ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses in what way societal heteronormative gender discourses and gender theories inform museums and focuses on displays that represent nature, as signified via animals. It also focuses on gender narrations implicit in representations of nature in regional German and Swiss museums. Moreover, museums tend to present their knowledge as given facts and veil the production process of this particular form of knowledge. By referring to biological knowledge about sex, museums tie in the authority and power of scientific knowledge with museum narrations—a seemingly positivistic knowledge that wants to tell the truth about nature. There is only one animal on display in the museums that is not a sexually dimorphic species: the hermaphroditic Pacific oyster. Museum and Gender aims at raising awareness for gender issues and provides basic information on theories of gender and on gender varieties as a lived reality in society.
