The Queer-Inclusive Museum (original) (raw)
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Queering Australian Museums: Management, Collections, Exhibitions, and Connections
2018
Queering Australian Museums addresses the problem of how queer or LGBTIQ communities can be further included in Australian museums on their own terms. It looks at four areas of museums—management, collections, exhibitions, and connections with audiences and communities—to consider barriers and enablers of queer inclusion in these often heteronormative institutions. Case studies of queer-inclusive efforts in public Australian museums are interpreted from institutional and community perspectives drawn from 25 interviews. The interviews are put into critical conversation with archival material and literature from museum studies and the emerging field of queer museology. The study evaluates the visibility of the history, cultures, and identities of queer communities in Australian museums. It establishes that many public representations of queerness have been driven by the efforts of LGBTIQ communities, particularly through community-based heritage organisations. It also gathers and reflects upon examples of critical queer inclusion that have occurred in public museums. Using these exemplars, it argues that queer communities should be empowered to make decisions about their own heritage with the support of museums and their unique attributes; that individual and organisational leadership, involving queer individuals and allies, should be brought to bear on this task; and that effectively navigating the tensions between museums and queer communities requires mutual understanding and accommodation. Through the process of queering the museum, it is suggested, each party might be transformed, leading to LGBTIQ diversity being valued as an integral part of society. The thesis addresses the gap in Australian museum studies literature on queer or LGBTIQ inclusion compared with Euro-American settings. It further contributes original case studies to the international field of queer museology, and to museum studies literature on including and empowering diverse communities. Both recognising the agency of queer communities and also engaging with the language and conventions of museums, it constructs a distinct account of how to navigate the historical tensions between the two. It thereby aims to enrich museum offerings for all audiences on the terms of those erstwhile excluded.
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This thesis focuses on the methods through which art museums represent LGBTQ identities, facilitate discourse about diverse sexualities through programming, and address targeted media controversy. Through the analysis of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (November 2010-February 2011) in comparison to the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition (November 2011-February 2012), I discuss effective methods of engaging diverse communities when faced with opposing voices or
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Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 2021
for Arts in Society and his research explores contemporary LGBT+ curatorial and artistic interventions into the Dutch, German and English museums. Conversing with intersectional feminist and queer theory, this project asks in what ways these curatorial, artistic, and collective initiatives question the intersecting exclusions and inequalities within heritage institutions.
IRIDESCENT FUTURES: Imagining Alternatives with Queering the Museum
2021
As I’m preparing for a day of museum meetings, I wonder if my young femme-domme-gender-queer-of-color aesthetics leaking through my fishnets, tattoos, and leather choker reveal “too much” about the queer I am whether or not I’m appropriate or belong in this space. This began when I moved up in positions. I was hired initially as a contract laborer in the education department in an off-site after-school art program, moved into temporary curatorial and installation, then temporary collections management, back to temporary curatorial and installation, and finally landed a full-time, then thought, permanent position in education as the teacher and student program coordinator at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Unapologetically queer throughout all those cycles of uncertain employment within the same institution driven on the concept of “la familia” (or the family), I remained hopeful that I could contribute to queering this institution. I insisted, but quickly realized tha...
FWD: Museums, 2021
Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is the follow-up collection to the 2010 volume Gender, Sexuality, and Museums: A Routledge Reader, edited by Amy K. Levin. In the new book, Joshua Adair 1 joins Levin as co-editor, and together they aim to capture developments in museum practice, case studies, and research that have emerged in the past decade, this time with an added emphasis on activism. Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism is part of Routledge's Museum Meanings series edited by Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps. The series responds to recent significant shifts in museological practice and uses interdisciplinary investigations to explore the changing role of museums. The authors of the chapters in this collection, ranging from the emerging to the established, draw on a diverse set of perspectives including theoretical, practical, and critical, and consider themes of inclusion, representation, and coproduction in art and history museums.
Mediating queer controversy in Australian museum exhibitions
Historic Environment, 2016
The phrase ‘museums are safe spaces for unsafe ideas’ belies the reality that museums are often wary of discussing unsafe ideas, not to mention queer ideas which often fall under this classification. Yet the phrase follows from the aspiration that museums can do better—that they can be socially responsive and responsible, and that they can seek to include the diversity of communities they serve. The three exhibitions discussed are moments where their host institutions pursued the implications of the phrase leading to queer inclusiveness but also to controversy: 'Mapplethorpe' at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, in 1995; 'Becoming Visible' at the Constitutional Museum, Adelaide, in 1982; and 'Prejudice and Pride' at the Australian Museum, Sydney, in 1994. Controversy almost inevitably follows from unsafe and queer ideas, the issue becoming how to mediate rather than avoid it. The above museum moments together suggest directions for best museum and heritage practice based on progressive organisational cultures, strong leadership and openness to experimentation. In actively encouraging these three elements, museums can reaffirm and defend themselves as safe spaces for unsafe ideas.