Enfilade

From Routledge:

Jennifer Germann and Heidi Strobel, eds., Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2016), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1472456311, $150.

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors’ engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women’s and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

Jennifer G. Germann is Assistant Professor of Art History, Ithaca College.
Heidi A. Strobel is Associate Professor of Art History, University of Evansville.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Material Culture and the Gendered Subject, Jennifer G. Germann and Heidi A. Strobel

I. Transgressive Objects
1  Men and Hunting Guns in Eighteenth-Century France, Amy Freund
2  Taste a-la-mode: Consuming Foreignness, Picturing Gender, Freya Gowrley
3  Gendered Souvenirs: Anna Amalia’s Grand Tourist Vedute Fans, Christina K. Lindeman
4  Majas, Mantillas, and Marcialidad: Fashioning Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Spain, Tara Zanardi

II. Gender and Domesticity
5  Place and Possession: Emma Hamilton at Merton, 1801–05, Amber Ludwig
6  A Gentlemen’s Pursuit: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie Silver in Britain, Elizabeth A. Williams
7  Sexing Sovereignty: The Material Culture and Sexual Politics of Queen Marie Leszczinska’s Bed, Jennifer G. Germann

III. High Art in Low Places
8  ‘Idleness Never Grew in My Soil’: Mary Delany’s Flower Collages, Gender, and the Moral Authority of ‘Nature’ in Eighteenth-Century England, Felicity Roberts
9  Pocket Museums: The Display of Art in Women’s Almanacs during the First French Empire, Ryan Whyte
10 Stitching the Stage: Mary Linwood, Thomas Gainsborough, and the Art of Installation Embroidery, Heidi A. Strobel

Selected Bibliography
Index

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