How to be seen: an introduction to feminist politics, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions

This is an introduction to an edited book, and develops insights that arise from the new research collected in the book as well as a critical reading of feminist literature on contemporary art practice and museum studies. One of the defining features of this introduction (and the whole book) is that it eschews the categorization of feminist criticism/practice into questions of 'generation' or 'geography' which has dominated accounts of feminism and art since the 1990s, and instead identifies a series of problems that have structured engagements between feminism and art exhibition across time and space. The text suggests that we should analyse exhibitions as instances of encounters between feminists and institutions; and/or as an aspect of feminist practice that has tried to realize a particular and distinctive form of exhibition; and/or as a dynamic of 'othering' that calls the one (and the other) into existence through the curatorial process. A defining and original feature of the introduction is its insistence on exploring all of these questions in the context of economic history of this period (rather than the more established frameworks for feminist enquiry of cultural history or psychoanalysis) as a principal feature of this are of study which concerns art, life and labour.