What a Genderful World – Thinking through and making of an exhibition

Introducing What a Genderful World

On 10 October 2019 the exhibition What a Genderful World opened in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam with a spectacular dance performance by Sarada Sarita & Otion from the ISH Dance Collective, a light show by MAISON the FAUX and music by DJ Jasmine Perez (Figure 1). The happening filled the central museum hall with people of different shapes, skin colours, hair and clothing styles representing a multiplicity of gender identities and life stories. In April 2021, when the exhibition travelled to the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, COVID-19 measures restricted the opening to an online meeting. The exhibition ambassadors from Rotterdam included Hasna El Maroudi, collaborator of Lilith, an intersectional feminist media platform; Diederik Kreike, a theatre performer known from the children's television programme Koken met Konijnen; and Dean Bowen, former city poet of Rotterdam. They all entered in conversation with Mounir Samuel, the event's host, about what gender means to them. The feminist Rotterdam singer MEROL performed and Diederik Kreike gave a glimpse of his play FOK ME HOKJE, a title that could be termed Dunglish ¹ and that conjures up in the minds of Dutch speakers the questioning of gender boundaries.

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Figure 1.

Dance performance by Sarada Sarita & Otion from the ISH Dance Collective at the opening of What a Genderful World on 10 October 2019, Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. Photograph: National Museum of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum 2019.

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam make up two of the four locations of the umbrella organisation of the National Museum of World Cultures created in 2014 and since October 2023 called the Wereldmuseum (World Museum). ² Within the Dutch museum landscape the National Museum of World Cultures is the largest museum with a history of ethnographic practice. As there remain few institutions in the Netherlands that care for ethnographic collections, its responsibility is important in terms of research, care and interpretation of ethnographic or world cultures collections attempting to fulfil the mission statement of fostering world citizenship. Within a single institution, each location addresses the mission informed by their individual histories. In so doing, the Tropenmuseum, grown out the Royal Zoological Society Natura Artis Magistra (Artis) founded in 1838 in Amsterdam and the Koloniaal Museum (the Colonial Museum) established in 1864 in Haarlem, deals with its colonial past in critical ways (Veys, 2018: 138). Located in the Royal Yacht Club in Rotterdam, the Wereldmuseum carries with it a history of merchant collecting in Europe's largest port. The National Museum of World Cultures sees objects as referents for the creative ways in which people have given shape and meaning to the world around them, but also as vibrant matter that has shaped, and continues to shape people's lives. The museum is committed to the idea of a world with no centre or periphery. Conversely the museum stands by the idea that the world is constituted of spatial nodes in a global network of relations. This position is at the centre of what was attempted in What a Genderful World: looking at the many trajectories of gender-making practices across the world and bringing them in relation to cultural, intellectual and historical movements.

The central premise of What a Genderful World is that gender is a universal concern as everyone experiences a body that moves, lives and breathes in a gendered world. However, the experience and categorisation of gender differs through time and space. This parallels the thinking of the illustrator and layman scientist Iris Gottlieb (2019: 13) who states ‘I am not a scholar of gender studies, but I have a gender and a body, as do you. Every person who might look at this page has the experience of inhabiting a body in a gendered world’. This article will first discuss how gender is understood within Dutch popular debate followed by an exploration of the unique relationship between material culture, museums and gender, posing the question what collections can tell us about gender. It will attest to the museum's, and by extension the exhibition's, concern with societal relevance and inclusivity. Then I will examine the development of the exhibition concept, a process that not surprisingly resembled the history of establishment of many Gender Studies university departments. The last part of this article will take the reader through the thematic and spatial arrangement of the exhibition looking at some of the challenges and opportunities the exhibition offered, including a discussion of objects displayed, shedding light on the materiality of gender-related stories.

To conclude this introduction, I want to briefly describe my positionality with regards to gender, material culture and museums. I am a curator who has focused on Oceanic material culture for more than 20 years. Through my research on the role of barkcloth in western Polynesian societies and specifically in Tonga, Māori musical instruments, Pacific canoe cultures and research on Aboriginal photography, which also involved dealing with men's and women's knowledge and secret/sacred issues, I have engaged with questions of gendered objects, knowledge and art production. My field research has made me acutely aware of my outsider status and my perceived femaleness. Despite an inclination in my research and curatorial practice towards gender-related topics, this exhibition has been a steep learning curve. I have tried to address some of the many lacunae in knowledge and experience by reading academic papers and news reports. I have also had numerous conversations with a wide range of people including artists, film makers, designers, transgender people, drag kings and queens, male and female friends, my mother, grandmother, sister, brother and little nieces. In addition, I participated in a weeklong – 13 to 17 August 2018 – Gender & Diversity Radboud Summer School at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. This has set the theoretical framework for concepts including gender, diversity and superdiversity, ³ intersectionality, ⁴ sexual politics, queer, ⁵ crip studies ⁶ and critical race theory. ⁷ Throughout the development of the exhibition, I became acutely aware of the Anglo-American roots of these theoretical concepts that could offer an anchor point for ideas but were not necessarily a guiding principle. The introduction of a volume edited by Poferl and Winkel was published a couple of years after the 2019 opening of What a Genderful World, captures my thinking of what I was trying to achieve in the exhibition: ‘a rereading of the social fabric of gender in contrast to androcentrist-modernist as well as orientalist representations of “the gendered Other”’ (Poferl and Winkel, 2021: 2).

A moot point

In Dutch society, gender is at the centre of much of the public debate. It ranges from which pronouns to use when addressing people to clothing styles and the use of the public space. In 2017, Dutch national railways, the NS, ⁸ became the focus of attention when it started speaking to people using ‘Dear travellers’ instead of ‘Dear ladies and gentlemen’ (AD, 2017). That same year, Hema, one of the large department stores decided to no longer label boy's and girl's clothing (Van Haga et al., 2017). Even though the labels disappeared, the clothes were still arranged in gendered sections suggesting that boys would wear mainly blue and girls mainly pink. Furthermore, the discussion about the gendered public space is monopolised by gender neutral toilets. Also, in the museum, possibilities were explored of having gender neutral toilets within the national legal frameworks and those of the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where the exhibitions were housed. Overall, a growing number of public toilets in the Netherlands are conceived of as gender neutral or gender free. ⁹ At the same time ‘genderneutraal’ (gender neutral) was voted the most irritating word of 2017. According to the voters ‘genderneutraal’ testified to political correctness gone mad with many people claiming that the connection between an English word ‘gender’ and a Dutch word ‘neutraal’ was plainly wrong. The correct word the public claimed was ‘geslachtsneutraal’ (sex neutral) (Het Parool, 2017). It is clear that gender occupied and still occupies people's minds.

Given the increasing prominence of gender issues in public discourse over the last few decades – with the growing visibility of people with queer, transitive, fluid and multiple gender identities – the museum wanted to fully engage in its societal role and consider gender in a context that fits its collections. What might it then mean to question and examine gender categories as transitive, porous or relational, rather than as fixed and binary? Or in the words of the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, the aim of the exhibition was to ‘open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized’ (Butler, 1999: viii).

Museums, objects and gender

A growing number of museums aim to look at their collections in different ways. The same is valid for the National Museum of World Cultures that is conscious of its implicatedness in systems of power and privilege of which the gender binary is just one example. However, museums are also increasingly aware that despite concerns about including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, ¹⁰ and queer histories, these continue to be largely absent in a museum context. In addition, as curators and academics Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton (2020: 1) argue ‘museums can, and we contend, should, be active participants in the articulation of critically engaged and socially transformative ways of seeing, knowing, being, doing’.

Encouraged by the Dutch Queering the Collections network group set up in 2014, ¹¹ the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven for example tries to make queering the collection part of its practice. It describes the process as follows: ‘Everything that goes against the grain or that is unexpected or fluid in terms of identity, sexuality and politics particularly has a central place in the process. Queering sees sexuality as being fluid and rejects the general categories and standards. With Queering the Collection, the Van Abbemuseum is contributing to the visibility of the LGBTI heritage in the arts, providing support for gathering information and experimenting with it’ (Van Abbemuseum, 2016). Within the National Museum of World Cultures awareness is raised on several levels: Un/engendering the collections is since 2017 a research theme within the Research Centre for Material Culture, the museum's research institute (Nakamura, 2017) but also training sessions by the Transketeers (Peters et al., 2016) were offered for invigilators, security staff, museum docents and everyone connected to the exhibition What a Genderful World.

Queer Objects (Brickell and Collard, 2019) is an example of a publication that directs its attention away from museums in favour of objects that deal with issues relating to sexuality and gender. The editors’ central question is ‘What makes an object queer?’ (Brickell and Collard, 2019: 11). They describe queer as a shorthand for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and asexual identities’ (Brickell and Collard, 2019: 17). The editors of Queer Objects, however, do recognise that ‘writings on queerness have only occasionally intersected with investigations into material culture’. The same is true for gender when looking from a worldwide perspective. While the French sociologist and ethnologist Anne Monjaret (2014: 154) by 2014 notices a growing interest in studying objects in relation to gender, publications that make serious attempts at a global object-focused perspective are far and few between. An example is Sie und Er. Frauenmacht und Männerherrschaft im Kulturvergleich (She and he. Women's power and male dominance in cultural comparison) (Völger, 1997), the third and last part of a large exhibition cycle at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne. The first exhibition Die Braut – geliebt, gekauft, getauscht, geraubt. Zur Rolle der Frau im Kulturvergleich (The bride – loved, bought, bartered, stolen. On the role of women in cultural comparison) was held in 1985 and the second in 1990 entitled Männerbünde – Männerbande. Zur Rolle des Mannes im Kulturvergleich (Male associations – male bonds. On the role of men in cultural comparison). While in the first two exhibitions a clear binary was assumed, the third display – despite its title – showed a concern to deal with gender in a more encompassing way.

Making an exhibition about gender means thinking gender through collections that have traditionally hardly ever been considered through a non-binary, non-Western lens. Explorations of queerness have only rarely intersected with material culture. Indeed, our collections have for a large part been formed by male European collectors who projected their own understandings about gender on objects to fit western categorisations. Monjaret (2014: 153–154) points out that sociologists and anthropologists have long studied objects, made and used by men or women, to understand division of labour or ritual activities. Interestingly, material culture studies have up to recently not progressed much further than this man/woman binary.

The male collector's gaze made objects related to beautifying the body, food preparation, textiles and baskets ‘female’, while weapons related to hunting and warfare were considered ‘male’. Hence, rethinking gender in ethnographic collections starts by accepting the idea that our holdings are deeply colonial and have therefore been assembled within a strong gender binary of strictly defined men's and women's realms. This Western epistemology has often clouded the way curators and material culture specialists approach objects that originate from contexts where the gender binary is not the norm. How do clothing, jewellery, seats, carvings, wood block prints, historic photography, masks, music and contemporary art, when considered seriously, articulate, undermine or complicate ideas of gendered boundaries and bodies?

Before gender

In 2017 an exhibition team was composed consisting of an exhibition maker, Titia Zoeter, a project leader, Wendy Janssen, and myself, a curator, to start thinking about the development of an exhibition, which was to focus on ‘the woman’. ¹² The initial proposal for this exhibition posited that in all times and cultures, women occupy a special position, which has changed over time. The proposed exhibition aimed to present how women were or still are venerated, desired, but also feared and maligned referring to Christian ideas of the woman as the mother of God but also as a devil's creation. The proposal explained that in many cultures, men have played a role in the representation and position of women shaping societies simultaneously. For example, until 1958 women civil servants in the Netherlands received an official letter of resignation upon marriage. But this show on women should also pay attention to matriarchal societies where women occupy a dominant position. The conclusion was that through times and in different cultures, women's positions and roles are diverse. Therefore, the women's exhibition wanted to show the different aspects of women as primordial mother, creator, the young seductive woman, the prostitute, the comforting mother, the old wise woman, the saint, the witch, the female hero, … The exhibition proposal also theorized that throughout time, women's emancipation was a recurring theme, which should be addressed (NMVW, 2015). With its biblical references including Lilith, supposedly Adam's first wife who was also the first feminist, and focus on western archetypes, the exhibition proposal was steeped in western feminist thinking.

The opening year of the ‘women's exhibition’ at the Tropenmuseum was to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of universal suffrage in the Netherlands. Evidently, several museums and exhibition spaces had scheduled to commemorate this event, such as the Groninger Museum's Struggle! 100 years of women's suffrage, the Library of Amsterdam's De straat op! 100 jaar vrouwenkiesrecht en activisme (To the streets! 100 years of women's vote and activism), Ik vier mijn stem (I celebrate my vote/voice) in the central hall of the parliament buildings in The Hague, and in the city hall of The Hague 100 jaar algemeen kiesrecht (100 years of universal suffrage) (Atria, 2021; Groninger Museum, 2021; Parlement.com, 2019; Tweede Kamer, 2021).

The ‘Women’ exhibition would not have been the first display in the Netherlands foregrounding women. Earlier exhibitions all had a feminist perspective and a clear political and/or societal message. On 2 May 1913, De Vrouw 1813–1913 (The Woman 1813–1913) opened in Amsterdam, celebrating 100 years of women's achievements since the end of French occupation of the Netherlands in 1813. This show was curated by the Dutch malacologist and feminist Mia Boissevain (1878–1959) and Jewish Dutch pacifist and female suffragist Rosette Susanna ‘Rosa’ Manus (1881–1942). They hoped to further the cause of the Dutch women's suffrage by providing information on the women's movement and place in society. Next to political and social information, literature, drama and visual arts were shown. The exhibition presented in the style of late 19th century World Fairs had welcomed 300 000 visitors in the tents placed on the terrain of Meerhuizen at the Amsteldijk in Amsterdam by 30 September 1913. One of the most well-known visitors was Queen Wilhelmina who came in May and in August (Naber, 1913).

This ‘women's exhibition’ was a follow-up event of the 1898 show entitled Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid (National Exhibition of Women's Work/Labour) held in The Hague between 9 July and 21 September 1898. Featuring artwork and handicrafts by female artists, products by businesswomen, as well as speeches, lectures and performances, the exhibition hoped to draw attention to women's work and the terms under which they worked. The show was to encourage women to be active professionally (Grever and Waaldijk, 1998).

Towards gender

Considering the exhibition proposal putting women central, the historical exhibitions with their clear societal and political message and the shows celebrating the realisation of universal suffrage, it became apparent that the museum's management team aimed for an exhibition that talked about women. The exhibition team soon came to the conclusion that if we were to engage with an exhibition on women, we would have to use precise definitions of who is a woman and who is not, of what makes a woman and what is absolutely not ‘womanly’. And then why not include men? In addition, how could people who do not fit these binary categories of men and women be included? As the historian of gender and race Kathleen Brown (1993: 315) acknowledges, definitions of a ‘woman’ have proved of limited utility. She summarises this by asking the question: ‘Do attempts to define women merely trap feminists in a sticky web of essentialism, the legacy of Enlightenment theories of sexual difference?’ (Brown, 1993: 315). Trying to define men of course also falls into this essentialising trap.

Not wanting to preoccupy themselves with questions of definition, the exhibition team departed from the original assignment that aimed at an exhibition about women. Moreover, all of the exhibitions discussed above had a binary Western framework a clear tendency to equate gender as the equivalent of ‘woman’ in a very narrow sense as trans-women were excluded from the discussion. In the same way as many practitioners of women's history informed by scholarship in anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism, began to ask critical questions of their own methodologies, the exhibition team began to question whether an exhibition on women would address the audience we aimed for and achieve the societal relevance we wanted. Hence, we felt an exhibition about gender would offer us the possibility to reach our aspirations. For to study gender and to exhibit gender is to examine how a society assigns social meanings to the different biological characteristics of people and is by definition inclusive. Gender offers the possibility to go beyond the western binary, while taking issues of femininity and masculinity seriously, but also reaching out to other possibilities of being.

Actually, the exhibition team's thinking followed in broad strokes the history of Gender Studies. That journey began with feminists active in Women's Studies departments challenging established ideas of knowing, building upon the work of several thinkers. Margaret Mead (1949) argued the malleability of gender roles across societies; Simone de Beauvoir (1949) demonstrated how motherhood put women in a lesser position preventing them from achieving their full potential in the way men can; and Virginia Woolf (1929; 1938) disputed women's exclusion from education and knowledge creation. By the 1980s and 1990s university programmes developed researching men and masculinities, leading to Men's Studies. Following these developments Gender Studies departments were established, focusing on gender identity and the representations of gender as the central theme across disciplines such as history, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, pedagogy and geography (Marchbank and Letherby, 2014: 14–19).

Choosing and staying on track with gender

For the exhibition What a Genderful World, the team made a resolute choice to examine gender in its own right. In western thought systems, masculinities and femininities are construed through the capacity of men being able to attract women and women being attractive to men. The reproduction of socially constructed links between gender and sexuality impose an ideology where heterosexual enactments constitute the adherence to the male or the female gender (Wolkomir, 2009: 495–496). The exhibition team wanted to clearly make a distinction between who people feel attracted to – sexuality – how people like to be intimate with others – sexual orientation – and the societal values that are ascribed to certain bodies and ways of being – gender. Evidently, some gender stories cannot be told without addressing norms related to sexuality and sexual orientation.

In order to help the exhibition team stay on track and explore the complex layers of gender stories, an advisory board was composed of nine experts with diverse backgrounds from the fields of the performing arts, fashion, feminism, activism, academics, editorial fields and gender-related interests. They brought personal experience with them as well. They included Redouane Amine, a freelancer who is concerned with male emancipation in connection to feminism. He advocates for a broader definition of masculinity and therefore the existence of multiple masculinities. Milou Deelen is a journalist and feminist, who has been writing about different topics including slut shaming ¹³ in magazines as Vice, Glamour and Grazia. Rikkert van Huissstede, a theatre maker, explores the lives that exist outside the mainstream gender categories. One of his shows Boys will be boys examines masculinities. Martijn Kamphorst is editor-in-chief at Winq, the largest queer lifestyle magazine in the Netherlands and Belgium. Ana Paula Lima is a Brazilian activist and chairperson of Trans United. She focuses on rights of bi-cultural transgender people, a group that is often forgotten. Jasmijn Rana is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She brought her knowledge and expertise stemming from research on sport participation of Muslim women in the Netherlands and Morocco and how everyday lived experiences intersect with race, ethnicity, gender and religion. Mounir Samuel, a political scientist and journalist, works on the intersection of media, art and culture. Eliza Steinbock is an assistant professor of Gender and Diversity Studies based in the Literature and Art Department at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University. They take an interdisciplinary perspective towards the aesthetics of bodily difference, the politics of visual culture, the practice of inclusivity and cultural participation. Aynouk Tan is a fashion journalist, curator, lecturer and advisor focusing on the connection between appearance and identity politics. The members of the advisory board aim to deconstruct colonial, neoliberal and heteronormative narratives (personal communication 1 March 2019). They intervened at several stages in the exhibition development process giving feedback on the title, the design and also the interactive elements of the exhibition.

A walk through ‘What a Genderful World’

Exhibitions organise complex ideas in a spatial experience where bodies, senses and minds are activated. In thinking exhibitions, designers play an important role as do the constrictions of the museum building. The Tropenmuseum demands a very linear setup while the Wereldmuseum has in some instances more flexibility. Still, the exhibition had a linear layout, with people moving from one consecutive space to the other.

The first designer of the exhibition conceptualised gender as a tripartite space: a zone for masculinities, one for femininities with in between a section for those objects that did not neatly fit into either of those binary categories. However, objects are messy and contentious in their meanings. In addition, ideas around gender are shaped and expressed differently through time and space, but other intersectional aspects including race, religion, socio-economic class, age or sexual orientation are equally important. The exhibition team felt uncomfortable with a tripartite set up. The comments from the advisory board were finally decisive in distancing ourselves from this tripartite division as it opposes femininity and masculinity, inclusion and exclusion in the gender binary, and the West and the Others. Hence everything that transgressed this binary would have been, even when not explicitly stated, categorised as an anomaly in the world of gendered lives and its objects.

Therefore, the travel through the exhibition was composed in a more flexible manner, imagining how different audiences might be affected at one point in time by the way gender is conceived in the societies they live in through the bodies they inhabit, the education they received, the role models they are presented with, the spaces they may enter, the power relationships and the playfulness with gender codes they may engage in. This would allow for opening up possibilities to visitors to think diverse gendered socialities and ‘multifaceted constitutions of gender realities’ (Poferl, 2021: 1). For example, when a police skirt (sulu tavatava) ¹⁴ is presented as part of the police uniform in Fiji, should this be considered an expression of a gendered identity? The seven thematic areas were framed around the following questions: (1) What do you think? (2) Does your body determine your gender? (3) How do you become a gender? (4) How ought you to behave? (5) Gender without borders? (6) Who has power here? (7) Playful with gender? The questions invited visitors to consider or explore issues rather than telling them what to think.

The visitor was drawn into the exhibition by reading the introductory panel, watching Courtney Act, an Australian drag queen, pop singer and entertainer explaining what gender is and then entering the yellow space organised around the question: ‘What do you think?’. People were invited to ponder about the fact that our use of language, sense of humour, the way we dress and which aspects of our personality we show can all be expressions of gendered identities that may feel so natural that one may not even be aware of them. However, through the display of objects related to wearing skirts, dresses, make-up or physical strength, audiences reflect on femininity, masculinity and the diversity of gender identities. The objects also touched upon how our thinking is conditioned in a gendered way. For example, to some researchers the fragrant powder boxes ¹⁵ used by members of the nomadic San populations in Namibia and Botswana could not be conceived of as being used by any other gender than the female one. The museum database reinforces that idea by describing how only women applied the sweet-smelling powders mixed with fat on their skins. Nevertheless, eyewitness accounts explain that both men and women used this make-up to beautify themselves and carried the decorated tortoiseshell practical containers around their necks as jewellery.

Throughout the exhibition there were interactive elements as some visitors like to experience information rather than obtain it visually. In this introductory bright yellow space, there were boxing balls where everyone could measure personal strength and think about what displaying strength means in terms of gender identities.

The visitor then entered into the thick of the subject matter with the question: ‘Does your body determine your gender?’. In this space made up of beige and brown tones, one was invited to think what the ways of bodily presentation say about gender identity, but also how modes of presentation are determined by cultural norms in time and space. Objects in this section related to the treatment of body hair, showing or dissimulation of vulvas and penises, but also to practices of bodily transformations such as elongations of skulls and binding of feet to fit beauty standards. By making an imprint of your own body on a pin wall, visitors are invited to think whether and how elements of their story are featured in the exhibition. In this section, extracts of the 2007 Iranian documentary by Tanaz Eshaghian Be Like Others, revealed many of the entanglements between gender and sexuality. In Iran, where it is believed that your body determines your gender but also your sexuality and sexual orientation, man to woman sex-change operations are permitted. On the other hand, homosexuality is an offence which forces some Iranian homosexual men to change their sex in order to be able to have a condoned normative heterosexual relationship with a man.

The pink and blue room talks about the socialisation of children; in short it discusses how one becomes a gender. The colours of the space played with the idea of pink being for girls and blue for boys. This now persistent, worldwide idea has only existed since the mid-20th century. Before then, both high-class men and women wore pink, from the 18th-century Parisian elite to Indian princes around 1900. Industrialisation and mass production in the 19th century made pink available to the lower classes, changing its meaning from chic to common. While everyone could wear pink, men were more likely to wear this colour derived from red and associated with blood, war and strength. World War II had seen the participation of both men and women in the war effort, thus blurring the gender roles. Thereafter, a clear differentiation between men and women was deemed important for a society struggling to get back on its feet. Advertisements, for example for toys, contributed to this, particularly via the colour pink. Now, the meaning varies from sweet, dear and childish to erotic: a reason for some to be anti-pink (Barraclough Paoletti, 2012: 99; Gottlieb, 2019: 88). In the exhibition gendered pink was discussed with barbie dolls, pink Lego, Japanese cute girls merchandising, designed by Rune Naitō (1932–2007); ¹⁶ a Dutch 18th-century pink suit ¹⁷ for a 4-year-old boy and a Mexican pink satin and cotton 15th birthday, Quinceañera, dress ¹⁸ worn in the 1990 by a girl celebrating this important day with expensive presents, like a car or a trip to Europe. The Quinceañera girls base their style on examples from films and advertising, often influenced by beauty ideals from the United States, such as the colour pink. The show also featured two photographs, respectively, representing a boy in a room full of blue toys and a girl in a room with plenty of pink toys, both the work of the Korean JeongMee Yoon who researched in The Pink and Blue Projects (2006–2008) how marketing campaigns spread the idea that pink is for girls and blue for boys (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Image showing part barbie dolls, pink Lego, Japanese cute girls merchandising, designed by Rune Naitō (1932–2007); a Dutch 18th-century pink suit, a 15th birthday dress from Mexico, The Pink and Blue Projects (2006–2008) by Korean JeongMee Yoon and Anamorphosis (2018) by Judth van IJken in the section ‘How do you become a gender?’. Photograph: National Museum of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum 2020.

The section discussed how upbringing – by parents, family, school, the community – plays an important role in who you become. The educational paths of boys and girls are often clearly separated, with rituals and festivities to confirm their masculinity or femininity. Some cultures are more ambiguous in their socialisation as became clear with a documentary film about gender-free schools in Iceland but also with early 19th-century Japanese prints by Katsukawa Shun'ei (1762–1819) ¹⁹ and Ishizaki Yūshi (1768–1846), ²⁰ a silk scroll painting ²¹ and knives ²² talking about the institution of wakashū. Until the beginning of the 20th century the term wakashū in Japan referred to a child that had external male sexual organs but whose role was in between that of a girl and a boy. Both adult women and men could fall for a wakashū. They were recognisable by their unshaven long hair and habitually wore a woman's kimono. Their bearing and mannerisms were often slightly erotic, which, in Japan, was considered typically feminine. However, around the age of fifteen, the wakashū underwent the adulthood ceremony, genpuku, making them into men. The hair above the forehead was shaved with triangular, razor-sharp knives. The remaining hair, tied in a ponytail, covered the shaven patch. It needed to be regularly neatly trimmed afterwards. From then on, the brand-new young men had adult responsibilities.

In the subsequent mint green space, the visitor enters the realm of role models and societal norms inspiring and sometimes forcing people to walk, stand, talk, laugh, in short behave in certain gendered ways. The objects present some of the religious, popular culture and colonial assumptions made in relation to gender. The work A Basic Instinct designed by Anna Aagaard Jensen (1990) in 2018 was included in What a Genderful World but made me feel uncomfortable as a curator who wanted to avoid these essentialist binary definitions. Her design consisted of three organically formed chairs with anthropomorphic spread legs. Only women were invited to take place in those chairs sitting self-assured with their legs apart. Jensen wanted to challenge everyone to think about social agreements and encourage women to take up more space. However, by prohibiting men from taking place, she tacitly implies that who is a man and who is a woman is clear to all. Moreover, people who do not fit this binary identity are automatically excluded.

While What a Genderful World did not address the Dutch universal suffrage through objects, this section did display aspects of women's rights worldwide. The double-sided, easy-to-wear bomber jacket ²³ designed by Mohammed F. Khoja for the Saudi Arabian brand Hindamme is an example. It was made to celebrate 24 June 2018, the day women in Saudi Arabia were allowed for the first time, to drive cars. The date that the ban on female driving was abolished, is embroidered on the black side of the jacket in gold lettering in Arabic and English. On the white satin side, the designer describes in an Arabic text the importance of this event for women's rights in Saudi Arabia. In this space, by way of interactive element, one could have oneself photographed drawing upon how actors, singers, models and influencers present themselves in specifically gendered way in relation to how you behave. This was also the space where objects discussed how colonisation and globalisation impacts on gendered ways of being through for example the display of a few penis sheaths (koteka) ²⁴ from the highlands of western New Guinea. These demonstrated that ‘Colonization itself was a gendered act, carried out by imperial workforces, overwhelmingly men, drawn from masculinized occupations such as soldiering and long-distance trade’ (Connell, 2014: 7). Koteka are traditionally worn in many highland areas of Indonesian Papua. Boys start wearing them from around four to six years old, without undergoing any particular ceremony. Variety in the sizes and shapes of penis-sheaths reflect group affiliation and the personal preferences of wearers. They are not linked to expressions of sexuality or social rank, contrary to the perception of many outsiders. Since the 1950s, missionaries and Dutch colonial administrators have campaigned for their replacement with shorts. Missionaries attempted to redefine gender roles, relations and identities. They particularly tried to influence male activities by discouraging polygamy and what was perceived as near-nudity, as well as providing new opportunities, such as school education and religious careers. From the 1960s onwards, penis-sheaths symbolised the primitiveness of highland Papuans for the Indonesian administration that launched an army-led ‘development programme’, named Operasi Koteka, in 1971. The operation was unsuccessful. Today penis-sheaths as well as western clothing continue to be worn depending upon the context. In 2018, several university students in the Papuan capital, Jayapura, caused controversy by wearing traditional clothes, including penis-sheaths, to class. They said it was a matter of showing cultural pride, no different than when their friends wear batik clothes. The history of koteka is an example of what happens when colonisation labels a particular expression of masculinity as deviant (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Section entitled ‘How ought you to behave’ showing the impact of colonialism and imperialism on the expressions of gender identity. The wearing of headscarfs in Indonesia, body covering clothes in Greenland and shorts in New Guinea are central. Photograph: National Museum of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum 2020.

The next themes take gender to a more societal level, moving away from the personal bodily, educational or psychological experience (Figure 4). Whether gendered bodies and behaviours are welcome anywhere is questioned in the purple space entitled ‘Gender without borders?’ Objects relating to religious buildings, seating areas, cafes, the street, or the house were displayed. The topic is widened by also exploring things that testify to the space in people's heads for a variety of gendered identities. A wool tapestry ²⁵ made by the Iranian Rassam Arabzadeh (1914–1995) shows a female-faced sun with almond-shaped eyes and thick, continuous eyebrows following the style in 19th-century Iran. The ideal face tells a story about feminine beauty, lust and the erotic. Before the 19th century, the sun was depicted with a male face, as a symbol of military and political power.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

The section ‘Gender without borders’ with centrally the wool tapestry by Rassam Arabzadeh (1914–1995). Photograph: National Museum of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum 2020.

An infographic in What a Genderful World created awareness about gendering in language: the word use, and also the language you speak, reveals how you and your community view gender diversity. For instance, in ancient Indian languages and some Siberian, North and South American, West African and in particular sign languages, men and women use a different word for the same thing. Also, as opposed to most European languages, speakers of Farsi, Yoruba, Turkish, Finnish, Samoan and many more do not differentiate between he and she, making the search for a gender-free pronoun redundant. Furthermore, the infographic discusses languages where nouns are gendered through the use of masculine, feminine or neutral articles.

Objects that depict Bahuchara, the hijra's protective goddess, are traditionally regarded as queer. Hijra are intersex persons or people who are of the male sex, but who are seen as neither female nor male. In Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh hijra are officially recognised in passport and other legal documents. Although hijras often fulfilled respected spiritual roles in the past, today, many are cast out by their families. They often live in poverty and rely on prostitution for survival. Well-organised hijra communities, led by gurus offer them protection. The exhibition displayed an early 20th century lithography, ²⁶ a 1980s lithography, ²⁷ a 2006 print, ²⁸ a 2005 story cloth ²⁹ each with the goddess Bahuchara and a portable altar ³⁰ dedicated to Bahuchara who cut off her breasts and relinquished her femininity, hence not fitting into the feminine and masculine binary. The display of these objects questioned the place of hijra in southeast Asian society.

The penultimate oxen red space explored the relationship between gender and power. A variety of high heels symbolising power or submission form the central part of this display. Inspired by the shoes of the cavalry of the powerful Persian army in their stirrups, Louis XIV launched the fashion of high heels in Europe. The higher the heel, the more powerful and more masculine the wearer. When Louis XIV as a style icon fell out of favour, the heel disappeared from the wardrobe. High heels later acquired a feminine, sexy and worldly image. Feminists see the impractical, uncomfortable footwear as a means of suppression and medical experts point out the health risks to joints and back. Certain women fight not to wear them, as the recent Japanese #KuToo, a word play on kutsu (shoe) and kutsuu (pain) shows. Others fervently favour heels for everyone. This section also explores jewellery and women's money testifying to matriarchal societies, the exceptional gendered position of eunuchs in Medina as guardians of the Great Mosque and the grave of the Prophet Mohammed in Medina, the role of the queen mother in the historic and contemporary kingdom of Benin and the role of jewellery as expression of status.

The final space was bright red and dealt with the reversal, exaggeration, criticism of gender roles in playful ways. Objects relating to theatrical performances in music, fashion, television and on stage are central here. Upon leaving the exhibition, visitors could comment on questions including: ‘High heels: power or powerlessness?’, ‘A happy gender-free world?’, ‘Who are your gender role models?’, ‘In which gender box do you fit?’, ‘How do you break gender norms?’, and ‘When are you playful with gender?’.

Gender in the ethnographic museum

By sidestepping essentialist definitions of gender identities, the exhibition team of What a Genderful World departed from the original assignment of an exhibition about women. Instead, questions of what makes gender, in relation to the museum's historically and geographically diverse collections, attempted to do justice to the multiple intersectional layers such as race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic class, age, sexuality and/or sexual orientation. The exhibition team has tried to explore what gender stories, clothing, jewellery, seats, carvings, wood block prints, historic photography, masks, music and contemporary art can tell about gender when considered seriously. We accepted the idea that our holdings are deeply colonial and have therefore been assembled within a strong gender binary of strictly defined men's and women's realms. This Western epistemology has often clouded the way curators and material culture specialists approach objects that originate from contexts where the gender binary is not the norm.

The exhibition reflected the museum's role in the societal debate around gender and was aimed at culture savvy audiences of young city dwellers and older more established museum goers. The diversity of the topics and its societal relevance made visitors rethink gender. Many of them even noted that the exhibition was particularly suited for children who could be familiarised with issues around gender in a friendly and considered manner. The visitors rated their visit generally highly, stressing they valued the diversity of the topics and the possibilities of interaction, attracting a high number of first-time visitors to the museum often by word of mouth (Sondervan, 2019: 9). Even though this exhibition is only a first step in the process of considering gender in an ethnographic museum, it still seems to have achieved its goal of making visitors think around the topic of gender and has thus perhaps made the societal impact the museum had hoped for. This exhibition has in addition contributed to a gendered approach to material culture, enabling to asking different questions to the objects in the collection.

If one takes the perspective that things are an intrinsic part of being human and shaping the world, objects also take an essential role in gendering bodies, social relations and ways of being. In What a Genderful World objects ‘provide essential tools for thought’ demonstrating that they are important vehicles for realisation of individual and group identities (Tilley, 2006: 7). The exhibition has thus initiated the cross-fertilisation between the ever-evolving fields of material culture and gender studies, disciplines that thus-far have not seemed natural allies. In addition, I argue that the curatorial and visitor engagement with objects and the exhibition making and experiencing process show that exhibitions can be a research tool (Herle, 2013) providing a way of writing an ‘anthropology of the otherwise’ as coined by the anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli: ‘This anthropology locates itself within forms of life that are at odds with dominant, and dominating, modes of being’ (Povinelli, 2011).