Uncertain Sexualities and Unusual Women: Museum Depictions of Jane Addams and Emily Dickinson

• In Event: 306 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Mediating Sexualities

Abstract

How do museums use displays, rooms, objects and written and oral narration to depict uncertain sexual reputations? This paper draws on observations at two museums: The Emily Dickinson Museum and The Jane Addams Hull House Museum. The women whose lives these museums depict have what we propose thinking of as “uncertain sexual reputations”: that is, each figure’s sexual reputation, among the general public and scholars, are either multiple and discordant (Dickinson) or cautiously uncertain (Addams). We argue that the museums use displays and artifacts – such as dresses, poems, and letters - to depict Addams and Dickinson as unusual women in order to convey their uncertain sexual identities in a palpable way. In so doing, these women’s sexualities and sexual practices – whatever they may have been – become an aspect of their unusualness; unusual women envelop uncertain sexualities. Constructing these women as unusual draws attention to them as remarkable and out of the ordinary, yet doing so can also evade further discussion about their biographies or act as a kind of universal response to questions about uncertainty. That is, they use the presentation of actors as “unusual” to gesture to the possibility of a non-normative sexual history without having to consistently and overtly characterize their sexuality. While veiled, we propose that the “unusual female character” is itself a kind of (veiled) sexual reputation. We suggest that our findings might point to a broader trend in how people and institutions deal with other uncertain or controversial topics and reputations.

Authors

• Robin Bartram, Northwestern University

• Holly Donovan, Boston University