A Mediterranean Bazaar
Marseille, France’s second largest city, was one of the two European ‘capitals of culture’ in 2013. The MuCEM, a museum dedicated to the idea of ‘The Mediterranean’ and its diverse cultures, opened on 7 June 2013 as one of the centrepiece’s of Marseille’s capital of culture stint. One of the MuCEM’s two inaugural temporary exhibitions was “Au Bazar du Genre” (at the Gender Bazaar). It was dedicated to exploring the recent history of feminist—and LGBT—challenges to the order of male domination in the twenty-one countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea. The expression ‘bazar’ is ambiguous in French. It calls up a mythified popular culture of the Mediterranean at the same time as it refers, in familiar parlance, to a mess or an assemblage of paraphernalia. This double entendre is surely deliberate, as ‘messing with gender’ is an explicit brief of the exhibition. At the same time, the choice of title leaves the curators of the exhibition open to the critique of bittiness. This chapter discusses these various facets of the exhibition and reactions to it in France, as an example of a certain institutionalisation of feminist memory that has both salutary and problematic aspects.