Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

As we walk through the permanent exhibition, at the National Museum of Art in Bolivia, three powerful female images dominate: the virgin, the wife, and the idealized indigenous woman depicted as part of the landscape. What do these images convey about the process of defining femininity in the Andean-Bolivian context? This research reconstructs dominant notions of femininity through Bolivian paintings from the colonial period until the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis compares popular images of three constitutive historical periods in order to focus on the transformations that occur in depicting women over this time lapse. These powerful representations of women in the exhibition are powerful for different reasons. Either they are divine and greatly devoted by the masses, related to independence heroes and political elites of the republic, or idealized as cultural mothers. The paintings show women of power on dissimilar realms. Thus, the depictions correspond to particular gender processes that were constructed in negotiation of masculine representations. Although, I will particularly focus on the constructions of femininities it is difficult to ignore dominant masculinities which, more often than not, interact within the social construction of the binary male-female.