’s frame of reference in terms of Victorian women and femininity. Yet, by looking
at these analyses of narrative constructions within museum spaces, we can also see that, in
a way, the analyses perpetuate the binaries they set out to challenge critically, by putting all
trust on the significations within museum exhibitions (language), while overlooking the
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materiality of artefacts. As argued by Barad (2003), the matter of museums only matters
when it has been turned to language. As an alternative understanding of discursive practices
such as representationalism, her writings on post-humanist performativity offer a perform-
ative approach where the human and non-human, material and discursive are considered
inseparable; an onto-epistemological framework of agential realism.
Central to Barad’s (2007) work is an examination of the separation of subject and object
which, when dissolved, reveals an entanglement of the two, described as phenomena.
Apparatuses are certain material-discursive practices that not only leave a trace in the
phenomena they produce, in fact they do more: they are intertwined with their output,
a part of their dynamic being in the world. As articulated by Barad (2007), apparatuses
(devices, environments, theories, and/or technologies) are not implements that render an
uncontaminated outcome. Rather, they become with the phenomena they produce. Read
with Haraway’s (1984) example of Akeley Hall, museum technologies are an apparatus that
transforms entities into narratives woven to implement specific meanings, thus enmeshing
the implicated technologies in the exhibition outcome. To describe the logic behind the
concept of apparatus, Barad (2007; see also interview with Barad in Kleinmann, 2012)
draws on a well-known experiment in quantum physics, where electrons are projected at a
partition with two slits. Electrons go through the slits and leave a pattern on the wall behind
the partition. The pattern differs when it is being observed or measured in a way that cannot
be attributed to the materiality of the electrons. There is no knowledge to be had in the
observation of electrons as material entities, as their ontology changes according to how
they are measured or observed. This creates a shift in our point of reference. Our point of
investigation, feminist analysis and discussion, is neither the electron nor the apparatus, but
what they create together through (what she calls) intra-action – a phenomenon involving
the entangled inseparability of subject and object.
Thus, the primary ontological unit is not a distinguishable material entity with clear
parameters that constitute a separation between the observer and that which an observer
observes, but “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting ‘agencies’”. That is, “phenomena
are ontological entanglements” (Barad, 2007, p. 333, emphasis in original). Barad points out
that a separation between the agencies of subject and object through specific intra-actions
lead to agential cuts that leave traces of their relationship. This leads to her challenge of
the Cartesian split, where the division between subject and object is perceived as a given
 10    A. Bergsdóttir

condition. That reinforces notions of individuality where entities may choose to be affected
by other matters. Entanglements, Barad (2010) argues, are not pre-existing entities that
have been enmeshed and can therefore be disentangled. Contrary to Cartesian splits,
agential cuts do not reductively undo entanglements. Rather, they engage in agential
separability by putting together as they take apart. It is a form of reworking relations.
I would therefore suggest that viewing the cultural heritage museum as phenomena may
further elucidate how exclusionary boundaries are enacted in museum spaces, and how
such enactments produce understandings of the world that do not necessarily correspond
fully or in part with the complex entanglements of the human and non-human world
outside museums.
Phenomena are material expressions of how the world acts. Here, discursive acts do
not refer to meanings inherent in specific utterances (i.e. language). Rather they refer to
the performance of limitations that are simultaneously the making of meaning through
language and ontology of the material. Therefore, discursive practices are done, as they are
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the dynamic process of enacting ontic-semantic limitations to boundaries, properties, and

meanings; they are “specific material configurings of the world through which determi-
nations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (Barad, 2007,
p. 335). According to Barad’s agential realism, so are the material limitations that shape
performances of being in the world and making sense of it. Making sense constitutes know-
ing, not in a mode of causality by reacting in different ways to different triggers, but in a
way that implicates the entangled state of performances, which are not only an engagement
with human abilities but materiality. This engagement with materiality involves conditions
where possibilities and accountabilities can be taken apart but also reconnected in ways
that make different possibilities possible.

Return of the Subject?

Academics within museology have engaged with the urgent call for alternative theorizations
to frame new ways of thinking in a changing world. In the work of scholars such as Fiona
Cameron (2015) and Rodney Harrison (2015), pathways are emerging that are aimed at
re-tooling museums and heritage in general with frameworks that attend to them as com-
plex networks of processes and materiality. From the perspective of a post-human feminist
museology, attending to materiality as configurations of agentic entities calls for theoretical
precision. If what we seek, among other things, are modes of conceptualizations that are not
grounded in the binary oppositions of subject/object, nature/culture, we must address the
subtle differences between the emerging frameworks of an object-oriented ontology (OOO)
and post-human feminist frameworks that I focus on here, such as Barad’s onto-ethic-epis-
temological configurations within agential realism.
To elucidate these subtle differences, I follow the work of van der Tuin (2014) and
Åsberg et al. (2015), who note these partings of ways in their theorizations on post-human
feminist methodologies and navigations of contemporary feminist materialist genealogies.
van der Tuin (2014) argues that it is timely to revitalize discussions about subjectivity
and the androcentrism of a disembodied voice, where the status of Other is disregarded
and subjectivity is given: “I worry that OOO’s installation of an ontological turn, bereft
of human subjectivity, provides for the capital-S Subject to come back with a vengeance”,
 NoraNordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research   11

she writes (van der Tuin, 2014, p. 4), as this would entail the loss of agency as an entan-
gled state of being and becoming in the world. Åsberg, Thiele, and van der Tuin suggest
that both OOO and new materialist cartographies certainly overlap in some important
aspects (such as affinity and relationally) (2015, p. 146). On the one hand, new material-
ist cartographies emphasize an onto-epistemology (and ethico-onto-epistomology) that
includes both human and non-human beings in the post-human entanglement of being
and knowing, which representationalist articulations are unable to account for. On the
other hand, OOO builds on the premise of a pre-existing reality that takes into account
(makes space for) world-­makings that allow for the agencies of non-human entities, as
discussed earlier in this article.
Yet, as argued by van der Tuin (2014), such flat distributions of pre-existing agencies are
subject to human cognition. Thus, directing focus towards objects and the materiality of
museums does not necessarily entail a focus on materiality sans subject. Rather, it encour-
ages a situatedness of our “worldings without referral to god-tricks” (Åsberg et al., 2015,
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p. 164). Matter is not (as in OOO) inherently agentic, always ready for encounters and
social interaction, but comes into being through the dynamic movements of intra-acting
agencies. According to the non-anthropocentric post-human understandings of Barad,
the subject therefore is still there in the production of knowledge, but in a non-central
capacity: as relational in an onto-epistemological entanglement. What this non-centrality
of an entangled subject means is that we are not only responsible for ourselves, as central
in a configuration of cause and effect, but also for the other. Moreover, ethical responsibil-
ity aligns with conceptualizations of (human and non-human) entangled states, as always
inherent in the being of the world, of dynamic post-human performativity.

Conclusion
In this article I have navigated the concerns of feminist museology. My aim has been to
contextualize post-human feminist museology and emerging dialogues of post-human
museologies (in the plural). Attention to feminist museology, from a post-human point
of view, implicates conceptualizations that allow us to re-/co-think museums, not as pre-
existing entities in need of (feminist) rectification, but as entangled processes. I have followed
Haraway’s notion of diffraction. Diffraction – as records of the passages of material-discursive
entities – allows for entangled histories of being and becoming in the world, as encounters
that make difference by considering the effects of difference. Contextualizing diffraction
with the taxonomical spaces of cultural heritage museums engages the material and re-tools
recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be
taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. Barad’s agential-
realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings
in and of the world compels us to consider theorizations of feminist museology and the
interferences of critical attention to gendered/sexed makings of meanings in representations,
and considerations of entangled beings and becomings as difference.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 12    A. Bergsdóttir

Notes on contributor
Arndís Bergsdóttir is a PhD student and part-time lecturer at the University of Iceland, where she
teaches a graduate course on gender and museums and instructs a reading course in museology.
She is also an open-position GEXcel scholar at Tema Genus at the University of Linköping and is
currently working on her doctoral dissertation that involves interdisciplinary research in museology
and feminist studies.

ORCID
Arndís Bergsdóttir   http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1616-4432

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