From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Fascism in German-History Museums
Author(s)
Rogoff, Irit
Abstract
Representations of women as well as the gendering of particular discourses serve to facilitate, codify, and stage the reconstruction of particular historical episodes. The discussion I would like to pursue in this context deals with historically convenient narratives and historically convenient victims, viewed critically through the terms of gender-specific analysis. It is an attempt to formulate questions regarding the links between historical display and the very concept of victimization, of how it is constructed, gendered, and represented and of what narrative purposes it serves within the specific contexts of museum displays. Museum displays, in their profound anxiety not to replicate the original seductive spectacle, have produced an equally dangerous gendered fiction that is rendering viewers politically neutered through humane empathy and historical mastery.
