Civic Collections, Gender Obedience, and the Socialisation of Violence

Kate Howe’s current practice-led PhD research investigates how museums, civic collections, canonical images, and cultural inheritance participate in the socialisation of violence against women and feminised bodies. The project asks how violence becomes culturally bearable when it is translated into beauty, taste, heritage, romance, modesty, protection, virtue, or moral instruction.

The research began with the museum as a mediating structure: a place that does not simply display culture, but trains viewers in what to admire, what to overlook, and how to behave in front of power. It now expands into Florence, where Renaissance power is built into streets, piazzas, churches, collections, thresholds, and tourist routes. Here, the project examines civic culture as a training ground for gender obedience: how public images, inherited stories, and institutional settings teach bodies where to stand, how to be seen, when to be silent, and what kinds of desire, shame, discipline, and submission are made to feel natural.

Rather than treating historical artworks as neutral masterpieces, Howe approaches them as active cultural evidence: evidence of what has been valued, protected, repeated, softened, and legitimised. The research asks what happens when admiration arrives before recognition; when a violated body becomes a beautiful composition; when covering is called care; when abduction becomes romance; when women’s knowledge is excluded from the civic script.

In Florence, this research is developing through several connected practice-led tests. The First Covering responds to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus by turning toward the cloak offered to Venus: a gesture that is tender, protective, and disciplinary at once. A developing opera imagines Renaissance and early modern women who passed through Florence speaking passionately to one another about anything other than romance, creating a kind of Bechdel test across centuries. Together with painting, installation, public intervention, writing, and repair, these works ask how gendered obedience is rehearsed — and how it might be interrupted.

Howe’s wider project does not seek to cancel beauty or reject the historical object. It asks what beauty is doing. Who benefits when violence is made beautiful? What systems are protected when admiration becomes automatic? What new forms of looking, listening, refusal, and embodied knowledge become possible when the training begins to fail?