Bristol Museum - Gender Stories
Gender Stories Exhibition Films
For the Gender Stories exhibition, Floating Harbour was commissioned to produce a suite of films designed to make complex historical narratives accessible to all visitors. This project centered on inclusivity, ensuring that the fascinating stories behind the museum's collection could be enjoyed by a wider audience, including Deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors.
Filmed in our dedicated Bristol studios, each film features a specialist historian discussing specific items of interest from the exhibition. To ensure a seamless aesthetic fit with the physical gallery space, we utilized color-matched backgrounds to mirror the specific theme colors of the different exhibition zones.
This film is part of our studio filming and virtual production and corporate film work. See all the films we make.
Read the transcript
Gender does not exist and has never existed in a vacuum. Instead, it is intimately connected to systems of power in different societies and cultures as it shapes and is shaped by different social, political, legal, and economic structures. Gender is not just something that we feel or experience on an individual level. Instead, it is a thing through which societies are organised and structured and through which the hierarchies are built and maintained.
As such, gender also intersects with other social relationships and categories of difference, things like race, class, and sexuality. Our experiences and understandings of gender can therefore be seen as being continuously in conversation with much broader questions of social power. Take for example, the patriarchy. Historically speaking, patriarchal social systems have placed men at the top of the social hierarchy.
This has meant that men have been put in particular positions of power, and the assumption has often been that men should be in dominant or leading roles in society. This of course, meant that women and people of other genders have presumed to be lower down in that social hierarchy, that they should have less power leading to systemic inequality and inequality that has been compounded and expanded by factors like race and class. Importantly, power structures influence men too. So patriarchy fosters cultures of toxic masculinity, for example, and historically has encouraged the oppression, derision or exclusion of men who don't meet patriarchal norms or expectations.
Gender has historically affected and has been affected by a whole host of different structures that inform our social fabric from colonialism to capitalism to the class system. While our own gender identities are personal to us, gender itself can thus be understood much more broadly and as something fundamental to relationships and frameworks of power.