Visualising the margins: Gendered perspectives

Visualising the Margins is an exhibition that presents the (audio)visual work of seven women academics at different stages of their career at King’s College London, all working on questions related to gender from feminist and queer perspectives.The material introduced here investigates the relationship between home, gender and marginality in different settings: from the Peruvian Andes, to the mountains of Tajikistan, from the physical urban spaces of Delhi to the virtual spaces opened through queer film.Part of the King’s College Exchange exhibition season on ‘Home’, this series of photographs, videos, drawings, musical clips and virtual archives draws explicitly or implicitly on the ambivalent relationship between home and gender that decades of feminist academic and activist work has made visible.All these contributions hint at these different meanings: home as a marginal and liminal space; home as a woman’s place; home as the private sphere of reproductive labour that sustains capitalist exploitation; home as a place of love and belonging, but also as a site of oppression; home as a lived experienced space, and as a distant place, a site of memory. They also interrogate the notion of the margins as a gendered space: a space of exclusion as well as a space for ‘radical openness’ and possibility (bell hooks, 1989).