Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity masculinity and the spaces in between. Collectively these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic including beds guns fans needle paintings prints drawings mantillas almanacs reticules silver punch bowls and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms however as the essays demonstrate their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods concepts or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians museum professionals women's and gender studies specialists students and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.