Gender performativity and heritage making: the tangible/intangible distinction revisited

Abstract

Drawing on critical heritage studies and feminist approaches, this research features gender as a disruptive lens through which heritage can be reinterpreted. It re-conceptualises heritage as a performative process to explain how change unfolds, challenging conventional frameworks that privilege rigid binaries, particularly the tangible/intangible heritage divide. Focusing on the case of marble craftsmanship on the Greek island of Tinos – inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2015 – the thesis employs ethnography to examine how gendered participation both influences androcentric representations of traditional craft and (re)iterates and reshapes multiple facets of heritage practice. It contributes to efforts in heritage studies more broadly, by integrating gender theories that account for change, offering a framework to discuss heritage as subversive. In this regard, it argues that gendered acts of doing, negotiating, and remaking heritage can open up space for transformative possibilities that are themselves ever-evolving in the heritage process. By emphasising epistemic relationality through community-level insights, the thesis highlights heritage as emergent through entangled interactions across bodies, materials, perspectives, and institutions, so that transformation is always situated and co-produced. It examines the limitations of transformation within heritage, the contingencies of enabling such transformation, and considers how its impact can be assessed.