Conceptual Dialogues for the Construction of a Feminist History of the Design of the 20th Century

This communication aims to describe how the advances made within the framework of the research project «Women Makers: towards a feminist history of the Design of the 20th Century», allowed us to state new questions regarding its object of study. This was possible from the realization of three internal reading seminars organized by the research team to discuss the central conceptual categories of the project. The methodology implemented during them was qualitative, with a documentary review  being the main technique motorized. In these spaces, it was evident that the category of patriarchal invisibility—central in our proposal—was unaware of discussions already overcome in the debates articulated between historiographical criticism and gender studies, impoverishing the potentiality of casuistry as a strategy in the survey of empirical material. Faced with  this, we decided to modify the general objective of the research to analyze the hegemonic historiographic discourse on design in the 20th century, taking into account the forms of disciplinary inclusion of women as objects and subjects of Design, and historicize the production of women designers, paying attention to the links they establish with the meanings and systems of patriarchal hierarchization within the disciplinary field itself.