Queering the Museum

Nikki Sullivan, Craig Middleton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815359623
• eBook ISBN: 9781351120166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Museum Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queering the Museum develops a queer analysis of the ways in which museums construct themselves, their core business, and their publics through the, often unconscious, use of inherited ways of knowing and doing.

Providing a critique of both the practices and conventions associated with the modern public museum, and the ontological assumptions that inform them, the authors consider recent discourse around inclusion in museums and explore the ways this has been taken up in practice. Highlighting the limits of particular approaches to inclusion, and the failure to move away from a traditional museological paradigm, the book outlines an alternative critical museological approach that the authors refer to as 'queer'. Providing readers with the critical tools necessary for a profound rethinking of museum practice, the book also responds to and problematises the growing call for social inclusion.

Queering the Museum will appeal to academics, students, and museum and arts sector practitioners with an interest in critical theory or queer practice. It will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of museum studies, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies, media, social policy, politics, philosophy, and history.

1 From LGBTIQ+ inclusion to queer ethics

As Helen Rees Leahy (2012) and Tony Bennett (1995) have demonstrated, from their inception, museums have cultivated suitable publics through the use of changing strategies and techniques. At the same time, they have, both intentionally and inadvertently, excluded those whose being-in-the-world does not fit with the normative structures and rationalities¹ of such institutions. One example of this is the absence in museums internationally of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) lives, experiences, and histories. Research suggests that this sort of exclusion negatively impacts LGBTIQ+ people, their families, and allies in a variety of ways. As Charles Taylor explains,

a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves… . Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a … reduced mode of being.

(1994:25)

Similarly, Anna Conlan argues that, “omission from the museum does not simply mean marginalization; it formally classifies certain lives, histories, and practices as insignificant, renders them invisible, marks them as unintelligible, and thereby casts them into the realm of the unreal” (2010:257). According to Judith Butler, this construction of excluded others is inseparable from the construction of the norm, the subject, the centre: indeed, the former provides the contrast against which the subject, the norm, defines itself, and accrues its status (1993/2011:xiii).

In recent years there has been a growing perception in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector that cultural institutions have an obligation to reflect diversity in all its forms, to take an active approach to inclusion, equality, and social justice, and to promote understanding between different groups, communities, and cultures (Nightingale & Sandell, 2013). To date, concerns such as these have been articulated primarily in terms of social exclusion/inclusion, human rights, and civic or moral responsibility (Sandell, 2017). While interventions undertaken in this conceptual vein are commendable, we contend that, in practice, inclusion strategies often fail to really grapple with the complexities of difference, of lived, embodied histories and habituated dispositions, or to undertake the kind of critical self-reflection that is imperative if museums are to play an active role in radical change.

Social inclusion

Critiques of exclusion and political demands for recognition in and by cultural institutions are far from new. For decades feminists, artists of colour, and others have identified, criticised, and attempted to counter the massive over-representation of white, upper-class, able-bodied, cisgender men in positions of power in cultural institutions, and the works, perspectives, objects, and histories of such men in art galleries and museums (Nochlin, 1971; White, 1976; Piper, 1996; Mũnoz, 1999). Cultural practitioners such as Deborah Willis, Coco Fusco, Lisa Reihana, Mat Fraser, and the Unbound Collective, to mention just a few, have also highlighted and critiqued the fact that when marginalised groups have been included it has largely been as subaltern² others, as objects rather than subjects of art, history, science, anthropology, and so on. While critical interventions that focus on difference and the structures of differentiation that (re)produce hierarchical relations and inequalities are almost always politically radical, the same cannot, we contend, be said of social inclusion discourse, rooted, as it is, in governmental policy.

Social inclusion, as a governmental discourse that interpolates cultural institutions, emerged in the UK in the 1990s under New Labour. Through a number of social inclusion policy moves (DCMS, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2005) museums, galleries, and archives were called upon to attract new publics and tackle social exclusion by linking their services to the four main indicators of social exclusion identified by the government: poor health, high crime, low educational attainment, and unemployment (Kinsley, 2016:476; Sandell, 2003:46). As Chris Smith, the then UK Secretary of State, put it in 2000, “museums, galleries and archives can act as agents of social change in the community, improving the quality of people’s lives through their outreach activities” (DCMS, 2000a:3). Consequently, museums and other cultural institutions began developing policies and practices aimed at enabling people to develop confidence, resilience, and a sense of belonging; expand their knowledge, skills, and qualifications; increase their employability; and improve overall wellbeing. While on the face of it this may sound laudable, the imperative that drove social inclusion policy was to “improve human capacity and ‘capital’ ” (Message, 2013:209) and minimise dependence on the state.

The motivations of museum staff involved in the development and implementation of inclusion strategies are undoubtedly many and varied, but anecdotal evidence suggests that, on the whole, they do not simply conform to the neoliberal agenda articulated by New Labour. Indeed, social inclusion discourse and policy has been leveraged to justify and fund programmes, events, and strategies that might be viewed in mainstream terms as ‘overtly political’, or at least ‘contentious’. In our own museums we have used the South Australian Department of Communities and Social Inclusion’s LGBTIQ Inclusion Strategy (DCSI, 2014) as the basis for a queer action plan, and as a rejoinder to a small number of visitor complaints about OUT at the Museum, an exhibition by and about queer youth which we discuss in Chapter 4. While, as Kylie Message notes, “Australian governments have not developed equivalent policy frameworks linking social outcomes to cultural policy and giving museums a clear purposeful directive” (Message, 2013:208), in the last few years social inclusion strategies and guidelines for developing inclusive workplaces and practices have been produced by a number of state governments (DPC, 2016; PSC, 2017; CSRDPC, 2015), and sectoral interventions are often framed in these terms.

Despite the fact that the notion of social inclusion can and has been used as a tool with which to begin to highlight the biases associated with traditional museological idea(l)s and practices, it is nevertheless our contention that social inclusion discourse aims to align individuals with the heteronormative aims of the state. In doing so, it functions as what Dewdney, Dibosa, and Walsh refer to as a “containment strategy” that ensures “that demands for change are neutralised” (2012:115). The tension between a radical politics of difference and inclusion policies and practices plays out in complex and often contradictory ways in museums. At worst, it manifests as a form of “cultural instrumentalism” which in its drive to achieve “greater market reach at the margins of the market” (Dewdney et al., 2012:117), invariably reduces marginalised ‘others’ to commodities that institutions can utilise to “acquire or maintain a competitive edge in the market” (Iverson, 2007:600). Further, statements of commitment to inclusion and diversity (such as those that appear on museum websites) can function as a disavowal of the fact that an institution may – at least in some aspects of its operation – be exclusionary, racist, homophobic, ableist, and so on, and thus inhibit the critical self-reflection that is integral to a genuine commitment to change.³

Dewdney et al.’s analysis of social inclusion policy and its implementation in the museum sector in the UK supports these criticisms, demonstrating that the imposition of diversity indicators tied to funding means, for example, that ‘blackness’ “functions less as a political position from which to critique power, than as a skin-colour, and an identifiable, quantifiable indicator of a particular group” (2012:116). The same could be said about gender, disability, and sexuality. ‘Auditable diversity’, as Dewdney et al. refer to it, thus constructs the difference it presumes to be visibly self-evident, as self-evident, as innate, fixed, essential: it reaffirms the essentialist notion of identity as inherent and fixed and thereby fails to interrogate the ways in which “museums serve as disciplinary structures, socially constructed means of defining and regulating difference” (Wallis, 2003:179).⁴ For Dewdney et al., this sort of approach constitutes what they, following Kobena Mercer, describe as “a detachment from the radicalism of ‘difference’ in order to attain the de-radicalised aims of diversity” (2012:116). Nathan Sentance makes a similar critique arguing that while “Many libraries, archives and museums … talk about how they value diversity and many … have their own diversity and inclusion initiatives… . These are often shallow exercises… [that] are seldom created to challenge and disrupt whiteness within and outside the sector” (2018:npn). Drawing on Poka Laenui’s discussion of the fifth step of colonisation – in which aspects of traditional culture that refuse to die are appropriated and assimilated into the culture of the dominating colonial society (2006:2)⁵ – Sentenace suggests that inclusion and diversity initiatives can, and do, appropriate (and thus further exploit) colonised others in their construction of mainstream culture as liberal, enlightened, egalitarian, and so on. Muñoz-Reed supports this, arguing that “Systematically including oppressed histories into the museum has proven to be insufficient, and in fact, when not carefully enacted, has led to an institutional tokenism, which has only served to reinforce imperial power hierarchies” (2017:101).

It is undoubtedly easier for museums to take a “pragmatic approach” to calls for inclusion by adding on services that do not challenge the structure of the museum and the principles that underpin it (O’Neill, 2002:36) than to address the structural roots of exclusion. Our own practice as curators (or, as we’d like to think, curatorial activists) has convinced us of the veracity of Richard Sandell’s claim that a paradigm shift is essential (2003:45) if we are to reconfigure museums as sites of radical contestation and debate. For us, this entails moving beyond (when and where appropriate) inclusion, to a ‘queering’ of contemporary museum practices, the often-invisible assumptions that underpin them, and the effects they produce.

Such an approach entails, first, acknowledging that there has been little attention paid by museum professionals to the ways in which museological theory and practice have constructed sexual norms, or to the role each of us, as practitioners, plays in the maintenance of heteronormativity (Saunders, 2008:15–16). Heteronormativity, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define it, refers to

the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked as the idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than as a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions.

(1998:548)

This term has been used in a variety of ways with some authors focussing solely on sexuality and others on gender and sexuality.⁶ We want to suggest that insofar as identity and positionality are always effects of complex intersecting vectors of power and privilege a single focus on sexuality and/or gender is problematic. Drawing on scholarship on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) we propose that critiques of heteronormativity must pay critical attention to the ways in which the systemic privileging of heterosexuality and cisgender⁷ is inextricable from the privileging of whiteness, able-bodiedness, class privilege, and so on. As Barnard puts it, “race and sexuality are not two separate axes of identity that cross and overlay in particular subject positions, but rather, ways to circumscribe systems of meaning and understanding that formatively and inherently define each other” (1999:200). Similarly, Mollow and McRuer gesture towards the inextricability of sex and dis/able-bodiedness in their assertion that “able-bodiedness is the foundation of sexiness… . Rarely are disabled people regarded as either desiring subjects or objects of desire” (2012:1).

In envisaging the critique of heteronormativity as intersectional we are not suggesting that, for example, racism and homophobia are ‘the same’, nor do we mean to conflate different forms of systemic violence, or to reduce complex, heterogeneous forms of marginalisation to a single term and thereby give precedence to sexuality over race, class, and so on. Rather, we contend that interrogating the othering of ‘non-normative’ knowledges and identities together can contribute to a mutually informing troubling of ableist, classist, colonialist, and heteronormative discourses, the assumptions that underpin and are reaffirmed by them, and the material effects they produce. On a more practical note, an intersectional approach to museological practice not only moves beyond the problematics of social inclusion that we outlined earlier, it also bypasses what some museum professionals might see as “the daunting task of fitting an ever-expanding rainbow of identities into existing museum archives, programs and exhibits” (Robert, 2014:25).

Critical analyses of the role of visual and/or material cultures in the (re)production of norms around identity and difference are, as we said earlier, far from new and yet they seem to have had little impact on museological practice. Indeed, as Tyburczy notes, there is a widespread failure to recognise that all museums have “always participated in the disciplining of sexuality” (Tyburczy, 2016:1), just as they have in the disciplining of gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, class, and so on. Why might this be?

Embodied knowledge

In order to begin to respond to this question it is necessary to consider the ways in which particular knowledges, practices, and identities become so normalised that their transmission or reproduction most often goes unnoticed and unremarked upon. The work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is helpful in unpacking the everyday processes that shape who are, what and how we know, ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From LGBTIQ+ inclusion to queer ethics
• 2 Queer/ing display
• 3 Queer/ing meaning-making
• 4 Queer/ing engagement
• Conclusion
• Index