Australian Feminist Studies

Revising the Record: Collecting, preserving and representing women's experiences across heritage, cultural and digital context

Almost a decade on from the Feminism and the Museum Symposium hosted by the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association at the National Library of Australia, this special issue of Australian Feminist Studies aims to examine the role and representation of gender in the collection, documentation, preservation, and/or exhibition practices found in Australia’s cultural and heritage industries. We invite submissions that centre women’s, gender diverse and/or queer stories across the GLAM sector, or which provide a blueprint for a gendered reinterpretation of existing collections, both physical and digital.

Although the role of museums and objects in fostering social memory is widely recognised, the presence of object and stories concerning women and gender diverse people in museums and other cultural and digital collections remains limited. Building on the seminal work Things That Liberate: An Australian Feminist Wunderkammer edited by Alison Bartlett & Margaret Henderson (2013), this issue will consider multidisciplinary feminist and queer approaches to the representation of gender in cultural and digital collections. As part of a global movement that includes initiatives such as the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) established by the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW), Mappa Mundi women’s atlas project at the University of Cambridge, the International Association of Women’s Museums (IAWM), and a growing number of online and digital initiatives that aim to raise the voices of women, all of which aim to counter the move by organisations such as Google who have removed key visibility initiatives such as International Women’s Day, Women’s History Month, Pride Month and many more from their online calendar. Emerging scholarship has also focused on digital mapping and archives in which experiences of queer belonging (Watson et al. 2024) and sexual harassment (Abdelmonem, & Galán, 2017) have been collectively documented.

In this special issue, we propose to consider what women’s objects are in the museum/heritage context and how women’s experiences are represented in physical and/or digital archives. We also welcome contributions that draw on feminist, queer, or gendered methodologies. We seek contributions from across disciplines to examine theoretical concepts of feminist and gendered understandings of the role of material culture in memorialising the stories of women across Australia.

We are interested in submissions from all disciplines that address efforts to counter systemic issues in the collection and management of women’s data, stories and knowledge.