Gendering the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Even though a gender perspective, in reference to various aspects of museums and their exhibits, permeates the reflection on museums, gender is not explicitly taken up as a category of knowledge within the self-reflective narratives about the core exhibition or the conceptualization of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish, which opened in Warsaw, Poland in 2014. Building upon the research gendering the memory of the Holocaust, especially with regard to historical exhibitions, and using a cultural studies framework to the study of representation, this article asks how femininities are framed by the representation of masculinities and how museum technologies work to produce gendered meanings. It concludes that most of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN problematically instrumentalizes gender relations to underpin a chronological historical narrative. In a dialogue with queer research on temporality, underscoring the coincidence of normative gender/sexuality and linear progressive narrative, it analyses this strategy as gender chronotechnology.