The Feminist Museum Hack. A pedagogy of seeing and possibility

Abstract

How can feminist adult educators use art galleries and museums to promote gender consciousness and change? Our response has been the Feminist Museum Hack, an adaptable pedagogical, methodological, analytical and interventionist practice we use in our university classroom teaching, community workshop facilitation, and researches and on a variety of museums and galleries across Canada and Europe. In this article, we discuss how the Hack draws on theories of representation and feminist visual and discursive methodologies to unmask, interrogate and deconstruct patriarchy’s epistemology of mastery that lies concealed in the visuals and narratives of exhibitions to produce, shape and mobilise problematic understandings of masculine, feminine and ‘the other’. As a pedagogy of possibility, the Hack stimulates the power of visuality in the form of a feminist oppositional gaze able to see, read and imagine the world as if it could be otherwise.