Artist Saimdang was selected to feature of the 50,000-won banknote to raise awareness of gender equality within Korea. However, this choice caused great controversy amongst many feminist commentators, who saw the selection as a way for the government to promote historic Confucian notions of gender identity and patriarchal expectations of women.
“I study women’s history and gender history. My thesis explores a women’s magazine from Shanghai in the early twentieth century.” “Really? I thought only women studied that.”
t best this leads to far too many people asking the average lesbian minding their own business: ‘But, how do you even have sex?’ At worst, it snowballs into misconceptions of the longevity of queer, gender, and even racial and disability emancipation movements throughout history.
Many of the artefacts we see today in the ‘Ancient Near East’ collections of European and American museums were purchased in the late 19th and early 20th century from dealers who specialised in smuggling archaeological artefacts to Europe from Baghdad.
