Houses of difference and glass: Dutch feminisms in the context of colonial exhibitions (1883–1898)

Abstract

Feminism—as a term, movement, and discourse—has often been met with resistance in Southeast Asia, as illustrated by the recent special issue on feminism and art histories of the journal Southeast of Now. Tracing such contentious relationships to the rise of feminism in the Netherlands in the late 19th century, particularly in relation to two landmark exhibitions in 1883 and 1898, this dissertation questions the colonial incentives embedded in Dutch feminist practice as well as the resistance the emerging field of discourse received. While critical breaks in 20th and 21st century feminist practice are well documented in the works of scholars like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Chandra Mohanty, the ways in which feminism itself was intertwined with colonialism from its inception in the Netherlands in the late 19th century are less studied. Yet the creation of a particular type of exhibition space—meant to represent an Indonesian kampong and ‘inhabited’ with Indonesian workers—at the International Colonial Exhibition (1883) and subsequent migration of this space to the National Exhibition of Women’s Work (1898) resists that gap in recent studies of intellectual histories. Understanding this phenomenon as a 19th century “augmented reality”— defined in this thesis as a fabricated space wherein imagination and reality morphed: a site where time, commodity and the Dutch East Indies became equated with ideological activism—this study puts forward a complex, multifaceted account of early feminisms in the Netherlands and their relationship with colonialism in Southeast Asia. In doing so, this thesis repositions such early intellectual histories via a close reading of physical manifestations and affective encounters in a specific exhibition space.