Cultural Content #8
International Women's Day, featuring the Vagina Museum, Black Country Living Museum, Beamish and National Galleries Scotland
International Women’s Day this year was interesting.
When I wrote the last Cultural Content (on responses to Ukraine) I was thinking that cultural orgs ability to create meaningful content in response had as much to do with a quick policy reaction from senior management as the talent of the social media content creator. #IWD22 was a case in point of this.
On Twitter, The Gender Pay Gap Bot used data from https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/ to repost content tagged #IWD22 with the gender pay gap stats. Madeline Odent then created a thread of organisations who subsequently deleted their Twitter content.
Suffice to say, it’s much easier to create authentic social media content around causes (like gender equality), in a way that makes the organisation look good, if management is actually behind those causes.
In this edition, I’ve looked at how four different organisations used different social media platforms to effectively tell stories from their organisation for International Women’s Day.
Vagina Museum on Twitter: trans people have always existed
I’d been expecting the Vagina Museum to say something for International Women’s Day. But what was surprising to me (in a good way) was that they went a step beyond gender equality and problematised gender constructs more broadly. The podcast they link to in the 2nd tweet here begins: “Queer people and trans people have always existed and we will always exist.” The podcast and the thread tell some of those stories.
In the abstract a “Vagina Museum” could quite easily have taken a biological deterministic standpoint (i.e. the idea that if you’re born with a vagina, you’re a woman). So the fact they haven’t, and have chosen International Women’s Day to talk about it, felt important.
Beamish on Facebook: getting kids to learn about the Suffragettes
What I liked about this post is that it leans into the strengths of Beamish as a family-friendly open-air attraction, designed to tell the story of social and industrial history in the North East. And it uses that to teach kids about the history of gender inequality resistance, by re-enacting suffragette rallies. What’s particularly lovely on this post are the comments; where visitors have sent in their pictures of their kids dressed up as suffragettes or uploaded personal photos from suffragette rally recreations at Beamish from the 90s. This feels like what museums should be doing; demonstrating how our historical past is relevant today.
Black Country Living Museum on TikTok: who rule the world
Take the above post but make it Black Country Living Museum. The follow up comment gives you more detail; “suffragettes, land girls and women chainmakers are just a few of the incredible women that make up the UK’s rich feminist history”. It’s not a complicated post, but it’s achieving a vast scale (673k views in 7 days) with the simple message that there is a history of resistance to gender inequality.
Also notable; at Black Country Living Museum, women’s median hourly pay is 0.4% higher than men’s. Almost all examples were higher for men, so 👏 to BCLM.
National Galleries Scotland on YouTube: Why are there so few female artists?
What the examples above have in common is that they’re telling a story of historical gender inequality using historical records. It’s easy for inequalities (of race, gender, sexuality) etc to be absorbed into a collection’s original interpretation (when those inequalities were more accepted). What’s interesting about this video is its interviews with current curators at NGS talking about what we can learn about the bias and prejudice of our collections; “although we can, to an extent, ‘rewrite’ historical art in terms of making the women who were making art visible, we can’t rewrite the historic gender imbalance”. It’s a video from 2020, but it felt fresh when reshared by NGS this International Women’s day.
That’s it for this fortnight, thanks for reading.
If you think someone else would enjoy this content, please do share it with them.
If you’d like to be a content contributor / guest editor of Cultural Content, do get in touch; georgina@onefurther.com 👍.
Finally, we’d like to hear from you! We’ve launched a Cultural Content survey, specifically to find out more about the landscape of creating content in the cultural sector. The intention is to run in year on year, and so get a sense of how the landscape is changing. Your time is really appreciated, and will all be in aid of producing objective (and anonymous) data on how the content creation is working in the sector, and how that is evolving over time.
We’re also making a donation to the DEC Ukrainian Humanitarian Appeal for every valid submission… and there’s a chance to win £50 of content strategy books.