Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice

Abstract

Important work in the last decades within the museum studies field has laid bare the implicit nationalist, evolutionist, and patriarchal narratives of the traditional museum. So far, though, only a few writers have discussed the museum’s role in supporting “heteronormative” narratives that consolidate heterosexuality as a norm within social and cultural life. This article is a critical discussion of methodological aspects of a queer perspective in interpreting, exhibiting, and organizing museum collections. Two shows with LGBT / queer perspective that were exhibited in Stockholm, Sweden during EuroPride 2008 are the focus of this article’s analysis. They consist of the photo exhibition Show Yourself! at the Nordic Museum, and Queer: Desire, Power, and Identity at the National Museum of Fine Arts. The author himself was the curator of the latter exhibition. This article offers personal reflections on the methodological challenges of translating an abstract queer perspective into museum practice in order to envision online and on‐site museum encounters that can mobilize various kinds of pluralistic passions.

El modernismo nórdico: nuevas orientaciones para su estudio

“…Les études de genre et la théorie queer pourraient également fournir de nouvelles pistes. On commence maintenant à s'intéresser à l'art nordique sous l'angle de la théorie queer, grâce aux importants travaux de Patrik Steorn sur Eugène Jansson, l'héritage queer et la pratique muséale, qui ont ouvert de nouvelles voies d'analyse 45 . Mathias Danbolt, auteur de Touching History: Art, Performance, and Politics in Queer Times, publié en 2013, et qui a fondé et dirige la revue Trickster: Nordic Queer Journal, a étudié la question de la temporalité queer dans les archives des militants, montrant que le récit des injustices est loin d'être achevé 46 .…”

Naming, shaming, framing?

“…Heritage institutions, such as museums, galleries or archives, have been increasingly attempting to acknowledge LGBTQ pasts, often guided by diversity policies (Axelsson and Åkerö, 2016;National Trust, 2017;Sandell and Nightingale, 2012;Steorn, 2012). They are some of the stakeholders in the process of heritage construction during which different interest groups negotiate political recognition (Smith, 2007).…”

“…Film historiography, media archaeology and archivology tend to neglect questions of archiving LGBTQ-related films, whereas studies on queer archives often ignore the specific requirements involved when archiving audio-visual footage. Studies on queer exhibition practice in museums tend to come to the conclusion that its production of knowledge, of inclusions and exclusions, is in need of further analysis (Museerna och hbtq, 2015;Steorn, 2010;2012). While conceptualisations of queer perspectives on the archive and archival exhibition practice (Cvetkovich, 2003;Danbolt, 2010;Halberstam, 2005;Muñoz, 2009;Stone and Cantrell, 2015) have outlined a number of relevant aspects for curating LGBTQ-related content, research on the recognition and interpretive framing of gender and sexuality is lacking.…”

“…8 Through self-reflexive acts like these, the archive acknowledges that metadata and search terms are historically situated. Moreover, archives need to navigate the risk of defying the subversive, evasive quality of queerness (Muñoz, 2009;Steorn, 2012). Single catalogue terms cannot grasp the complexities of shifting sexualities or variable gender expressions.…”

Beyond the martial façade: gender, heritage and medieval castles

“…Gender is more appropriately understood as the performance of a socially constructed identity that intersects with age, race, class, and which is fluid and changeable over time (Butler 1988;Gilchrist 1999). Museum and Library Studies and other cognate disciplines have explored gender in terms of the absence of representation of women and LGBTQ+ perspectives (Porter 1995;Vanegas 2002;Steorn 2012). However, the critical reflection in these disciplines has not impacted on heritage discourses surrounding medieval castles or castle-studies.…”