Exhibiting Women: Women's Voices In Contemporary Museums

In recent years,women's voices have become a popular topic in museums and galleries.Based on this,a number of women-themed museums and exhibitions have emerged in China.These trends in museums that "display women"raise the following questions:How do museums and women's topics meet?What can a female perspective bring to the inherent binary structure of museums?What are the national trends in the presentation of women?Using Gaby Porter's museum studies,poststructuralism and feminism as theoretical lenses,this paper explores the challenges posed to museums by women as social constructs using gender as a tool,and the current state of women's unrepresented and unspoken presence in museums.In museums under the influence of binary structures,women workers and women-themed exhibitions are often in a relatively marginal position.Based on this,Porter tries to go beyond the framework of gender and explores the complex situation of women in museum exhibitions with a transcendent perspective.Her own proposition is that bring women back to history.At the same time,her focus is not on history itself,but on the way how museums present history.Subsequently,this paper takes domestic women's museums,art museums and women-themed exhibitions as research objects,and sorts out women's narratives in museums from macroscopic and microscopic perspectives.Macroscopically,since the beginning of the twenty-first century,deeply influenced by the feminist movement and the awakening of women's consciousness,museums also began to reposition their functions,and domestic women's museums began to establish exhibitions that attracted widespread attention in the society,women's history began to enter the viewers' vision from various perspectives.On a micro level,this article lists three recent exhibitions on women:"Twentieth Century Fashion Trends","Four Questions of the Bauhaus",and "Stand by Her".In the "Twentieth Century Fashion Trends",it can be seen that young woman in China in the twentieth century,under the influence of the new cultural movement and feminism,pursues freedom and emancipation of thought,and their aesthetic interests changed.One of the exhibits,"Four Problems of the Bauhaus," introduces the women who fought for the opportunity to study at the Bauhaus School in the twentieth century.The exhibition "Stand by Her" covers many aspects and carries out various activities,and female artists try to construct women's subjective identities through many practices,so as to arouse public attention to women in modern society.The study believes that museums,as public cultural spaces,are trying to re-examine,interpret and represent women's culture from "her perspective".Museums' attempts to reconstruct women's cultural identities will contribute to the construction of an equal and fair public cultural space.