Darlene E. Clover

Using objects-based research, feminist adult educators and museum curators shared and described artifacts of personal and professional meaning. These objects enabled participants in this feminist study to articulate ways in which we enact power and change, and ways in which we can imagine and create a more feminist world. Through this study we challenge systems of patriarchal colonial oppression, addressing inequities across gender as it connects with class, race and culture and showing how objects reveal alternative ways of seeing and shaping the world. In this paper we take up feminist object-based research as a way to step outside ‘patriarchal logic’ to reimagine the world through four themes: corporeal, including the body and objects worn on the body; communicative, which speak and narrative; protect, representing feminist action and power, and disappearing, referring to that which has been lost or made absent. These show recurring patterns and connections that collectively enable us to imagine a more equitable and just feminist world.

As an academic teaching courses on critical theories of adult education, I employ artsbased teaching and research and facilitates community workshops worldwide. I argue that working across formal and nonformal spaces is a central part of the social responsibility of academics in adult education to work for change, and equally, stems from the conviction that theory and practice need one another. Theory enables us to see more deeply and clearly into what is taking place in the world or what we are being taught to see and to believe about the world. Theory guides both the why and how we educate, the context and intention of which is central and the diverse methods we use, which are elemental.I wish to ask the strategic question: What are adult education and research for? How participants and students answer this question, this essay argues, depends on where they stand and their perceptions of the world and of education and learning. Everything adult educators think, say, do and/or teach is done in context. My context as a feminist adult educator is our highly inequitably gendered world. Gender is understood as central to the web of assumptions behind dominant social imaginaries that hold certain conceptual frames in place. I maintain that the mesh of recent crises has brought to light a steady rise of a global patriarchal backlash of fundamentalist and fascist agendas across the globe, threatening the gains made by women and LGBTQIA communities. Asking what feminist adult education and research are forproduces a complex of answers, but for adult education and research the answer must be: for radicalgender and social justice change, for the disruption of patriarchal knowledge, for the fight against “epistemic injustice”, and for new imaginaries for women to make sense of and story the worlds they inhabit. Finally, the essay discusses the aims and methods of a 5-year international SSHRC project focused on feminist imaginary as a pedagogical tool for epistemic justice and change.

This article focuses on the feminist design, content and pedagogical impact of a multi-media research exhibition I curated entitled Disobedient women: Defiance, resilience and creativity past and present. Through the conceptual frameworks of feminist adult education and feminist exhibtionary praxis, I discuss the development and design of the exhibition and then share findings from a study that aimed to unearth the learning made possible for visitors by viewing the exhibition’s stories and images. Findings show that as Disobedient Women instructed intentionally about gender injustice past and present, it made possible new interpretations, meaning making and cross-cultural connections; as the exhibition illustrated a deeply problematic gendered world its playfulness and beauty challenged assumptions about activism and feminism and encouraged hope and aesthetic agency. While important challenges and critiques were raised, I argue that intentional, participatory feminist exhibitions such as Disobedient Women are valuable processes of feminist adult education because they open up possibilities of seeing and thus knowing things differently and acting in the interests of gender justice and change.

How do we illuminate patriarchal ideologies that hide in plain sight in museums and art galleries and still play a powerful active role shaping andmobilising problematic gendered constructions that re-enforce gender and oppression? This question was central to our development of the Feminist Museum Hack, an innovative pedagogical, investigative, analytical and interventionist practice we have designed to use in the complex context of cultural institutions. In this article, we share the various components of the Hack, its aim to strengthen analytical and visual skills and connect disconnects of language and image. The Hack makes a valuable contribution to feminist adult education by enabling us to see the unseen of intrinsic patriarchal ideologies in museums. Further, the Hack works to develop imagination and sharpen an oppositional feminist gaze, giving us a sense of agency with which to disrupt the privileged authority of museums and unearth their problematic discursive, visual and rhetorical politics that have implications for seeing and knowing gender beyond their walls.

In response to calls by feminist cultural theorists to develop means to unmask patriarchy, the system of power that lies at the heart of museums that maintain problematic hierarchical binaries of masculinity and femininity, we designed the Feminist Museum Hack. The Hack draws on theories of representation, feminist critical discourse analysis and visual methodologies/literacy to operate as a critical and creative practice that can be adapted to any museum context. The primary aim of the Hack – a methodology and pedagogy – is to provide a lens through which adults can see the unseen of patriarchy and how it hides so cleverly in plain sight in the museum’s practices of representation. In this article, we use examples of how we have used the Hack as researchers and educators in various museum settings to expose, decode and disrupt the hegemonic gendered messages in the images, displays, curatorial statements, labels and even in object placement and stagecrafting. We also show how the Hack functions as a practice of ‘direct agency’, a means to re-write and engage with museum narratives. We argue that the Hack is an important and innovative practice because it turns museums into spaces of ‘pedagogic possibility’ – sites where we can learn new strategies of feminist opposition to counter the male gaze and its ability to define women’s lives.

Public museums and art galleries in Canada are highly authoritative, and trusted knowledge and identity mobilising institutions, whose exhibitions are frequently a ‘blank page’ of erasure, silencing, and marginalisation, in terms of women’s histories, experiences, and contributions. Feminist exhibitions are a response to this, but few in Canada have been explored as practices of feminist community adult education. I begin to address this gap with an analysis of two feminist exhibitions: In Defiance: Indigenous Women Define Themselves, curated by Mohawk-Iroquois artist, Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, at the Legacy Gallery, University of Victoria; and Fashion Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, curated by Ryerson Professor Alison Matthews David, at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. Although dissimilar in form, focus, and era, these exhibitions act as powerful intentional pedagogical processes of disruption and reclamation, using images and storytelling to animate, re-write and reimagine the ‘blank pages’ of particular and particularised histories and identities. Through the centrality of women’s bodies and practices of violence, victimization, and women’s power, these exhibitions encourage the feminist oppositional imagination, dialogic looking, gender consciousness, and a visual literacy of hope and possibility. Yet, as women’s stories become audible through the very representational vehicles and institutional spaces used to silence them, challenges remain.