Gender-Inclusive Activism as Public Pedagogy in Music Heritage Contexts

Abstract

While heritage is increasingly set at the heart of cultural sustainability discourse, its inherently political nature is too often ignored. Heritage includes both positive and negative dimensions of social life and the public sphere; it can serve as a powerful source of cultural identity, belonging, and social transformation, while also, for instance, sustaining gender-exclusive norms. This article acknowledges that heritage is a contested site, and argues that gender-inclusive activist interventions utilized as public pedagogy in music heritage contexts have the potential to reconfigure patriarchal structures, to expand the established socio-cultural boundaries of who is authorized to perform culture and bear or produce knowledge for/in/of the public. By foregrounding public pedagogy and drawing on feminist theories of cultural and social transformation, this article explores the potential for gender-inclusive heritage activism in Nepal to generate pedagogical sites of political negotiation and wider social transformation. The theoretical exploration illustrates how heritage activism can generate encounters in which authority is transcended, collective agency is exercised, and new cultural meanings are cocreated for the notion of publicness. In activist processes, the chain of communicative actions between those marginalized - women in this case - and their allies holds the potential for pedagogical moments in which heritage narratives are reconfigured, political presence is asserted, and social transformation fostered beyond the actual staging of heritage. The article suggests that place-bending in genderinclusive heritage activism can be a resource through which those with authority can challenge their own authorities to transform public aspects, both discursive and spatial, of heritage.