1. INTRODUCTION

In this essay, we are interested in how contemporary museums address sexual violence and feminicide. At this very moment, gender, and gendered violence, have re-emerged as most urgent concerns and are being turned into an ideological battlefield. There is large-scale feminist organizing against sexual violence and feminicide. One may think here of #metoo, first started by Tarana Burke in 2006 to combat sexual violence in schools and then going viral as a global hashtag in 2017. One may also think of the new wave of Latin American feminism, with the Ni Una Menos movement starting in Argentina in 2015 and Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Path) by Chilean performance group Las Tesis now being chanted in countries around the world. There is growing awareness of rising numbers of women murdered. According to the UN, 2024, there is the “harrowing global reality of femicide” with “one woman killed every ten minutes” globally.1 At the same time, we see that neo-fascist movements claim that rights to gender identities are a perverse ideology that threatens the established order of men being men and of women being women to the point of moral panic. The far-right also makes ethnosexist claims that the brown and black bodies of male asylum seekers and immigrants are a sexual threat to white women’s bodies. The rights to bodily and sexual sovereignty, that is, the freedom from sexual violence, of which feminicide —the murder of women because of their gender— is the most acute expression, remain the territory of political, social, legal, cultural, and, of course, feminist struggles. Writing in these troubled times of gendered deadly violence, we are asking how museums of the twenty-first century are not only registering these concerns of sexual violence and feminicide, but actively addressing them.

The we of this essay is forged in the coming together of a feminist cultural theorist concerned with questions of care and spatial practices and a feminist art historian concerned with studying history in culture. Acknowledging from where we write and inquire the work of museums in relation to sexual violence and feminicide, one of us (Elke) lives in Vienna, the former capital of the colonial imperial Habsburg Empire and a city marked by the history of the Holocaust and one of us (Lara) lives in Brighton, located in the former colonial British metropole as an immigrant from Canada, a context marked by settler colonialism and indigenous resistance. Having learned to think about violence in relation to our different historical contexts, we bring different understandings but shared interests in the continuities and changes of understanding colonial patriarchal sexual violence and its acute necropolitical expression in femigenocide.2 We view museums as public spaces and cultural infrastructures that articulate specific public pedagogies, and our larger aspiration is to undertake feminist analyses of museums that help us to understand how museums are part of the formation and maintenance, but also the undoing and changing of “gender regimes.”3 The configuration of gender practice today, in particular in relation to sexual violence, can be seen, experienced, and studied in museums.

As we argued in our 2022 article “Against Sexual Violence in the Museum: Art, Curating, and Activism,”4 the modern museum —which forms part of the system of public pedagogies of colonialism and patriarchy and was established through the opening up of imperial collections to the public— has to be viewed at least as a perpetrator of sexual violence at the level of the visual; one may think here of all the sculptures or paintings that chose as their motif Apollo and Daphne, Danae and Zeus, or Susanna and the Elders. Ancient mythology just as much as the bible were plentiful resources for imperial commissions inviting artists and sculptors to fulfil the desires of patriarchal voyeurism, making sexist violence not only appear normal, but, in fact, culturally elite, refined, and even erudite. These are no longer the only forms of culture that provide museums with material that displays or investigates sexist violence; in what follows, we have made some initial explorations of other ways in which museums are engaging with material and communities around the issue of sexual violence. We delve into the question of how the fundamental legal changes at the turn of the millennium that made sexual violence and violence against women crimes against humanity are reflected in cultural and societal responses, and specifically how they are registered in the work of twenty-first century museums.

In order to achieve this, we have adopted for the examination of museums a vocabulary drawn from legal, social science, and health studies that describes sexual violence, sexist violence, rape, gender-based crimes, and crimes against women as crimes against humanity. This vocabulary builds on decades of feminist activist and epistemological work to develop a language that expresses how gender regimes structure the acts and consequences of violence. While this terminology may not be the typical critical vocabulary used by museum studies scholars, we hold that this terminology matters to understanding how museums are articulating and, at times, resisting sexual violence. Sexual violence and femicide are epistemological and political feminist terms that explain that sexual violence is socially produced as part of a patriarchal gender regime. Most broadly defined, the term sexual violence acknowledges the link between aggression, sex and power. Particularly since the 1970s, feminist activists, law makers, policy makers, and scholars, have been working against the hidden dimensions of sexual violence, that is their domestic, private, and intimate nature. Tracing all the feminist work that went into finding words to describe conditions of patriarchy and regimes of gender and changing rights and laws at supranational and national levels, goes far beyond the scope of this essay.5 What we do want to acknowledge is that such work matters not only to lived realities of female and female-identifying people around the world, but that it also has to be acknowledged in critical theory and feminist cultural studies including museum studies.

Decades of feminist activism against violence against women, which was a main and strategic priority of feminist work since the 1970s, led to recognising that eliminating violence is a human rights obligation of states. In 1993, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was issued by the UN General Assembly. This “established that eliminating violence against women was a human rights obligation of States, and that rape and sexual violence in armed conflict were violations of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian and human rights law.”6 Five years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted and led to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002. The Statutes sets out the Court’s jurisdiction over “the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes”, to which “crimes of aggression” were added in 2010.7 Since then “rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity” are legally considered crimes against humanity. “Committing rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, […] enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence also constituting a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions” are also legally considered war crimes.8 Furthermore, the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, commonly referred to as Istanbul Convention, was opened for signature in 2011 and has since been ratified by 38 states and the European Union.

These legal developments were preceded by a number of awareness campaigns for abolishing sexual violence, including ‘Speak Outs’ about women’s experiences of violence led by feminist groups in the 1970s, campaigns to change laws concerning victims’ testimony in rape, and the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence started in 1991 by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University in New Jersey.9 More than 800 organizations and 90 countries have joined the campaign which runs annually from November 25 (the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) until December 10 (Human Rights Day). Although all these measures have not led to abolition of sexual violence, the awareness that freedom from sexual violence is a human right has increased tremendously. Prior to the end of the twentieth century there were few legal imaginaries that held structures of patriarchal sexism accountable. By placing contemporary museum work adjacent to the supranational legal developments around sexual violence and violence against women, our aim is to explore the role that museums can play in relation to new and emancipatory cultural imaginaries and public pedagogies around sexual violence in gender regimes which are defined by the legacies of patriarchy and the re-invention of patriarchy by the far-right today.

Our adoption of this vocabulary reflects our position that we consider museums not as sites set apart from events and developments in ‘the world outside’, but as porous and permeated by ideas, ideologies, and struggles that take place in the world beyond the walls of the museum. Defining the museum as an object of study is not only difficult but potentially counterproductive for a project that aims to be sensitive to global flows of agency and power through material forms: any universal definition risks excluding what might be some of the most important examples for understanding the local context.10 Candlin and Larkin have adopted the idea of the museum as an assemblage of different intentions or purposes; in this text, we have not followed their specific model but have chosen case studies that demonstrate different mechanisms by which museum work and its public pedagogies perform a standpoint in relation to sexist violence and feminicides. That is, that the activities of an organization collecting, displaying and interpreting cultural knowledge or artefacts can be understood to take sides with struggles that go on in the world outside of the museum. It is our hope to contribute to a more nuanced analysis and interpretation of the work of museums and their importance to how imaginaries and realities of sexist violence and feminicides are articulated.

Our examples each come from a different country and represent very different types of museums. One is the Jack the Ripper Museum, founded as a commercial enterprise in the East End of London in 2015, which presents in what might be described as a sensationalist way, immersive displays relating to a series of well-known historical crimes against women. A second is the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, South Korea, which opened in 2012. This museum is actively involved in fighting for justice for sexual slavery, for the recognition of patriarchal war crimes against women, and demanding redress and reparations. A final example is Jaime Black-Morsette’s (Métis) REDress project, which started as the artist’s independent installation project in 2010 to challenge the invisibility of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and Two-Spirit people in the settler colonial nation of Canada where she lives. The project has been displayed at a number of museums and galleries in the subsequent years, including at national museums in both Canada and the United States. Each of these examples place sexist violence at the centre of the work of the museum but in very different ways and in relation to very specific local concerns. Our case studies show how museums make explicit their specific standpoint, their politics and ethics, in relation to sexist violence and feminicides.

2. MURDER IN THE MUSEUM: FEMINICIDE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LONDON

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a public debate in England was unleashed around the representation of feminicides in museums, although the participants may not recognize this as a description of their concerns. The word feminicides was not used for the discussion about a museum which first appeared intended to be a new women’s museum for London, but was subsequently revealed to be themed on the life and crimes of Jack the Ripper, an as yet formally unidentified serial murderer of women whose crimes were committed in the East End of London in 1888.11 When the museum opened in 2015, it was in a building on Cable Street whose front was painted black, with the words Jack the Ripper in large red letters surmounted by a silhouette of a man with a top hat and medical bag. The opening of the museum ignited debates about the representation of historical women in London’s East End and the way that their lives and achievements had been overshadowed by dominant cultural narratives of women as victims of various forms of degradation in a ‘dangerous’ neighbourhood.

The violent murders of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly (and suspected others) by an unknown person widely referred to as Jack the Ripper contributed to the reputation of the Whitechapel area of London as being a place of danger for women at the time that they took place, and after. In 1888, the newspapers sensationalized these crimes in their reporting, weaving the women’s deaths into a narrative of the East End of London as a place of criminal activity and degraded lives. Work by social historians of nineteenth century England, particularly Judith Walkowitz in her book City of Dreadful Delight (1992), have exposed the extent to which the newspaper reporting of these murders was seamlessly integrated into very negative discourses of female sexuality drawn from a wide range of areas of investigation and social concern that associated poor women’s lives with prostitution, disease, and early and ignominious death.12 What was it about Europe in the 1880s that brought white women’s bodies, degraded by what was often sexist violence, into the central concerns of the popular press? The different forms of journalism or documentary reporting that included newspaper reports of gory crime could be considered as part of the expansion of visual and reportage culture in the second half of the nineteenth century which disseminated new forms of sexist visuality, from female ethnic nudes to the photography of criminals and crime scenes. Under the regimes of colonial epistemologies in anthropology and ethnography, photography of female persons exposing their breasts became a supply for feeding the voracious appetite for erotic photography, including in the burgeoning new institutions of anthropology museums, which were set up and funded by imperial regimes across the European territories and settler colonial states such as the United States of America. The feminicides perpetrated by Jack the Ripper were first spectacularized in the popular press of the nineteenth century in ways which resonated with a wide variety of images that sensationalized and objectified their subjects in ways that deprived the subjects of their humanity and reduced their lives to the moments in which they became the focus of a voyeuristic gaze.

The end of the nineteenth-century then saw the emergence of new forms of sexist visual and actual violence that was set to be transformed into the museum collections of the future —including the Jack the Ripper Museum. The nineteenth century popular press perspective on nine women’s lives was reinscribed more than one hundred years later in the form of a museum in Cable Street, continuing a tradition of validating Jack the Ripper as an icon of English cultural heritage that Deborah Cameron wrote about in relation to the Ripper ‘centenary’ in 1988.13 Claire Hayward’s 2017 review of the museum emphasises the extent to which its displays stayed close to the narrative conventions that centred the women represented as natural victims of crime, and not in terms of their daily lives, challenges and successes.14 That the ‘new’ Jack the Ripper Museum presented us with what was effectively an anachronistic mode of narrating the history of nineteenth century London was a disappointment to those who appreciated the new forms of women’s history that had been elaborated in the preceding decades.

Historians of nineteenth century London have worked hard to develop the social history that explains the full range of women’s lives and importance during this period. For example, 1888 is also notable for a long and successful strike of the women who worked at the Bryant and May match factory in nearby Bow. This culmination of a series of strikes in the 1880s was closely connected with the founding of the Suffragette movement in the following decade. Whitechapel women were integral to the weaving and sewing trades that were then the neighbourhood’s economic engine. These stories are silenced both literally and representationally by making sexist violence the main feature of the Jack the Ripper Museum. Activists responded to this injustice in a variety of ways, including with various forms of public protest. A significant response was to found a museum that could transcend the limitations of the Jack the Ripper Museum. The East End Women’s Museum, the UK’s first women’s museum, was founded in response to the Jack the Ripper Museum to celebrate the history of women in the East End in a way which is inclusive and inspiring.15 However, ten years later the museum is still without a permanent physical space.

3. TESTIMONY, EMPATHY, SOLIDARITY: THE WAR AND WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS MUSEUM

During World War II, more specifically in the context of the Asia Pacific War (the largest theatre of war between 1941 and 1945, on which was staged the war between the Empire of Japan and the military coalition of the Allies, China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States of America), hundreds and thousands of women and girls, the majority of them from Korea, but also from Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, China, Australia, and other countries, were forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. Since 2012, there is a new museum which is dedicated to the sole cause of remembrance and redress of these events. The War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, located in the residential neighbourhood of Seongsan-dong, west of the city centre. The original aim was to even though locate the museum in the Independence Park, with a number of museums there making it a key site for remembering independence, yet this received political and societal push-back, as a museum dedicated to the remembrance of sexual slavery was considered to bring “dishonor” to commemorating the struggles for independence.16 This museum has activist beginnings and continues to be an agent of activism in a web of local and transnational feminist organizing dedicated to achieving recognition of the crimes of military sexual slavery and pursuing the demand that Japan formally acknowledges these crimes; offer a formal apology; and officially works on redress and reparation payments. The activist organizing and the museum provide evidence of the need to develop feminist terminologies and epistemologies for museums that address sexual violence. The women whose history is recorded in this museum were referred to as “comfort women” and the military brothels were known as “comfort stations.”17 Suggesting the provision of physical ease, emotional support, and freedom from constraint, we see how patriarchal sexual violence operates at the level of language. Pushing back against this normalisation and, worse, exculpation of sexual violence, systematic rape, slavery, and in many cases, women dying from the aftermath of the violence they were exposed to, is central to the work of the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul.

In 1990, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan was founded (its official name today is The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan; hereafter referred to as the Korean Council). Two professors at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Hyo-chae and Yun Chung-ok, managed to bring together thirty-seven different Korean women’s organizations to form the council. Since then, the Korean Council has continued to work on the following agenda: acknowledge the war crime, reveal the truth in its entirety about the crimes of military sexual slavery, make an official apology, make legal reparations, punish those responsible for the war crime, accurately record the crime in history textbooks and erect a memorial for the victims of the military sexual slavery and establish a historical museum.18

A number of different activities are brought together by feminist activism in this movement for redress, including organising local demonstrations in Seoul opposite the Japanese embassy. These “Wednesday Demonstrations,” which started in 1992, have become the longest-running single-cause protest in the world. The Korean Council’s activities include historical research and scholarship as well as working at the UN level. In 1996 recommendations were made by UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, and now there are many UN documents concerned with the matters raised by the Korean Council.19 Activist work for commemoration and redress shows clearly that the patriarchal sexual violence goes far beyond the “class-based exploitation of women in the sex industry and into the realm of international relations, in terms of power-disparity between nation states”20 and addresses the femigenocidal dimensions of the militarization of structural sexual violence that becomes part of how nations wage war. The museum is central to this ongoing activist campaign, and works to unite its different elements including testimony, and research. It also maintains a link to the Wednesday demonstrations with a bronze replica of the Statue of Peace in the museum.

It took more than twenty years to realise the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum. Today, when one visits, the museum is a bit hard to find: very little gives away that the building is a museum. There is minimal signage and only a very modest entrance, which could easily be missed. The museum building, designed by Wise Architecture, a South Korean architectural practice, re-uses and extends a 30-year-old residential house. The scale of the museum is still the scale of a home. Perforated black bricks, which separate the interior from the exterior, are the new skin of the building and conceal the clay brickwork of the original house. Nothing gives away to the outside that testimony for the most horrendous violence and the resultant histories of trauma is provided on the inside. Awareness of the history of sexual slavery is not created by means of visual activism or, worse, visual spectacularization of violence. On the contrary, the museum building employs a subtle, even restrained aesthetics.

Inside the museum, the visitor mainly experiences oral testimony and historical documentation. Testimony is at the core of how the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum works. There are oral histories of former military sexual slaves, there are black-and-white photographic documentations of the conditions of sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War, there are floor plans of barracks and military brothels. Through these materials and the use of testimonies, the museum makes the claim to be a guarantor of truth for the systematic crime of military sexual slavery committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. While testimony is key for showing that sexual violence is a war crime and offers the formal evidence needed for the demands of an official apology, redress, and reparation, this may not be enough for effecting cultural change and an ethics of solidarity with survivors. In order to overcome the shame which confronted those who have been forced into sexual slavery, activism against sexual violence, including museum activism, is challenged to navigate this violence at the level of the visual.

A central piece, if not the central piece of the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, is a bronze replica of the Statue of Peace, which has become a global icon for the transnational movement for the women drafted for military sexual slavery by Japan. This statue is a direct link between the activism on the streets and the activism in the museum. Since 1992, rallies have taken place opposite of the Japanese embassy in Seoul every Wednesday, and bring together “victim-survivors”21, representatives of the Korean Council, school children and youth, and many local, national, and international allies. In the museum, a video documentation of the demonstrations is screened opposite of the statue. This statue represents the girls and young women that were forced into sexual slavery without showing the violence that was perpetrated against their bodies. Created by two South Korean artists Kim Seo-Kyung and Kim Eun-sung, this monument consists of a bronze statue of a girl sitting on a chair. The girl casts the shadow of an elderly woman. Next to the girl is an empty chair. The empty chair represents the historical fact that many of young women did not survive the military brothels. They did not come back. The empty chair also symbolizes that in the post-war societies in Korea and the other Asian territories from where the young women and girls had been drafted, sitting next to a known former military sexual slave in public would not have happened. The patriarchal ideology of virginity, shame and guilt barred many from returning home. They would not have been welcome by their families because of their violated and abused bodies. In the context of the demonstrations, the monument becomes a form for giving testimony, with survivors sitting on the empty chair next to the girl, who embodies a younger self they may once have been. Demonstrators show their care, love, and support for the girl or young woman by holding her hand, caressing her face, and dressing her warmly to protect her from the freezing winter. These actions of care, love, and support are not made only by survivors. Complete strangers sit down on the chair next to the young girl. Sitting on the empty chair is an act of solidarity. Giving testimony of one’s empathy, which is evoked by the meanings of the empty chair and the knowledge of what happened to the girl or young woman sitting on the chair, becomes an act of solidarity.

In the context of the Wednesday demonstrations, but also in the context of the museum, these acts become visual evidence of solidarity. One is not allowed to take photographs in the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, with one exception: one is allowed to be photographed when sitting down next to the bronze sculpture of the young girl that casts the shadow of an old woman. This is an example how street activism and museum activism aim to work in non-spectacularizing, dignifying, yet memorable ways for the remembrance, and redress, of sexual violence: solidarity can be physically performed. One is invited to take a seat, which is a seat in history and a seat for different futures. One is invited to share one’s image with others to create visual evidence for the collective remembrance of military sexual slavery.

The narrative and visual language of the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum aims to act in support of the women, who were forced into sexual slavery, and who had the courage to break the silence created by shame and denial of history. Seeing the work of the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum as anti-violence work, makes clear that the museum is tasked with creating testimony for sexual violence without reproducing this very violence. Visual dignity, that is the absence of any spectacularization of sexual violence, is a way to avoid re-stigmatization and re-traumatization. Visual dignity is central to testimony, empathy, and solidarity and provides the basis for overcoming the cruel norm of social contempt, with which sexually abused and violated bodies have often been met.

4. REDress: INSTALLING ACTIVISM IN NATIONAL MUSEUMS

The relationship between museums and activist work are sometimes uneasy, as the ethical and political imperatives which drive communities and affected groups are not always aligned with the practices of museums. The asymmetry between the visibility campaigns for the victims of feminicide and sexist violence and the pedagogic aspirations and work of museums is particularly noticeable in the context of settler colonial states such as Canada in which the function of museums is usually more aligned to the naturalization if not the suppression of this knowledge. The risks associated with developing museum content that addresses community concerns relating to sexual violence and feminicide are partly with the museum, which is vulnerable to exposing, for good or bad, the extent of its own biases; but risks are mainly with the community which is already in a state of disenfranchisement with respect to the power structures which the museum represents. This risk is particularly acute in the context of the need to recognize Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls and Women and Two-Spirit People, which a national inquiry described as a genocide “in which Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people are particularly targeted.”22

A project which navigates this difficult domain is Jaime Black-Morsette’s (Métis) REDress project, begun in 2010 in response to the artist’s indignation at the extent of the violence against indigenous girls and women on Turtle Island. In an extract from a book which will shortly be published, REDress: Art, Action and the Power of Presence (2025),23 artist Black-Morsette describes the multiple prompts that led her first to purchase used red dresses and hang them in the trees in winter. A conference in Europe in which were shared the depressing statistics of rates of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people; witnessing a powerful performance of an action and dance by women protesting women’s disappearances in a public square in Colombia; and the teachings about indigenous matriarchy by educator Jessica Yee. Black-Morsette’s initial gesture of hanging seven dresses outdoors near her home in Winnipeg, Manitoba led to over a hundred donations of red dresses and a series of displays or installations at sites across Canada and later the United States including on the grounds of a former Residential School in Kamloops, B.C. and a companion display at the nearby Thompson Rivers University; at several University galleries and in a permanent display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a relatively new museum whose relationship to the history and present concerns of indigenous human rights including that of the missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people is the subject of considerable local as well as national debate.

Amber Dean’s article “The CMHR and the Ongoing Crisis of Murdered or Missing Indigenous Women: Do Museums Have a Responsibility to Care?” suggests that museum displays and installations can take different ethical relationships of care in relation to the knowledge of violence against indigenous women, including the ethics of how individual women’s stories are presented to museum audiences.24 The REDress project does not identify specific women as victims of violence but uses ‘empty’ red dresses to stand in their place. While the dresses are often donated by the families of missing and murdered indigenous women, the former wearers are not directly or legibly signified by their display. Jaime Black-Morsette suggests that the installations of REDress ensure that viewers are “Confronted with the violence, both the violence the women are experiencing, but also the presence and power of indigenous women.”25 The power of the imagery comes from the ‘empty’ or unworn dress and the colour red. Red is a colour to which Black-Morsette is drawn for her own spiritual practices and has learned that it is used for sacred spiritual purposes in many communities. In the foreward to the forthcoming REDress book, Cathy Merrick also shares that in many indigenous cultures, red is a colour that is understood to be perceived by those in the spirit world as well as those in the physical world, and that the dresses remind us of “the people who should have worn them.”26

While the installation of the REDress project at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is part of the museum’s interior displays, the dresses are hung in front of photography-based wallpaper of a birch forest in winter in which red dresses appear among the trees, suspended on clothes hangers from the branches. Black-Morsette’s preference is for the installation to be experienced outdoors: in a 2015 video, Black-Morsette describes how the experience of encountering the dresses outdoors allows for an emotional response before the intention of the display is more fully understood, and allows people to engage with the facts of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit People in a different way from which other forms of public protest are received.27 The dresses were hung outdoors when the work was displayed at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, which is explained as a way of connecting people to the natural world: “Starting in 2016, [Black-Morsette] sought other ways to heal herself and others connected to the project. This brought her back to the teachings of her Anishinaabe grandfather who ‘understood and respected the land,’ says Black. ‘I began to think about ‘where do we reconnect and get our power back?’ For me, that is being out on the land’.”28 We would suggest that the relationship of this work to the land and its origins as a form of outdoor installation are also important for a respectful relationship between the work and the museum which seeks to display it.

The REDress project is connected to the task of redressing the genocidal violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people and has evolved in a wider context in which both activist and governmental agencies have sought to develop knowledge and action against this violence. This activism is specific to the context of the settler colonial state of Canada where May 5th is denominated as ‘Red Dress Day’ or the National Day of Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two Spirit People. But the REDress project also shares in a wider use of the language of textiles and the colour red to symbolize acts of redress against sexist pedagogies including a global collaborative embroidery project based in London (2009 ongoing),29 Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebels who protest in all-red garb, the application of red tape as a symbol of how bureaucratic ‘red tape’ silenced concerns about sexual violence at Columbia University in the 2010s,30 and in a protest in the country of Colombia watched by Black before her own REDress work was initiated. All of these projects could find themselves displayed in museums —and bring the topics of sexual violence and feminicide with them.

5. CONCLUSION

Even though the museum is, of course, historically a hyper-patriarchal institution, we are advocating for partisan analysis to enable feminist challenges around the treatment of issues of sexual injustice to be constructively made within them. We have aimed at an analysis that makes clear the position from which we write, and we argue for critical nuance and appreciation of activism by explaining why one may find oneself in disagreement with some of the aesthetic choices or the theoretical assumptions underpinning a specific museum display or narration. At times, anti-violence projects remain deeply infiltrated by what they resist. We work for, and toward, nuanced feminist and queer feminist analysis of how sexist violence and feminicides are articulated in museums and we write in appreciation and support of anti-violence museum work, with which we are politically and ethically aligned. Yet, we hold that partisan analysis and writing in solidarity does not mean making broad and sweeping claims, but requires nuance in the analysis of museum violence and the perpetuation of pedagogies of patriarchy by museums. We have attempted this here by considering a few examples and providing initial approaches to how different museums articulate public pedagogies of patriarchy, resistance, or mourning in relation to sexist violence and feminicide.

This essay as part of our long-term search for a conceptual understanding of the politics of conquest that have underpinned the logic of the modern museum as a regime of taking things out of life worlds and participating in the literal objectification of the world resulting from colonial patriarchal imperialism-cum-capitalism. This patriarchal logic of conquest, which was culturally enshrined in the modern museum and its lifeless objects in glass cases or deep storage vaults, is the same logic that uses sexist violence and the targeting of women’s bodies in feminicidal acts including intimate partner rape and murder, war crimes, and honour killings, as conquest of women. Researching how museums today make room for public “pedagogies of cruelty”31 as well as pedagogies of kindness, is part of our search for a useful hermeneutic for understanding the articulations of contemporary patriarchy as they are embedded in neoliberal capitalism and taking on acute new forms in neo-colonialism and neo-fascism. At the same time, we advocate for the perspective that museums can act as infrastructures for civic society to articulate resistance against sexist and feminicidal violence, and to practice imagining gender relations beyond heteronormativity and sexist violence. At this present moment with fascist hyper-patriarchy on the rise, heroic masculine violence celebrated as virtue by the far-right, and hetero-binarism viewed as the only possible way in which bodies can live their gendered existence, it is important to make the museum useful for complex and nuanced debates and for resistance against violence.

Vienna, March 2025