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The coloniality of gender and sexuality - Digital exhibition

By Jennie Gamlin
Written and designed by EIA team member Jennie Gamlin, this bilingual exhibition is a collaboration with the British Museum’s San Diego Centre for Excellence in Research on Latin America. Beginning with an exploration of what gender looked like in precolonial times the exhibition critically traces the historicity of gender in Indigenous Wixárika communities through three ‘contact zones’ “spaces of imperial encounter where people who have historically been separated, come into contact with one another and establish ongoing relation, usually in conditions of racial inequality, violence or coercion” (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992). Colonialism, independence and modern Mexico each brough new structures and constraints to women’s and men’s identities reshaping Indigenous gender relations into a hybrid form of European patriarchy. The exhibition showcases ethnographic and historical data.

Click on the picture below to start exploring the exhibition.
The Coloniality of Gender and Sexuality’ was produced by Jennie Gamlin of the EIA collective in close collaboration with Humberto Fernández (curator) of the NGO Conservación Humana A.C (CHAC), Maria Teresa Fernández and Paulina Ultreras from CIESAS Occidente, Mexico. The exhibition is hosted by the San Diego Centre for Excellence on Research in Latin America at the British Museum, and was digitally created by Magdalena Araus Sieber. The exhibition showcases the findings of the Wellcome Trust funded research project ‘Gender, health and the afterlife of colonialism. Engaging new problematisations to improve maternal and infant survival’.

Learning points

  • What are the overlaps between the coloniality of gender and the Anthropocene?
  • How has the coloniality of gender changed Indigenous relationships with the land?
  • Gender is an embodied identity and inequality. In what ways does the coloniality of gender define men’s and women’s wellbeing?

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