Carry on Collecting: Sex, Gender and Ethnography by Wellcome Collection

Stephen Terence Welsh is Curator of Living Cultures and Honorary Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. In this talk he draws attention to the historical ethnocentricity of museum displays and interpretation. Collections assembled in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were invariably informed by contemporary notions of gender and sex.

Chiefly male collectors misrepresented and misappropriated objects associated with concepts of gender and sex found beyond Europe to fit their own particular colonialist worldview. Sex was inextricably associated with childbirth, women with domesticity and men with warfare and violence. This Sexology Season event was recorded on 2 March 2015 at Manchester Museum.