Cyborgian entanglements: post-human feminism, diffraction and the science exhibition Bundled-up in Blue

ABSTRACT

This article articulates a post-human feminist museology within cultural heritage museums. It focuses on the entwined intra-actions of museum artifacts, traditional exhibition forms and technologies, and considers how sex/gender is enmeshed in entanglements of meaning and matter. Its aim is twofold: to introduce insights from scholars working within feminist studies of technoscience into museological theorisations, and to put such articulations to work through a case study of an exhibition at The National Museum of Iceland. Through Barad’s theorisations of agential realism and Haraway’s articulations of the cyborg, the article contributes to a diffractive mapping of intra-active cyborgian entanglements that make different possibilities possible and elucidates how materialities, discourses, technologies and nature come into being through ways that are always open-ended and uncertain.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-human feminism
• diffraction
• cultural heritage museum
• agential realism
• cyborgian entanglements
• new materialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Arndís Bergsdóttir is a Ph.D. student at the University of Iceland. Her project is a contribution to a feminist museology and focuses on articulating an onto-epistemological approach to historical and heritage exhibitions with specific emphasis on women’s roles in museum narratives. Arndís is also a part-time lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Iceland and an open position GEXcel scholar at Tema Genus at the University of Linköping.

ORCID

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

Notes

1 In 1938, the director of the National Museum of Iceland proclaimed the body’s sex as ‘female’ based on the grave goods (Lesbókin, 1938).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Eimskip University Fund at the University of Iceland under Grant number 1032521.