The dominating discourses and configurations/representations within museums today are usually presenting the past in very reduces stereotyped manners, especially in relation to gender. Even if the contexts are different, the stories are often told in the same way they have always been narrated.

This way of narrating the past has broadly been identified as the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) by the critical heritage scholar Laurajane Smith (2006). The AHD is conceived as an ‘official’ way of understanding heritage and is, according to Smith, a particular way of understanding heritage which stresses the importance of expertise knowledge, and privileges the cultural recollection of a limited social stratum, including a limited scope on gender relations and representations.

One way of challenging this AHD is to critically analyse the curatorial practices from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw 1991, Lykke 2010, Grahn 2011). This means to ask questions of how exhibitions configure and shape our remembrance of the intertwined relations of social identities such as gender, class, age, sexuality, dis/ability etc., which this presentation will do.