2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel focuses on three examples of curatorial practice -- the restored Rose Hall Great House plantation in Jamaica which most visitors know as a haunted house, the Australian exhibition project ‘Creative Dystocia’, which draws out the relationship between women, motherhood and the life of the artist, and the restoration work of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America -- to explore the process by which women's lives are represented. Issues explored by in this session include how women's lives go largely unexplored even as they are used to construct stories intended to titilate and entertain visitors, the way in which curatorial practices seek to instill different patterns of engagement and an assessment of the work done by women who see themselves as "keepers of the past."